Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  On January 22, 1188, Henry and Philip drew up their retinues under the elm once more. They had scarcely settled down to business, those wearying topics of Alais and the Vexin, when the archbishop of Tyre arrived, having lately traveled across the Mediterranean and over the Alps for the express purpose of stirring Europe to action. By chance he found his way to the elm of Gisors, and so powerful were his exhortations that within a day both Henry and Philip Augustus had taken the cross. It was, people said, a miracle. To others, Eleanor perhaps, Henry’s sudden reversal suggested less lofty motives. A Crusade would, at the very least, distract Philip from his perennial harping about Alais; it would rid Henry of his two main irritants, his son and Louis Capet’s son; and in the end, there might be a way of wriggling out of his Crusader’s vow before the expedition set out, some fifteen months hence.

  Back in England in 1188, Henry abruptly sent Eleanor into close confinement again at either Winchester or Salisbury while he solaced himself with Alais Capet and tried to forget Philip’s persistent attempts to harass him. By July, however, it was clear that Philip could be restrained by no other means than force. Despite Henry’s age, corpulence, and increasing ill health, he resolved to tolerate the impudent king of the Franks no longer, even blaspheming before his horrified prelates, “Why should I worship Christ? Why should I deign to honour Him who takes my earthly honour and allows me to be ignominiously confounded by a mere boy?” On August 16, he met with the “mere boy” under the Gisors elm, and for three days listened to Philip’s demands for the retrocession of the Vexin and the marriage of his aging sister. Henry, sitting in the shade, hardly bothered to give his attention. In his opinion, the Norman Vexin rightfully belonged to him. To treat it as the dower of a Capetian bride was wholly beside the point. To Philip, however, the Vexin and Alais were merely proofs of Henry’s bad faith. At some undetermined point in the negotiations, the Franks, who had been sweltering on the sunny side of the elm, suddenly rushed at Henry’s entourage with drawn swords, sending the English to the shelter of the nearby castle. Infuriated, Philip ordered the elm cut down so that no parley might ever take place there again with the treacherous Plantagenets. Seeing the mutilated stump, Henry calmly declared war, but although subsequently he plunged into France to ravage a few castles near Mantes, in truth he had no appetite for fighting.

  During the winter of 1188-89, Henry, ill and depressed, stayed at Le Mans in the castle where he had been born. He had developed an anal fistula, and by March it had grown badly abcessed. With him were his illegitimate son, Geoffrey, William Marshal, and perhaps, John. Richard he preferred not to think about. When he had last met with Philip in November, he had been shocked to see Richard among the retinue of the Capetian king. In the hearing of the courtiers, Richard had asked Henry to recognize him as his heir. Henry had refused. “Now,” cried Richard, “at last I believe what heretofore has seemed incredible!” And throwing himself on his knees before Dieu-Donné, he had done homage for all the lands to which he claimed inheritance and had sworn fealty to him as his liege man. Henry’s thirty-one-year-old son had ridden away with Philip, and soon curious reports were drifting back to Le Mans: The Capetian so honored his son that every day they ate from the same dish and at night they slept in the same bed. Such brotherhood was too remarkable not to be widely commented upon; gossip was rife, and people whispered of the sin of Sodom. Henry, ignoring the sexual innuendoes, mourned because he wanted his son back.

  After a series of fruitless conferences with Philip in the spring of 1189. Henry returned to Le Mans, even though his bishops and barons warned him that Philip and Richard were leading an army through Maine, taking every castle in their path. It was not until Sunday, June 11, when Philip’s army appeared before the walls of Le Mans, that he was forced to acknowledge the danger. To avoid a battle, Henry ordered one of the suburbs set afire in the hope that he could drive the French away. Suddenly, however, the wind changed, and flames began to suck the walls of the city. In the blaze that followed, the French poured through the gates, while Henry had no choice but to rally his seven hundred knights and flee. On a hill two miles north of the city, he drew rein and turned for a last look at the inferno raging in his birthplace. The bitterness poured out. “O God,” he cried, “Thou hast vilely taken away the city I loved best on earth, the city where I was born and bred, the city where my father is buried. I will pay Thee back as best I can. I will rob Thee of the thing Thou lovest best in me, my soul!” According to Gerald of Wales, he said a great deal more, which the chronicler thought safer not to record.

  With Philip and Richard hard on his heels, he pressed furiously north, while William Marshal covered his retreat. Out of a cloud of dust came the vanguard of the French army, with Richard in the lead. Marshal turned and leveled his lance.

  “By God’s legs, Marshal,” shouted Richard in his only recorded instance of fear, “do not kill me. I wear no hauberk.”

  “May the Devil kill you,” cried Marshal, “for I will not.” With that, he plunged his lance into Richard’s horse.

