by Marion Meade
When Eleanor finally decided to act, the last possible moment for flight had already passed. That she knew this is evident from the manner of her departure. She took with her no silken gowns or chests or maids. Disguised in a knight’s attire, she set out astride her mount, accompanied only by a few knights of her household. Along some road in the north of Poitou the queen’s little band was accosted, almost accidentally it seems, by a party of her own countrymen, unfortunately some of the few Poitevins still loyal to Henry Plantagenet and thus quick to assess the value of this prize that had dropped into their laps. Her capture was accomplished swiftly and silently. No chronicler had access to the facts, neither the date nor the place nor the names of her captors. The sole annalist to mention the episode was Gervase of Canterbury and then only to record his surprise that the most dignified queen in Europe should be found in men’s clothes—“mutata veste muliebri”—with her legs vulgarly straddling a horse. A twentieth-century historian suggests that her betrayers were four Poitevin barons who later received valuable grants from Henry; if that were truly the case, the men would have been known to her, no doubt vassals who had sworn homage, who had lazed about the Great Hall of her palace listening to the troubadours and partaking of her hospitality, and on whom she had tried to graft an enlightened consciousness. Whatever the manner of the confrontation between these men and their liege lady—whether men and horses crashed to the ground as her escort attempted a defense, whether her party was led away in helpless silence—the betrayal took place with secrecy and murderous efficiency. Nor did the king advertise the capture of his royal prisoner of war. Her proverbially disloyal countrymen had neatly taken care of his problems, both marital and martial, and now he would deal with her privately as the poorest villein would punish a faithless wife. Swiftly, the unrepentant queen was stored in a convenient fortress, Chinon perhaps, but for many months her whereabouts must have remained a mystery to her sons and supporters. She had disappeared as if swallowed up by an extraterrestrial invasion party. At one point, however, Eleanor and Henry must have faced each other in bitter colloquy. Did Henry threaten to execute her for treason? Did he fly into one of his Angevin rages and roll on the floor? The answers to such questions lie hidden in the mists of history, if indeed they were ever publicly known. Perhaps Henry forewent the pleasure of a tantrum and informed her with a deadly calm worse than rage that her future lay solely at his disposal. Despite the propaganda emanating from her court of love, she was, after all, his property. The principles of feudalism rode triumphant.
On Whitsunday, May 12, 1174. Henry himself arrived in Poitiers to scoop up the remnants of Eleanor’s court—Queen Marguerite and the Princess Alais; Henry’s sister, Emma of Anjou, Constance of Brittany and Alice of Maurienne; his daughter, Joanna—and then he proceeded to clean house. The chevaliers and songsters were sent on their way, idlers and tourneyers banished, key rebels flushed from their burrows and assigned to chains. Trustworthy men were placed in charge of the duchy. Eleanor’s famous court, the scene of brilliant fêtes and female fantasies of power, stood empty now. The Young King had gone, and Richard and Geoffrey—all moved on to challenge their destinies in the Île-de-France. Countess Marie, who had remained until shortly before Henry’s purge, was now back in Champagne with her tales of Arthur and Guinevere. The countess of Flanders had returned to Arras, where her husband, refusing to tolerate Amazons or goddesses, hung a young man who had dared to practice the principles of Andreas’s De Amore. The court of love was vacant now and the land in which it had flourished left to the winds of anarchy.
All through that dreary winter and spring of 1174 we hear nothing of Eleanor. The kings and knights, bishops and castles, even the pawns, still moved about the political chessboard, but the queen had been deftly removed and pocketed. It can be supposed, however, that her hope of release remained high, and if communications from the outside reached her, she would have been encouraged to learn that the Young King and Philip of Flanders, their army and fleet assembled, now waited only for a favorable wind to speed their flotilla across the Channel. The revolt by no means over, there always remained the chance of rescue, either by her sons or by Louis or by some sympathetic jailer.
Suddenly in July, doors were unbarred and drawbridges lowered, but not by friends. Eleanor was carried under close guard to the port of Barfleur “where a considerable number of ships had been assembled against the king’s arrival.” In fact, forty vessels had been hired to transport across the Channel Henry’s assortment of captive rebels and innocent bystanders; amid the crowd could be found the queen with her jailers, the Plantagenet children and daughters-in-law anxiously bewildered, and a number of well-known earls, countesses, and barons dragging their chains. The Channel was rough and the Norman coast lashed by summer storms. The first time Eleanor had watched the foaming breakers and waited for weather in this port, she had been thirty-two years old and held the world in the-palm of her hand. In a storm, she had crossed with her virile young husband to claim a crown, but now, in another storm, she may have seen the Channel as a runway to the tomb. She was an elderly woman whose moment had come and gone.
