by Marion Meade
But that was less than half the story. What must have turned her against Henry so irrevocably was his public flaunting of Rosamond. Sometime during his stay in England after the Welsh campaign, he brought Rosamond to Woodstock and installed her with regal honors in Eleanor’s apartments. Apprised of these developments by friends or informers, Eleanor lost no time in making her way toward the vicinity of Oxford once she reached England in 1166. There must have been a compelling reason why a woman whose pregnancy was nearly at term and who might have retired to her comfortable palaces at Westminster or Winchester would prefer to seek instead the spartan atmosphere of Beaumont. One can only guess that Eleanor, determined to investigate firsthand Henry’s latest amour, found Rosamond living like a queen at Woodstock. Evidently reluctant to eject Henry’s sweetheart from the palace, unwilling to remain under the same roof for her lying-in, exhausted and outraged, she must have withdrawn a few miles to the nearest royal sanctuary, which happened to be Beaumont Palace in Oxford.
There is no doubt that Rosamond Clifford touched a nerve in Eleanor, but it was a nerve already raw. Of late her relations with the king had grown steadily worse for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual jealousy. In large part her discontentment stemmed from the gradual waning of her influence. Whatever else Eleanor may have loved, she loved to rule best. To her, queenship meant sharing the regal power; queenship to Henry meant, when all was said and done, a woman who bore children and then had the sense to retire and take up pious work, a woman like his mother. Male and female had their assigned places, after all, and the throne of England was only big enough for one. Slowly, irrefutably, Henry had edged Eleanor further and further from the high place where he sat, and now, to add a gratuitous insult, he publicly honored a concubine, installing her in a palace where the queen had been undisputed mistress. Other queens might sit by helplessly and watch themselves relegated to a secondary role, but Eleanor had the resources to spare herself that humiliation. Before she had ever become queen of France or queen of England, she had been duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitou. Her vassals had never been happy under the rule of foreigners, and now a plan began coiling in her mind, a vision that suggested solutions to both her vassals’ problems as well as her own. How she might put these visions into effect was quite another matter, however.
During the entire year of 1167, Eleanor chose to remain in England, ostensibly to prepare for her daughter’s forthcoming wedding. Although the ceremony would take place in Germany, there was much to be done before Matilda’s departure. Since the princess must arrive in her new land in a style that would reflect the power of England, she must be magnificently accoutered. To that end, Eleanor purchased sixty-three pounds worth of clothing, as well as “2 large silken cloths and 2 tapestries and 1 cloth of samite and 12 sable-skins.” Other purchases recorded in the pipe rolls included twenty pairs of saddlebags and twenty chests, seven saddles gilded and covered with scarlet and thirty-four packhorses. To cover these expenses, Henry took advantage of his royal privileges. He had the right to exact a special aid from his barons on certain occasions: for ransom, in case he was captured in war; for the knighting of his eldest son; and for the marriage of his eldest daughter. Now his tenants were assessed accordingly, but he went further than previous kings by extracting a tax from cities, towns, even the tiniest villages. Altogether, the assessment for Matilda’s trousseau brought in a sum of £4,500, almost one-quarter of the kingdom’s total revenue that year. Obviously, the princess’s bridal outfit did not cost anywhere near that figure, which meant that Henry was left with a handsome profit. In July, envoys arrived to escort Matilda to Germany, and in late September, Eleanor accompanied her daughter to Dover, where the enormous collection of chests, bags, and boxes was loaded onto German ships. One account claims that Eleanor embarked with Matilda, but this appears doubtful; if she did cross to Normandy, she must have returned immediately. At Winchester that fall, she behaved suspiciously like a woman who is about to leave her husband; she collected and packed every movable object that she could call her own in England, and when she finally set sail in December, it required seven ships to transport her accumulated belongings.
