by Marion Meade
But Henry would accept none of these arguments. Somehow, when his back had been turned for a moment, his darling boy had been transformed into an unrecognizable monster. Since the boy could do no wrong in his eyes, someone else must be responsible for the mysterious transformation, and he did not have far to look to understand whose handiwork he was seeing. The boy had been corrupted during his visits to Eleanor’s court. His head had been stuffed full of Arthurian romances and Ovidian nonsense, unreal notions of knights-errant and women who fancied themselves goddesses. Did his son believe himself to be a hero out of the pages of a Chrétien de Troyes fantasy? He certainly behaved so. Real life was not only tournaments and courts of love; it was the sober conventions of councils and law courts. Henry did not care that the Young King had “revived chivalry, for she was dead or almost so.” The tournaments that the boy adored fell into the same category as troubadours, both a waste of time. The king himself had no taste for such diversions. He had banned tournaments in England and now regretted that he had not extended the ban to his Continental divisions. If the Young King would attend to his duties as an apprentice monarch, he would have no time for mock wars; if he must pursue renown, let it be in the course of duty as Henry’s assistant. The trouble was, the boy’s mind had been warped by Eleanor and the preux chevaliers who clustered around the queen in Poitiers, her palace a trysting place for idlers who thought only of the next amusing adventure. For too many years he had closed his eyes to Eleanor’s activities, but now he would make it his business to take more than a casual interest.
By the time that the rancorous Christmas court disbanded, there was no question that war had been declared and the battle lines drawn up, but what Henry failed to understand was that Eleanor had been arming for this conflict for some time now. God, as the Wife of Bath observed, has given women three weapons: deceit, weeping, and spinning. Since Eleanor by temperament lacked the taste for either of the latter, she had resorted to the former. While the troubadours were singing and her ladies passing judgments in the court of love, the queen had become involved in a serious development. With the aid of Ralph de Faye and other confidants among the Poitevin nobility and with the encouragement of her sons, she had somehow made contact with Louis Capet, and a conspiracy of sorts had been born. Unfortunately, the origins of the plot against Henry Plantagenet were never revealed, but it seems to have been a loose confederation of the king’s disaffected vassals, a group that at that time included his wife, sons. and their champion the king of France. Although their united goal was Henry’s removal and the elevation of the Young King, their individual motives varied widely. In Louis’s case, his machinations aimed at breaking the power of the wily Plantagenet; the traitorous Aquitainian warlords would have jumped eagerly at any opportunity for revenge on what they considered an oppressive overlord; and Henry’s sons were rebelling at an authoritarian parent who threw up barriers between them and their youthful desires. It is less easy to understand Eleanor’s motives. She who had worked so hard in harness with Henry to forge an empire must have realized that Louis’s long-range plans might destroy the very thing she had labored to build. Perhaps at that point her hatred of Henry had become so great that she was willing to see the empire fall along with its master. More likely she had convinced herself that it was time to pass along the holdings to the next generation. What she surely could not have believed was that Henry would voluntarily step down. While the chroniclers provide no insights into Eleanor’s thinking, they are unanimous in crediting her as the ringleader, and they are equally unanimous in their condemnation. Gervase of Canterbury contended that the whole uprising had been devised and executed by the queen, “a very clever woman, born of noble stock, but flighty.” The anonymous chronicler of the Gesta Henrici states emphatically that “the authors of this heinous treachery were Louis, King of France, and, as some say, Eleanor, Queen of England and Ralph de Faye.” William of Newburgh is more discreet, only remarking dryly that after the Young King had reached manhood, “certain persons indeed whispered in his ear that he ought now by rights to reign alone, for at his coronation his father’s reign had, as it were, ceased.” Richard Fitzneale, a great admirer of Henry‘s, charges Eleanor with a calculated program of alienation of affections: “For while his sons were yet young and by reason of their age easily swayed by any emotion, certain’little foxes’ corrupted them with bad advice; so that at last his own bowels turned against him and told her sons to persecute their father.”
