Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  In early May 1162, the royal family was residing at the castle of Falaise in Normandy. Over a year had elapsed since the death of Archbishop Theobald, months in which the court had murmured furiously with rumors, but Henry, blithely untroubled, had ignored the vacancy at Canterbury. If anything, he seemed titillated to play a prolonged game of cat and mouse with Thomas. “The chancellor, however, who from certain forebodings and conjectures already had an inkling of the king’s purpose, kept silence about the matter, even as the king concealed his intentions.” Nor did it appear that the game would be called in the near future, because Henry now seemed totally preoccupied with his eldest son. Anxious to exact from his English barons another oath of fealty, he ordered Becket to take the seven-year-old prince to England, where he would call together the Great Council in the king’s name and require every bishop and baron in the realm to pay homage. Even though Eleanor and Henry would not be present, an appropriately majestic ceremony had been planned, and according to the pipe rolls, they paid the well-known financier William Cade the goodly sum of thirty-eight pounds six shillings “for gold for preparing a crown and regalia for the King’s son.”

  On the eve of the departure, Thomas brought his young charge to Falaise so that Eleanor and Henry might say good-bye to their son. At the last minute, almost as an afterthought. Henry drew Thomas aside for a private conversation. “You do not yet fully comprehend your mission,” said the king, as if he imagined that Thomas had been blind and deaf for the past year. When Thomas did not answer immediately, Henry added imperiously, “It is my intention that you should become Archbishop of Canterbury.” Phrased in that manner, it was hardly an invitation. He did not ask Thomas for his opinion, nor did he leave room for discussion—it was his intention. There was an awkward silence, and when Thomas finally replied, it was in the bantering tone he often took with the king. With a deprecating smile he looked down and pointed to his expensive robe. “How religious, how saintly, is the man whom you would appoint to that holy see and over so famous and pious a congregation of monks.” When Henry failed to return his smile, he rushed on in a desperately serious voice: “I know of a truth that, should God permit it, you would quickly turn against me and the love which is now so great between us would be changed into the most bitter hatred. I know that you would make demands that I could never meet with equanimity, because already you presume too much in Church affairs. And so the envious would find opportunities to stir up endless strife between us.”

  Henry dismissed his protestations almost as if he had expected them, and in fact, Thomas’s speech almost sounds rehearsed. But it should not be supposed that Becket was insincere. No matter how tempting the offer—not every day did a merchant’s son rise to the high place of Canterbury—he knew his master well, his jealousy, his sudden rages, his inability to tolerate opposition. According to Becket’s close friend, John of Salisbury, “From these considerations he rightly drew the conclusion that, if he accepted the post offered to him, he would lose either the favor of God or that of the king.” Whatever else may be said of Becket and his sincerity, there is no question that he warned Henry against the nomination. On the other hand, he does not seem to have protested at any appreciable length nor, in the end, did he refuse the offer. At any rate, it seems that Henry paid utterly no attention to the warning, because shortly afterward, perhaps the same day, he held a revealing conversation with Richard of Luci. “Richard,” he demanded, “if I lay dead in my shroud, would you see to it that my firstborn son Henry were raised to the throne?” When Richard assured him that he would do so at the risk of his life and limbs, Henry instructed him to leave at once for England and, exerting whatever pressure necessary on the monks of Canterbury, see that Thomas was elected.

  It was settled then. Thomas would become archbishop, young Henry crowned king in due time, the throne of England safeguarded for the golden boy whom Henry adored. The empire would endure. It was the king’s privilege to have arranged these matters, but it would be a privilege for which he would pay heavily.

  The salt wind swelled the silken sails of the Esnecca, skimming the royal barge closer and closer to the pale coastline of England. The Plantagenets had announced that they would celebrate Christmas in England, but impassable seas and contrary winds had delayed them many weeks in Normandy. They had been forced to spend a dismal, slapdash Christmas in Cherbourg, and it was not until the end of January 1163 that they had finally sailed for their island kingdom. On the dock at Southampton, an official delegation waited to hail a boisterous welcome to the king, who had been absent four years and the queen who had been away two. Those years in Normandy, while peaceful, had been dimmed for Eleanor by indefinable dissatisfactions, perhaps a sense of drifting more than anything else. She had lacked, of course, any challenge for her energies, and indolence never sat well with her. At the same time, the contours of her relationship with Henry were changing, and she must have noticed a certain restraint in his behavior since the birth of Eleanor fifteen months earlier. Close to forty, she had reached an age when women, no matter how beautiful, do not like to be reminded of their years, especially when their husbands are significantly younger, and she may have attributed Henry’s indifference to the age factor. Not only did he take her for granted as a woman but, more distressing, he had shoved her into the background. No longer a working queen, she was expected to derive contentment from idleness. This was not easy for her to accept, and she would have expressed resentment, with grievances and misunderstandings accumulating on her side as well as on Henry’s. The return to England and the prospect of seeing her son after a seven-month separation provided a welcome relief, more especially since his guardian’s elevation to Canterbury had unloosed a torrent of highly diverting gossip.