During Christmas court, celebrated that year at Argentan in Normandy, she informed Henry that she wished to return to her own estates. We do not know how she broke this news to him, only that she left for Poitiers immediately after Christmas. There was little likelihood that she displayed any open hostility, although Henry would not have been blind to her coolness, and she certainly did not mention divorce. What she seems to have had in mind was an unofficial separation in which she would go her way and the king go his. Whenever it came to disengaging herself from unwanted husbands, a situation into which she had now fallen a second time, she rejected personal or domestic arguments, always concentrating on practical reasons sure to carry political weight. Now, carefully avoiding any exhibition of defiance that might be interpreted as disloyalty and bring the sort of repercussions she had seen falling on Becket’s head, she probably engineered her departure by suggesting that her presence in Aquitaine might help to ease the discord between her vassals and the crown. In setting up an administration of her own, she would attempt to restore the goodwill of her people and bring about a peace that had continued to elude Henry.
There is no doubt that Aquitaine stood on the brink of total rebellion by the time Eleanor returned to the Continent, and in fact, the south had occupied much of the king’s time during the previous year. Forced to spend the first six months of 1167 in Eleanor’s estates, Henry had taken an army of mercenaries into the Auvergne, where the local nobility had ideas of offering their allegiance to Louis Capet, a hope that Louis all too eagerly encouraged. Henry found himself in the position of a person trying to extinguish a roaring conflagration with buckets of water; each time he turned his back, a new blaze ignited. In the end, he agreed to Eleanor’s plan simply because he had little choice. Perhaps those proverbially faithless southerners would respond best to their own duchess.
After Christmas court, Henry and his army personally escorted Eleanor to Poitiers so that on the face of it her return appeared to be part of Plantagenet policy for Aquitaine rather than any personal break between king and queen. By the time Eleanor arrived in her ancestral city, nearly all the land south of the Loire had broken into open rebellion under the leadership of the counts of Angoulême and La Marche, the Lusignan family, and Hugh and Robert of Silly. Girding himself for action, Henry wasted no time in mounting an attack on the fortress of Lusignan, and after capturing and garrisoning the castle, he razed its walls and ravaged the neighboring lands. Most of the ringleaders escaped, although Robert of Silly, who made the mistake of surrendering, was imprisoned and starved to death, Henry probably intending to make an example of him. By March 1168, some of the most noble families of Aquitaine were wandering the roads, homeless, hungry, and reduced to brigandage. Some found their way to the Île-de-France, where Louis’s new foreign policy extended asylum to all Plantagenet enemies.
Aquitaine secure for the present, Henry left Poitiers before Easter and headed for the Norman frontier to attend a peace conference with the king of France. Ever since the birth of Philip Augustus, Louis had been sticking his fingers into Henry’s affairs whenever the opportunity arose, an obvious means of keeping the Plantagenet uneasy. Now war between France and England appeared imminent, although at this point Henry was so beset by enemies that he barely knew in which direction to turn.
Although Eleanor had been left behind in the captured castle at Lusignan, she had not been abandoned to her own devices. Even though Aquitaine seemed quiet, sedition was the southerners’ daily bread, and Henry, aware of Eleanor’s trust in Ralph de Faye, took precautions lest she turn to the wrong person for advice. Rather than appoint her regent, he placed her under the protective custody of Earl Patrick, his military commander for the region, and in view of the unsettled conditions Eleanor may have been content with the arrangement. She soon discovered that Hen
ry’s security had been a mirage.
On March 27, just a few days after Henry’s departure, Eleanor and Earl Patrick were riding near the castle with a small bodyguard. Since the men wore no armor, perhaps the party was hawking. Suddenly, there burst from an ambush a strong force led by two surly Lusignans, who, with the recklessness of those who have nothing more to lose, had decided to capture Eleanor and Earl Patrick and hold them for ransom. Accustomed to dealing with ruffians, Eleanor was off and riding toward the castle once she realized what Geoffrey and Guy de Lusignan had in mind. Earl Patrick called for his war-horse but before he could don his hauberk, he was slain from behind, the Lusignans not being sufficiently chivalrous to wait until their foes armed. As a result of this grievous incident, Eleanor’s attention had been drawn to Earl Patrick’s nephew, a young knight who fought “like a wild boar besieged by hounds” but who had, nevertheless, been captured. Twenty-two-year-old William Marshal was one of those landless younger sons, in fact the son of that same John Marshal whose complaints had brought Becket to Northampton. Knighted only a few months earlier, he had already distinguished himself in several tournaments, and Eleanor was not the first to remark upon his skill with sword and lance. Not only did she arrange for his ransom and release, she “bestowed upon him horses, gold and rich garments, and more than all opened her palace gates and fostered his ambition.” Seeing something special in the young man, those virtues of courtesy, generosity, and perfect loyalty that always touched her, she brought him into her family as tutor, guardian, friend, and companion for Prince Henry, thus paving the way for Marshal’s rise from knight-errant to, five decades later, regent of England.