It is difficult to unravel cause and effect. Did Eleanor, as the chroniclers claim, foster her sons’ hatred of their father and incite them to rebellion, or did she merely support them in their own feelings about Henry? John, whom she did not raise and rarely saw, would later hold similar attitudes about his father. If Eleanor, as the custodial parent of Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey, did in truth turn them against Henry, she did a more thorough job than most separated wives, in that such attempts more often than not backfire. Her contemporaries, adamant in believing the worst about her, proceeded on the premise that a woman who had ostentatiously abandoned her husband and set up a court where women reigned supreme had to be wicked or, at the least, “flighty.” Remembering her intrigue with Henry while she had still been queen of France, they viewed her as an unnatural woman, one who did not know her place and, as such, would be capable of anything, especially a strenuous campaign to poison her children against their father.
All efforts at changing Henry’s attitude having failed, Eleanor took Richard and Geoffrey back to Poitiers, where plans for the uprising moved forward in a somewhat cautious manner. Mainly it was a period of waiting and watching for precisely the right moment to strike. Henry, however, took active steps to regain control of his heir so that he might undo the work of the “little foxes.” Not only would he separate that young man from his mother and her obnoxious court, but he would also banish other undesirables who might be exerting a bad influence. Despite the Young King’s howls of rage, Henry dismissed his favorite jousting companions and informed him that in future he would accompany his father and learn the profession of kingship. In early February, he more or less dragged young Henry to Montferrand in the Auvergne, where an important meeting had been scheduled with Count Humbert III of Maurienne, the lord of a spacious province extending southward and eastward from Lake Geneva to the frontiers of Italy and Provence. Two years earlier Henry and Humbert, who had no son, had tentatively agreed to a match between the count’s daughter, Alice, and John Lackland, and now a formal betrothal was to take place. The contract drawn up, Henry promised to pay Count Humbert five thousand marks, while Humbert agreed to make John his heir to Maurienne. So far, young Henry had observed the negotiations without enthusiasm but with, perhaps, some jealousy. After Count Humbert had handed over the baby Alice to Henry, the entire party moved north to Limoges, where the king had summoned Eleanor and his two middle sons to confirm the settlement. During the week of February 21-28, he held court in Limoges, the first time he had stepped foot in Eleanor’s provinces for several years, and he dominated the proceedings as though his wife did not exist. Calling together the barons of Aquitaine, he proudly announced his new alliance with Maurienne and then proceeded to take care of other business. With great ado, he acted as arbitrator between the feuding king of Aragon-Barcelona and Count Raymond of Toulouse, after which he received the homage of the count, who had recently severed his connections with the Capets.
Sometime during that week, Count Humbert, having disposed of both his daughter and the future of his fief, began to have annoying second thoughts. Perhaps he had made a poor bargain. Admittedly, his prospective son-in-law was the son of the king of England, but what did that mean exactly, since Henry had already divided his lands among his three eldest sons? What dower, he suddenly demanded of Henry, did he mean to set aside for young John? Placed on the spot, Henry replied that he would give the six-year-old boy the castles of Chinon, Loudon, and Mirebeau, a spur-of-the-moment decision that conveniently ignored the fa
ct that those castles lay in Anjou, a county already assigned to his eldest son.
With no prompting from Eleanor, the Young King burst into loud protests, flatly refusing to give his castles to John, either then or at any time in the future. Indignant, he began to recite the whole chronicle of injuries his father had visited upon him, particularly the scorching insult of not being permitted to select his own friends. Although Eleanor, Richard, and Geoffrey supported him in refusing to ratify the marriage settlement, their refusals did not prevent Henry from assuring the count of Maurienne that his word remained law in the family. In the midst of this exceedingly public quarrel, the count of Toulouse saw an opportunity to settle an old score. Speaking privately to Henry, he suggested that the king might do well to open his ears and eyes a bit wider. Surely he could see that the queen had brainwashed their sons. Behind the floss and frill of her court of love, plots to depose him were being hatched, and for that matter, Raymond doubted if Henry had a loyal vassal left in the whole of Aquitaine. The king listened to this tale of sedition without revealing his emotions. Whatever else he might think of Eleanor, he could not readily believe that she would betray him, and he knew that Raymond, a past-master at treachery, certainly held enough of a grudge against the queen to concoct such a story. Henry, too, had his informers, and no reports of foul play had come to his ears. At the same time, he did not dismiss Raymond’s warning; rather, he filed it as a subject worthy of further investigation.