  Throughout the previous summer and autumn, word of Becket’s activities had flown the Channel, with delighted talebearers repeating the latest news for the edification of the court. Ever since Becket’s consecration on June 3, he had become, if gossip could be trusted, a totally changed man. “Putting off the secular man, he now put on Jesus Christ,” throwing himself into the role of archbishop with a fervor equal to the enthusiasm he had exhibited as chancellor. It was said that he wore vestments of gold, but beneath was “a hairshirt of the roughest kind, which reached to his knees and swarmed with vermin.” It was also claimed that “he mortified his flesh with the sparest diet and his accustomed drink was water used for the cooking of hay,” that he exposed his naked back to the lash of discipline, slept on the bare floor next to a bed “covered with soft coverlets and cloths of silver,” and washed the feet of thirteen poor folk every morning. “Contrary to the expectation of the king and all men, he so utterly abandoned the world and so suddenly experienced that conversion which is the finger of God that all men marveled thereat.”

  Eleanor, like Henry, tended to be cynical about such conspicuous miracles. For eight years she had seen the chancellor in many guises: as the oily-tongued courtier always ready with a quip; as the gourmet who decked his table with expensive wines and the best cuts of flesh; as a posturing soldier on his way to war; and as the resplendent diplomat, puffed up with self-importance and the ostentation of the nouveaux riches. Under the circumstances, his metamorphosis did not seem genuine. Within weeks of his consecration, however, there had come the first intimation that perhaps both Henry and Eleanor had misread Thomas Becket. They had been in Normandy when a Master Ernulf arrived, bringing with him a parcel and a message from Becket. When Henry saw that the package contained the Great Seal of England, he let loose with his favorite oath. “By the eyes of God!” he had shouted. “Doesn’t he want to keep it anymore?”

  “He feels,” explained the messenger, “that the burdens of two offices are too much for him.”

  “I feel that he no longer cares to be in my service,” snapped Henry, who, far from accepting Becket’s excuse of overwork, interpreted his resignation as a slap in the face.

  Becket’s tactless haste in resigning the chancellorship pr
ovided an ominous clue that he planned to be his own master in the future, and other signs of trouble followed stealthily as he began to reassert Canterbury’s claim to property the Church had lost during Stephen’s reign. Wherever he found Church land, either farms or manors, in the hands of laymen, he dispatched his knights to seize it but, in his zealousness, very often neglected to bring the cases to court. Since Henry had granted him permission to reclaim alienated Church property, Thomas stood on fairly safe ground as long as he confined his recovery programs to small holdings; it was when he began laying claim to the castles of great lords that Eleanor noticed her husband’s temper rising sharply. Before long, there were indignant protests, one of them from Earl Roger of Clare, who complained that Thomas was trying to deprive him of his castle at Tonbridge. As Eleanor could have predicted, Henry bristled noticeably at this particular complaint because Roger’s sister “was more beautiful than any lady in the land and the king had at one time passionately loved her.” This insult to the family of one of the king’s mistresses was not taken lightly, but Henry, although worried now, pretended to overlook it. Soon afterward, however, had come Henry’s resolve to return to England, and obviously Becket’s new militancy was the cause.

  Eleanor, too, was anxious to observe for herself the metamorphosis of the elegant chancellor into, as one chronicler described him, “an erect pillar in the Church of the Lord, a bright candle on God’s candlestick.” When they landed at Southampton, she caught sight of a gaunt Becket advancing toward them, her son Henry’s hand clasped in his. After having listened to Henry’s cautious fulminations against Thomas for some months, Eleanor must have watched their meeting with interest. Aside from a slight formality in Henry’s manner, they greeted each other with kisses, embraces, and expressions of pleasure; that evening at supper and the next day traveling up to London the two men never left each other’s side, chattering and laughing in a manner reminiscent of earlier days. If Eleanor had hoped for something different, she must have been disappointed; still, despite the show of cordiality and friendship, she knew Henry too well to believe that the breach had been fully mended.