With the death of Earl Patrick, Henry was too embroiled with other problems during the remainder of 1168 to pay much attention to Aquitaine. For the time being at least, Eleanor was on her own.
In Paris, in Rouen, and in London, there were whispers about the domestic affairs of the Plantagenets. It was noted that the king of England had kept Christmas court at Argentan in 1168, but the queen was nowhere to be seen. She had presided over her own Christmas court in Poitiers with her favorite son, Richard, and several of her younger children. Just as if she had no lord, she administered her duchy with a steady hand, no doubt putting to good use the lessons she had learned while serving her apprenticeship in the English law courts. She was, of course, closely supervised, for no one believed that Henry would cut adrift either his queen or her domains, no matter how troublesome Aquitaine had grown in recent years. There was more to this than met the eye, but exactly what lay behind these unusual arrangements within the English royal family no one could say for certain. Since no enlightenment was forthcoming from either of the principals, the nature of the breach between them—if there was one—remained a mystery to those who made it their business to keep abreast of international happenings.
Louis Capet, normally the last to traffic in domestic gossip, was not, nevertheless, so myopic that he could allow these odd rumors and reports to slide by without further investigation, especially since he counted the queen in her capacity as duchess of Aquitaine as one of his vassals and more especially since he had been engaged in a desultory war with Henry for the past year. Throughout 1168 Louis had sent raiding parties into the Vexin, and Henry had burnt villages along the French border; the skirmishes had been interspersed with cease-fires and feeble attempts on Louis’s part to patch up their differences by diplomacy. If neither force nor diplomacy had proved effective in breaking up Henry’s empire, perhaps yet another way remained. Louis was a slow man, and his ideas were never flashy nor executed with the electricity that marked some of Henry’s programs. Louis chewed over imponderables until, sometimes, he was able to devise an inspired course of action. All things were possible if one had the patience to wait, and although Louis at forty-nine could obviously not wait forever, his strivings might not necessarily be in vain if Dieu-Donné could reap the harvest.
To break the diplomatic deadlock and secure peace in France and in Henry’s mainland possessions. Louis proposed that Henry partition his empire among his three oldest sons; he should cede the counties of Anjou and Maine to Prince Henry, not quite fourteen, and then the boy might do homage to Louis for his lands. Likewise Richard should receive the duchy of Aquitaine and Geoffrey the duchy of Brittany on the same basis. To sweeten the pot, Louis offered to give Richard the hand of Alais, his daughter by Constance of Castile and the sister of Princess Marguerite. Although one might imagine that Henry would have seen through this thinly veiled attempt to divide and conquer, he did not. As we have seen, he was prey to intense anxiety that his sons might have to fight for their inheritances as he had. The surest way to provide for an orderly succession would be for them to do homage to the king of France while Henry was still alive. In fact, the more he thought about the idea, the more it appealed to him, and undeniably it fit perfectly into his cherished plan to have Prince Henry annointed king of England during his lifetime. Altogether, the arrangements suggested by Louis would provide him with some desperately needed peace of mind. If it occurred to him that Louis might be attempting to weaken his empire by driving a wedge between father and sons, he surely discounted the notion. He was not in the habit of crediting Louis with guile or even ordinary astuteness, and in any case, he had no intention of hacking up these grants to his sons with any real authority. They were, after all, mere babes.
On the feast of Epiphany, January 6, 1169, Henry and Louis conferred at Montmirail, on the border of Maine near Chartres. Both potentates arrived with imposing retinues, especially Henry, who was accompanied by his three sons, each of them decked out in his finest clothes and surrounded with a household of knights and barons. Obviously glorying in this opportunity to show off his handsome offspring, Henry was in unusually high spirits that day. He opened the parley with a flowery speech of the variety that he rarely bothered to make. “My lord King,” he said to Louis, “on this feast of Epiphany, commemorating the day on which the three kings offered gifts to the King of Kings, I commend my three sons and my lands to your safekeeping.”