When the conclave broke up at the end of February, Henry announced that he would continue to take charge of the Young King; to Eleanor’s dismay, she was forced to return to Poitiers with only Richard and Geoffrey. As the king’s entourage moved north, breaking their journey occasionally to hunt and hawk, there was no doubt that young Henry was being held under house arrest. His father did not allow him out of his sight, even insisting that they sleep in the same room. On the evening of March 5, after a hard day’s ride, they reached Chinon, and that night Henry slept perhaps more soundly than usual, because the next morning he awoke to find his son gone. The drawbridge, he learned, had been lowered before dawn. Frantic, he dispatched messengers in every direction, and when he learned that the boy had forded the Loire and had been seen heading north, he sped after him. For the next two days Henry raced to overtake the renegade in a hopeless chase that took him from Le Mans to Alençon to Argentan. But on March 8, after an all-night ride, the Young King crossed the French border to rest safely in the domains of his father-in-law. Obviously, the escape had been carefully planned; fresh horses had been posted at intervals so that the Young King would have no trouble in maintaining a good lead over pursuers. Exactly who arranged these details is uncertain, although it would be reasonable to assume that Eleanor was responsible.
At the French frontier, shaking with frustration, Henry sent several eminent bishops to Louis asking for the return of his son and promising that if the boy had complaints, they would be rectified. In this matter he would, he vowed, even take Louis’s advice.
Louis replied with a feyness that greatly amused his court.
“Who is it that sends this message to me?” he asked.
“The king of England,” replied Henry’s bishops.
“That is untrue,” said Louis archly. “Look, the king of England is here with me and he sends me no message through you. But if you still call king his father who was formerly king of England, know that he is no longer king. Although he may still act as king, everyone knows that he resigned his kingdom to his son.”
It was obvious to Henry that the time had come to put his house in order. If his heir mocked him, there still remained time to gather in the rest of the brood. Shortly, however, he discovered his mistake. “Soon after, the younger Henry, devising evil against his father from every side by the advice of the French king, went secretly into Aquitaine where his two youthful brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, were living with their mother, and with her connivance, so it is said, he incited them to join him and brought them back to France.” With three sons now beyond his jurisdiction, Henry still did not take the runaways terribly seriously. Childish petulance was all that troubled them. Apparently undisturbed, he had his hawks and hounds shipped over from England and passed the time hunting. More or less impotent for the moment, he was reduced to threatening Eleanor. Through Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen he appealed to her to end the game, adding assurances that if she and the boys returned home, all would be forgiven.
“Pious queen, most illustrious queen,” wrote the archbishop, “before matters come to a worse end, return with your sons to your husband, whom you are bound to obey and with whom you are forced to live; return lest he mistrust you or your sons. Most surely we know that he will in every way possible show you his love and grant you the assurance of perfect safety. Bid your sons, we beg you, to be obedient and devoted to their father, who for their sakes has undergone so many difficulties, run so many dangers, and undertaken so many labors.”
The archbishop then lifted before the queen’s eyes the specter of serious punishment. “Either go back to your husband, or by canon law we shall be compelled and forced to lay the censure of the Church on you. Although we say it unwillingly, unless you return to your senses we shall do this with grief and tears.”
Eleanor did not deign to reply, indeed there was no reason at all to pay the slightest morsel of attention to either Henry’s importunities or the archbishop’s threats of excommunication. As for her husband’s secondhand promises of “love” and “perfect safety,” she was wary of the word love on his tongue. At any event, by Easter of 1173, the dagger was poised for the thrust, with the Young King’s escape the signal for a widespread uprising against the king; in the half of western Christendom every baron with a grievance against his Plantagenet overlord saw that the hour had struck. The confederation, which months earlier had included mainly the queen, her sons, and her ex-husband, had now swollen to include a motley assortment of fresh recruits: the houses of Champagne and Flanders, liege men of the young princes, Poitevins burning for revenge, aggravated barons of Brittany, English lords eager to escape Henry’s crippling taxes, roustabouts who had followed in the wake of the popular Young King; in the far north, even King William of Scotland threw his support to Eleanor’s son. In England, Richard of Dover’s investiture as archbishop of Canterbury was broken off in midceremony by a messenger from the Young King protesting an election held without his consent. In Aquitaine, all officials appointed by the king were promptly shown the door; in Anjou, Brittany, and Maine, the king’s authority was stoutly repudiated. In that spring of 1173, only Normandy remained faithful to its overlord, and of all Henry’s family, “John alone, who was a little boy, remained with his father.” The Plantagenet edifice, constructed with such precision over the past two decades, seemed on the brink of folding like a house of cards.