  The day was extremely hot, the road narrow, the retreat confused, and many of Henry’s knights died from heat and fatigue or fell prostrate along the roadside. His advisers counseled him to strike northward to the heart of Normandy, where he could find reinforcements for his army or send to England for help. Although he agreed to send his troops on to Alencon, he himself turned south into Anjou. For two weeks he traversed the backroads that he knew so well, twisting and turning over nearly two hundred miles of trails, somehow evading Philip’s army, which had overrun the province. The killing ride combined with the heat opened his wound, and by the time he reached his great fortress of Chinon, the poison in his blood had virtually robbed him of the use of his legs, and he could neither sit nor stand comfortably. Aware that the roads were infested with Franks, that castle after castle had fallen to them, he clung feebly to Geoffrey and William Marshal. Somehow, in the melee, he had lost his youngest son. Where was John?

  At dawn on the morning of Monday, July 3, Philip’s soldiers set up their scaling ladders against the walls of Tours, and by midmorning, the city had fallen. The following day, he summoned Henry to a conference at Ballan, a few miles southwest of the captured city. Racked by intense pain, Henry nevertheless set out from Chinon with William Marshal and a small party of knights to meet his victorious enemy. When they reached the house of the Knights Templar in Ballan, he was so exhausted that he fell upon a cot. “Marshal, sweet gentle sir,” Henry said, “a cruel pain has seized my toes and feet and is piercing my legs. My whole body is on fire.” Some of his knights rode off to the conference site to inform Philip that the king was ill, but Richard warned that his father was feigning; no doubt he had another trick up his sleeve. Stung when he learned of his son’s taunt, Henry made a supreme effort to rise and ordered his knights to seat him on his horse.

  It was a clear sultry day, the sky cloudless and the air still. As Henry advanced toward Philip and Richard, a clap of thunder was heard and then another. At the sight of Henry’s ashen face, Philip, moved to pity, hurriedly ordered a cloak to be folded and placed on the ground so that Henry might sit. He had not come to sit, Henry replied, but to learn the price he must pay for peace. Remaining on his horse, his men holding him upright, he listened as the humiliating terms were read. He was to do homage to the king of France for all his Continental possessions. He was to place himself wholly at Philip’s will and pay an indemnity of twenty thousand marks. He must give up Alais Capet so that Richard might marry her on his return from Jerusalem. He must agree to Richard receiving the fealty of his father’s subjects on both sides of the sea as lawful heir to the Plantagenet lands. As a pledge of his good faith, he must surrender three major castles in Anjou or the Vexin, and to prevent him from taking revenge on any of his barons who had deserted to the Frankish camp, it was stipulated that they would not return to the king’s service until a month before the start of the Crusade.

  Rolls of thunder rent the afternoo
n sky as Henry murmured his assent and motioned his knights for departure. Philip stopped him. He must give his son the kiss of peace. As Richard advanced for the embrace, Henry drew back and whispered fiercely, “God grant that I may not die until I have had a fitting revenge on you.”

  An ailing lion savaged by jackals, he was carried back to Chinon on a litter, cursing the day he was born and calling down Heaven’s wrath on his son. In his fortress high above the Vienne, physicians were summoned, but the king, groaning on his couch, lay far beyond the reach of their potions. He had left behind one of his men, Roger Malchael, to secure from Philip a list of those who had deserted him and who were to be exempt from punishment. When Roger returned with the parchment and began to read, his voice suddenly failed. “Sire, may Jesus Christ help me!” he exclaimed. “The first name written here is Count John, your son.”

  The king gave an anguished cry. “Is it true that John, my heart, John whom I loved more than all my sons and for whose sake I have suffered all these evils, has forsaken me?” Turning his face to the wall, he motioned Roger away. “Say no more. Now let the rest go as it will. I care no more for myself nor for aught in this world.”

  The will to live had faded. He lapsed into delirium, sometimes appearing to sleep, occasionally breaking into wild moans of grief and pain. His son Geoffrey cradled his head and fanned away the flies. In the final hours, Henry was heard to cry over and over, “Shame, shame on a vanquished king.” Crying shame, he died on Thursday, the sixth of July, 1189, in the thirty-fifth year of his reign.

  Because servants had ransacked the corpse for clothes and jewels, his friends had difficulty laying out the king’s body properly, and they collected makeshift trappings from wherever they could: a ring for his finger, an ersatz scepter for his hand, and for his crown a band of tattered gold embroidery donated by an obliging woman. The next morning, his body was borne on the shoulders of his few remaining faithful barons, down from the castle on the rock of Chinon, across a viaduct above the swampy meadows, and then northward along the left bank of the Vienne to the abbey church of Fontevrault, where the veiled sisters gathered to keep watch over the bier. William Marshal had sent word to Richard, but not until nightfall did he finally appear, slipping quietly into the church to stand and gaze down at his father. “One could not tell from his expression whether he felt joy or sorrow, grief, anger, or satisfaction.” Then he knelt to pray, remaining on his knees “scarcely longer than the space of a Paternoster.” At that moment, “blood began to flow from the dead king’s nostrils and ceased not so long as his son remained there.” It was, a chronicler said, “as if his spirit were moved with indignation,” the fiery king still venting his famous Angevin temper from beyond God’s other door.