Louis swept his gaze over Eleanor’s three sons and made the kind of holier-than-thou rejoinder that always succeeded in annoying Henry. “Since the King who received those gifts from the Magi seems to have inspired your words, may your sons, when they take possession of their lands, do so as in the presence of our Lord.”
Allowing this lesson on the duties of a vassal to pass without comment, Henry proceeded to renew his homage to Louis for his Continental possessions and promised to return castles and lands he had taken from the Aquitainian rebels, many of whom were now refugees in France. Once these formalities had been taken care of, the conference shifted emphasis from the older generation to the younger. The next day, Henry brought forth his namesake, his pride and joy, Prince Henry, and watched proudly as the boy placed his hands in the palm of his father-in-law to render homage for his provinces of Anjou, Brittany, and Maine. (He had already done homage for Normandy in 1160.) To show his regard for the lad, Louis bestowed on him the post of seneschal of France. Then eleven-year-old Richard stepped forward to be confirmed in his inheritance of his mother’s lands, that magnificent dower that had slipped through Louis’s fingers seventeen years earlier, and to Richard he presented his future bride. Nine-year-old Alais Capet, orphaned at birth, was handed over to the Plantagenets to be reared in their court. And finally, Geoffrey, now ten, made his appearance to receive Louis’s consent to his marriage with the heiress of Brittany. It was arranged that later in the year he would do homage to his brother Henry for his patrimony.
For the witnesses and spectators at Montmirail, it had been a confusing two days, and even afterward, they would have difficulty making sense out of these happenings. Most perplexing was why the acquisitive Henry had agreed to this division of his hard-earned lands to boys who had yet to be knighted. One theory held that he secretly planned to take the cross and depart for the Holy Land, others contended that he had been offered the Holy Roma
n Empire and therefore could well afford to dispose of his mainland holdings. And why did Eleanor remain sequestered in Poitiers? And why had Henry agreed to Richard’s betrothal to Alais, making it possible for Aquitaine to one day be pulled back into Frankish domains? But there seemed to be no answers to these questions.
Among the spectators at Montmirail sat one man who watched the investitures with ill-concealed impatience. Thomas Becket had not seen Henry since their furious combat at Northampton four years earlier. For the archbishop, those had been years of prayer, study, and harsh, self-administered penances, a life of solitude far from the dazzling arena of kings and courts. As for Henry, time had accomplished what reason could not. Finally, he had succeeded in pushing Becket from the forefront of his concerns; or perhaps more accurately, he had faced more pressing problems in quelling various insurrections in his estates. By now, Becket had become a nuisance and a distraction—in fact, Becket had become an irritant for many people—because if Henry was willing to drop the quarrel, the aggrieved archbishop was not. Victory was his raison d’être, and he pursued Henry with all the indefatigable ardor of a rejected mistress. From the Abbey of Pontigny and later Saint Columba’s Abbey near Sens, he pestered Henry with scolding letters urging penance and reflection upon wrongdoings and reminding him that he was the king’s spiritual father. He collected works on canon law and spent his days working up an airtight case against the arrogant Plantagenet. He swamped Europe with a river of self-pitying correspondence in which he pressed for redress of his grievances. No suffering equaled his: There was, he wrote, no grief “like unto my grief.” While Henry ignored the letters, other incidents moved him to fits of blind rage, which Thomas could inspire so successfully. On Whitsunday 1166, Thomas had celebrated Mass at Vézelay. At the conclusion of the service, he had excommunicated all of Henry’s officers who had committed crimes, either against his person or against the see of Canterbury. Exempting Henry, who, he had heard, was ill, he had limited himself to a stiff denunciation and a warning that if the king continued to persecute the Church, he too would soon be bound by the chains of anathema. When reports of these holy thunderbolts had reached Henry at Chinon, he had turned his wrath upon his court, accusing everyone in sight of being a traitor who lacked the courage and enterprise to rid him of the pestilential archbishop. Thomas, he had cried, would not be happy until he had deprived him of body and soul.