Toward the end of June, the revolt began in earnest. On the twenty-ninth, Count Philip of Flanders invaded Normandy and captured Aumale north of Rouen, while Eleanor’s sons, “laying waste their father’s lands on every side with fire, sword and rapine,” received their first taste of real warfare at the siege of Driencourt Castle at Neufchatel. Louis Capet set up his stonethrowers and siege engines at Verneuil, one of Henry’s strongest fortifications on the Norman-French border. By midsummer Eleanor must have felt confident that Henry Plantagenet’s days on the throne were numbered. The king appeared to be stunned, not without good reason; Earl Robert of Leicester, the son of his former chief justiciar and one of his most loyal supporters, had deserted to the camp of the Young King, and the count of Flanders readied a fleet to invade England. Each day brought tidings of fresh disaster for the king and promises of a new regime for Eleanor. In August, however, the situation dramatically altered as the lion seemed to slowly shake himself awake and exhibit the speed he had shown in the early days of their marriage. With loyal vassals in short supply, certainly too few to form a decent army, Henry raided his treasury for funds to purchase mercenaries. Between Au
gust 12 and 19, he raced his army of ten thousand Brabantines from Normandy to Brittany at the rate of twenty miles a day. To Eleanor’s consternation, he began to stamp out, one by one, the fires of sedition.
As autumn drew near, Louis Capet decided to go home. His vassals had committed their time to Young Henry’s cause for only the traditional forty days of military service; if Louis remained in the field any longer, he would be obliged to pay them out of his own pocket, and even for his son-in-law, he would not go that far. From experience, Eleanor knew better than to trust Louis when it came to military ventures, but still she must have fumed to learn that he had requested a truce. On September 25, 1173, the two kings met under the spreading branches of a gigantic elm tree at Gisors in the Vexin, the traditional meeting place for the two rival powers. In the shade of the great tree, Henry’s three sons faced their father and listened impatiently to his offers of allowances and castles. Quickly, they realized that their situations had not changed, for Henry made no mention of authority. Rejecting what they considered bribes with the supreme disdain of those who have not yet tasted defeat, they confidently turned their backs on him and rode back to Paris with Louis. The fighting season had ended for the year, but in the spring they would strike again, and next time the attack would be aimed at the heart of his power, England.
It was late September now, and Eleanor must have sat uneasily in her high tower at Poitiers. Her sons may have been safe at the Capetian court, but no such security was vouchsafed to Eleanor, whose future suddenly appeared perilous. Rattling their way over the highroads of Normandy and Anjou came dismaying reports that her husband, having nothing to fear from Louis for the moment, was methodically moving his Brabantines in a southerly direction, slowly but unmistakably bearing down on Poitiers and eager to lay hands on the taproot of all his afflictions. In Touraine and northern Poitou he was capturing castles and razing walls, burning vineyards, and uprooting crops; hardly a day passed without the sight of terrorized refugees seeking safety behind Poitiers’s walls, their stomachs empty but their mouths full of horror stories about kin who had been captured and assigned to unknown Plantagenet dungeons. As the shadow of the king loomed closer, it was clearly time for Eleanor to leave her capital city, and yet she lingered. The reason for her delay can only be surmised: At that crucial moment when nearly the whole region north of Poitiers lay a smoking ruin, she must have disliked the idea of abandoning her province to the fury of her husband. Then. too, she must have experienced difficulty in coming to terms with the remaining alternative. If she fled, there was only one direction to go—the way of thousands of other refugees, including Becket and her sons. The wheel of fortune had made a cruel if complete revolution; at the age of fifty-one, was she reduced to abandoning her duchy and running to the Capets for protection? Undoubtedly, this was a step she wished to avoid at all costs, but in the end there was of course no choice. Even Ralph de Faye had deemed it prudent to winter along the Seine, and by the time Henry had set up his siege engines before the walls of Faye-la-Vineuse, he had already crossed into the Île-de-France. Only a few months earlier, one of Eleanor’s vassals had written boldly, “Rejoice, O Aquitaine, be jubilant, O Poitou, for the scepter of the king of the North Wind is drawing away from you,” but the rejoicing and jubilance had not survived the vintage.