Storms had not stopped Henry in 1154, and they surely did not deter him now. To the terror of his sailors and captives, he ordered the fleet to sail on the morning of Monday, July 8. Standing on the deck of his ship, he lifted his eyes to the stormy skies and shouted above the gale a message to God, his attitude toward the Almighty always being that of one businessman to another, an equal from whom he expected fair dealing. “Lord, if in my heart I nourish plans which will bring peace to the clergy and the people, if the King of Heaven has decreed in His infinite mercy that my arrival shall mark the return of peace, then may He grant that I come safely to harbour. If He is opposed to my purpose and has decided to punish my kingdom, may I never be allowed to reach its shores.” The fleet rode into Southampton that same evening.
It was high summer in England, but the sun did not shine. Instead, rain and fog shrouded Southampton, and it was cold. Henry had no time to waste on his captives. Declining a proper meal, he wolfed down water and a chunk of bread before he disposed of his excess baggage with a promptness that suggests he had already allotted some thought to the matter. Marguerite and the other young ladies were sent to Devizes, his chained prisoners to Porchester, and the less dangerous to Winchester. But neither in Winchester nor in London nor in Oxford would he incarcerate Eleanor, nor in any site where a rising tide of sympathy and interest in the queen of England might lap at her walls. The queen was immured in the strong tower of Salisbury, not the Salisbury we know today but Old Sarum, where she would have ample time to examine her conscience and reflect upon the error of her perfidy. As for Henry, he felt the need to look into his own conscience. The next morning, he set out on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Three miles from the town, he dismounted and walked the rest of the way barefoot. “His footsteps along the road seemed to be covered with blood and really were so; for his tender feet were being cut by the hard stones.” It was a year since Thomas the martyr had been canonized, more than three years since the crime had taken place. Entering the crypt, Henry prostrated himself before the tomb and then stripped his pilgrim’s smock for the lashes of the bishops, abbots, and monks. “There he remained in prayer before the holy Martyr all that day and night. He neither took food nor went out to relieve nature but, as he had come, so he remained and would not permit a rug or anything else to be laid under him.” At daybreak on Sunday the thirteenth he heard Mass and received a phial of the martyr’s blood. The following Wednesday evening the king, resting at Westminster after his exertions and fasting, was halfway between waking and sleeping when a messenger beat loudly on his chamber door. At that particular time he must have dreaded the approach of any courier, since nearly all reports turned out to be alarming; King William of Scotland was harrying his northern borders, mercenaries of the count of Flanders had already landed in East Anglia, and momentarily he expected to see the Young King himself at the head of
an army. Under the circumstances, he braced himself for evil tidings: “Brien, what news do you bring?”
“The King of Scotland is taken and all his barons.”
“Then,” says King Henry, “God be thanked for it,
And St. Thomas Martyr and all God’s saints!”
And the King is so merry that night and so joyful
That he went to the knights and woke them all up:
“Barons, wake up! This has been a good night for you!
Such a thing have I heard as will make you joyful:
Taken is the King of Scotland, so it has been told me for truth.
Just now the news came to me, when I should have been in bed.”
The next morning, the bells rang in every church in London, and in the course of the next two months, Henry quenched the fires of rebellion in England and then on the Continent. On September 29, he met with his rebel sons at Montlouis, between Tours and Amboise, to dictate the terms of peace. Stripping them of independent authority, he gave the Young King two castles in Normandy and an income of £3,750 sterling a year. Richard was allotted two castles in Poitou and half the county’s revenues, while Geoffrey was to have half the income from Constance of Brittany’s marriage portion. His provisions for John, which had so provoked the Young King earlier in the year at Limoges, were now substantially increased, and instead of the three castles originally promised, he was to receive property in England, Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, as well as considerable revenues. “Furthermore, King Henry, the son of the Lord King, and his brothers gave assurance that they would never demand anything more of the Lord King, their father, beyond the determined settlement” and that they would “withdraw neither themselves nor their service from their father.” And so the cubs were pulled back into the fold so successfully that people said it must have been due to the intervention of the Blessed Saint Thomas. The king and his four sons, all very models of filial obedience, kept Christmas court at Argentan, where they feasted on “the meat of four score deer sent to the King beyond the sea.” In victory, Henry had shown himself magnanimous, excusing his sons’ treachery on the grounds of youth and blaming their excesses on troublemakers. His leniency did not, however, extend to his wife.
At Salisbury, the queen dined on disappointed hopes. There is no evidence she was confined to a cell or in any way physically mistreated, but at the same time there is no doubt that she remained very much a prisoner, always kept under strict surveillance by one of the king’s watchdogs. Her pride shredded, her hopes and ambitions utterly destroyed, she who had been mistress of all she surveyed was now estranged from her children and cut off from the world’s commerce, forced to rely on her keepers for news. With her she had a small household—her maid, Amaria, and perhaps a few other familiars—but she seems to have lived a comparatively mean existence. If the pipe rolls record the total extent of the allowances for her maintenance, her income would have permitted only the most spartan of lives. There had been method in Henry’s disposition of her, a cruelty that comes of knowing a person intimately, for he understood that she had not the slightest passion for solitude. On the contrary, she gloried in the converse of people, and of course, she abhorred idleness. In clipping the Eagle’s wings, he had deliberately condemned her to what he believed would be a living death.