  At Westminster, Eleanor again found herself in the position of decorative queen, carefully restricted to the shadows. Judging from the pipe rolls, she must have arranged a festive party for young Henry’s eighth birthday, but otherwise she seems to have been inactive. By this time, it must have been apparent that her vision of equal partnership with Henry had been a delusion, although during the periods of her regencies he had seemed pleased enough to benefit from her services. He had permitted her sovereignty under special conditions, namely during his absences, but when they both occupied the same territory, he would not countenance her interference. Only in separation, then, was she able to function with any semblance of autonomy or even productivity, but of this she was only imperfectly aware at this time. It has been suggested that she took small interest in the king’s feud with Becket; on the contrary, feeling at loose ends and having little else to occupy her time during that restive year of 1163, she must have been a keen observer of the steady buildup of tension that resulted, in large part, from Becket’s persistence in goading the king at every turn. Already, words had passed between them in public, and Eleanor, more than anyone else, would have been witness to Henry’s private irritation, his charges of ingratitude, his rambling threats to cut the archbishop down to size—all embellished by cries of “By God’s eyes!”

  Eleanor’s appraisal of the situation would have proceeded on a quite different level: Becket, a self-seeking hypocrite from the outset, a consummate actor, was merely showing his true colors at last. Rather quickly she must have perceived trouble ahead for Thomas, a prospect that did not at all displease her. Indeed, it would have been altogether less than natural if she had not felt much relieved to see her rival topple from the king’s favor. In any case, she could hardly have held herself aloof from the controversy, since Westminster boiled with juicy reports of each encounter, the hostile courtiers baying triumphantly at the smallest black look the king gave Becket. A man who had accumulated as much power as Becket could not have helped making enemies, and now, explains one of Becket’s biographers, they sowed their tares eagerly. “The king’s courtiers, seeking to win his favor and itching to gain his ear, defamed the archbishop and hated him without cause.” Eleanor would not have been among those who whispered malice into Henry’s ear—not for nothing had she maintained a strict silence for the past eight years—because she understood to perfection that he would fall without her denigration, subtle or otherwise.

  As spring drifted into summer, the drama between the two men grew more absorbing. In July, Henry held a council at Woodstock, and although the pipe rolls do not specifically mention Eleanor’s presence, it seems likely that she and the children accompanied him to live in the splendid manor house set among the green woods of Oxfordshire. At this meeting Henry introduced the subject of sheriff’s aid, a payment of two shillings per hide of land to the sheriff of each county as a token recompense for his administrative duties. Always alert to new sources of income, especially now that Canterbury was no longer vacant, he proposed that this customary gift to the sheriffs be paid instead directly into the treasury as a legal tax. The first person to voice an objection was Becket. Perhaps from force of habit, he momentarily forgot that he was no longer in a position to give the king advice, but more probably he believed it a grave tactical error to deprive the sheriffs of an important source of income, since it would encourage them to reimburse themselves by cheating the treasury. In any event, he took the king sharply to task.

  “By God’s eyes,” Henry spat back, “it shall be given me as a tax and entered in the King’s roll; nor is it fitting that you should oppose me when no one is trying to impose a burden on you or the Church.” At this point Thomas would have been wise to have maintained a diplomatic silence. He, if anyone, knew how easily defiance could bring on an attack of Plantagenet fury, and as chancellor, he certainly would have known better than to answer. But he was no longer the king’s creature; he was archbishop of Canterbury, and he vented his own temper, confidently matching oath for oath. “By the reverence of those eyes by which you have sworn, my lord King, not a penny shall be paid from any of the land under Church jurisdiction.”

  His face flushing crimson, Henry abruptly dropped the subject and moved on to the next item on his agenda. During this exchange, the barons had stirred nervously, waiting for the explosion that failed to come. But behind Henry’s controlled, if untypical silence—the result of shock more than anything else—burned deep rage, because normally no one dared speak to him in so disrespectful a manner, especially before an assembly of his barons. Perhaps for the first time, he allowed himself to recognize that his long friendship with Thomas the chancellor was finished; thereafter, he would be forced to deal with Thomas the archbishop. Since Becket seemed to be spoiling for a fight, he would give him one, and before the Woodstock meeting adjourned, Henry hit upon a suitable means of retaliation. For some time now he had been concerned over what amounted to an unprecedented crime wave in England, and in fact, many of the offenses appeared to have been committed by clergy, either men in holy orders or those who had merely taken religious vows. These “criminous clerks,” as they would henceforth be known, were in the habit of dressing up like monks, joining bands of travelers, and once they reached a forest or deserted stretch of road, robbing and murdering them. What especially enraged Henry was that anyone who enjoyed the status of clergy could not be tried in the civil court; they could plead clerical immunity and demand trial in the ecclesiastical courts, where, to the king’s thinking, they received absurdly light sentences. At the worst, their punishment amounted to a severe penance, suspension from the exercise of their priestly functions, or confinement in a monastery for the remainder of the offender’s life.