Her state of mind at this time was as much a matter of conjecture to the twelfth century as it is now. In Aquitaine, her subjects cried out in vain against the imprisonment of their duchess, but whether their laments reached Salisbury cannot be determined.
Tell me, Eagle with two heads, tell me: where were you when your eaglets, flying from their nest, dared to raise their talons against the king of the North Wind? It was you, we learn, who urged them to rise against their father. That is why you have been plucked from your own country and carried away to an alien land. Your barons have cheated you by their conciliatory words. In the old days, with your taste for luxury and refinement. you enjoyed a royal liberty. You lived richly on your own inheritance, you took pleasure in the pastimes of your women, you delighted in the melodies of the flute and drum. And now, Queen with two crowns, you consume yourself with sorrow, you ravage your heart with tears. Return, O captive, return to your own lands if you can. You may ask yourself: Where is my court? Where are the members of my family? Where are my handmaidens, my counselors? Some have been torn from their lands and condemned to a shameful death; some have been deprived of their sight, others wander exiled in far places. Eagle of the broken alliance, how much longer will you cry out unanswered? The king of the North Wind holds you in captivity. But do not despair; lift your voice like a bugle and it shall reach the ears of your sons. The day will come when they will set you free and you shall come again to dwell in your native land.
But Eleanor’s voice trumpeted no farther than the moat at Salisbury. If she pleaded with Henry for her liberty, his ears were stopped against her words, and even her sons appeared deaf. She had played her dangerous game and lost, and now she must sustain herself with memories. One can imagine that her thoughts might have strayed back to the Île-de-France and the young man with whom she had intrigued on a few sultry August evenings twenty-five years earlier; she had loved him as passionately then as she now detested him. And she must have thought, too, of the children she had been so eager to bear. Her daughters, sensible girls bred for queenship, had never caused her grief: Matilda, prim, solid, always reliable; Eleanor and Joanna, spirited and beautiful. As for her sons, she could not have denied that they had become, in some curious way, thorns in her flesh. The Young King’s enormous charm could not disguise a kind of stupidity in his nature, just as Geoffrey’s sugared tongue could not overcome his craftiness and selfishness; John had the energy and nerve of his father, but in him Henry’s vitality became nervous weakness, his bravado merely underhandedness. Of all her brood it was the thought of Richard that must have warmed her most isolated moments—Richard her love, the child with the greatest spirit, the most cultured, the most intelligent.
As Salisbury the days were long. She must have used every trick to nourish her hope of release before she died, but there was no trick. She could only wait, in apprehension and eagerness, watching the seasons unfurl and die, waiting for news of her children, turning over in her mind her yesterdays, when she had dreamed of an unreal love as sung by the troubadours. So many cansos only half-heard, so many lovely days wasted, so many roads ridden over without turning her head aside to watch the trees and fields, so many goblets of wine drunk hastily, so much of life consumed but never tasted.
In 1175, Eleanor was offered a possible chance of escape. She may have been removed from Henry’s sight but not from his mind; indeed, one of his chief problems was her final disposition. Ironically, his dilemma was the same that had perplexed the king of the Franks some twenty-five years earlier; how to rid himself of the queen without also losing her duchy. Clearly, he had excellent grounds for divorce, because she was more closely related to him than to Louis, but he could also see that divorce might not be the answer. He had no intention of repeating Louis’s mistake, for in setting Eleanor free, he would lose half of his Continental domains at one stroke to her and Richard. Surely it would be madness to place such weapons in the hands of a woman who hated him and a son who had already proved his intransigence. Still, other alternatives might remain that the spineless Louis had not dared to attempt. At the end of October 1175, Henry welcomed to England Cardinal Hugh Pierleoni, who had come on other matters but unexpectedly found himself the recipient of an astounding royal largesse. At Winchester, Henry loaded him with gifts and sweet words; indeed, the amount of silver that passed into the cardinal’s hands suggested a barely concealed bribe. What Henry proposed was a divorce, after which the ex-queen of England should relinquish worldly pursuits and retreat into some honorable establishment for women where she could do no harm. Perhaps, he suggested, the queen might be prevailed upon to retire to Fontevrault, not as an ordinary nun but in the prestigious position
of abbess. There in that famous and noble nunnery she might live out her few remaining years in the company of other rich old ladies, leaving him free to form a new alliance.