  In July of 1189, Eleanor of Aquitaine was sixty-seven years old. She had been her husband’s prisoner for sixteen years.

  Autumn and After

  When William Marshal arrived at Winchester in mid-July with instructions to unlock Eleanor’s prison gates, he found the lady already at liberty, no one having dared detain her a single hour after news of the king’s death had reached England. To William’s astonishment, the sixty-seven-year-old woman advanced to greet him with all the grace and civility he remembered from her court in Poitiers. Even though the years that should have been filled with contentment and enjoyment of the honors due great queens had been stolen from her, she had somehow managed to preserve herself, physically as well as mentally. If Marshal had anticipated a frail, doddering relic warped with bitterness and grief, he did not find it. It seemed as if she had used her enforced tranquility to purge her spirit of imprudence and self-indulgence, to broaden her understanding of politics and sharpen her instincts about the affairs of humankind. For sixteen years she had looked deeply into her soul to glean eternal truths, and now that her hour of liberation had come, she was ready.

  William carried with him letters from Richard giving his mother full command of the realm until he had settled his affairs in Normandy and would be able to join her. But Eleanor, perhaps using that clairvoyance credited her by the archdeacon of Wells, had already taken the first steps toward assumption of the regency, and to Winchester subjects were flocking, eager to pay homage at the court of “Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England.” After Marshal’s arrival, she immediately gathered up her household and set off for London, where she convened her court at Westminster and summoned the barons and prelates of the realm to make their oaths of allegiance to the new king. All the while, she evidently felt that this act was not sufficient to secure for her son the love of the English. Although born in Oxford, he had never considered his birthplace any more than an easily rectified accident. Since childhood, he had made only brief visits to the island; he neither spoke English nor did he have more than a vague familiarity with the terrain of the kingdom. Aquitaine was his home, and from infancy Eleanor had been instrumental in directing her heir’s eyes away from the island kingdom, the feudal prerogative of her eldest son, and toward her own provinces, where one day he would be master. Circumstances having overturned a lifetime of careful planning, she now saw that the situation must be remedied as quickly as possible. At this late date there was, obviously, little that she might do to instill in her son a belated affection for England, but she could do something to promote the island’s enthusiasm for the foreigner whom they called “Richard the Poitevin.”

  With a sagacity that recalls her introduction of Richard to her southern vassals in the late sixties, she abandoned London after a few days in favor of a tour of England, “moving her royal court from city to city and from castle to castle, just as she thought proper.” There is no doubt that the sight of the Eagle in her new incarnation helped to reassure the English and, to a great extent, dulled the memories of those who a few weeks earlier had been shaking their heads in alarm over the unnatural conduct of King Henry’s disobedient son. As Eleanor well knew, it would take more than a royal chevauchée to blot out fifteen years of family brawling and implant in her subjects’ minds the idea that a new reign was beginning. In a frank appeal for popularity, she sent messengers to every county in England ordering that all captives be liberated from prison because “she had learnt by experience that imprisonment is distasteful to mankind and that it is a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be liberated therefrom.” Opening the dungeons “for the good of King Henry’s soul,” surely a barely veiled sarcasm, she issued a general pardon to all those who had trespassed against Henry’s forest laws, who had been imprisoned “by the will of the king or his justiciar,” and to those who had been jailed for a half dozen other reasons, the principal condition of release being a promise to support the new government in preserving the peace. Within days, the smallest village in the realm teemed with liberated jailbirds singing the praises of the liberal Richard Plantagenet. Only William of Newburgh had an acid word to say about this: “At that time the gaols were crowded with criminals awaiting trial or punishment but through Richard’s clemency these pests came forth from prison, perhaps to become bolder thieves in the future.”

  But Eleanor’s largesse extended beyond the kingdom’s malefactors. Henry had been in the habit of stabling his horses in abbeys, the better to undertake his lightning dashes around the country, but a practice that caused no little inconvenience and expense to the chapters; Eleanor promptly relieved the clergy of this burden. She also made plans to introduce a new standard coinage that would be valid anywhere in England, as well as a series of uniform weights and measures for corn, liquids, and lengths of cloth. Roger of Wendover records that “she arranged matters in the kingdom according to her own pleasure and nobles were instructed to obey her in every respect.” In these summer days, the chronicler adds, was fulfilled the prophecy of Merlin, “The Eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third nesting.”

  In a few short weeks, so thoroughly did Eleanor prepare the ground that when Richard dropped anchor at Portsmouth on August 13, his previous image as a parricide was quite
forgotten in a tide of popular goodwill. In the midst of her journeying, Eleanor had not neglected preparations for his coronation. No doubt remembering those hectic days of December 1154 before her own hasty coronation, she determined to make Richard’s an occasion the English would never forget. It was significant that, on Eleanor’s advice, he was not crowned immediately. There was no need for haste; unlike every other king of England since the Norman Conquest, he had neither enemies nor rivals, and thanks to his mother’s proclamations, he had made a host of new friends. So complete was his security that the next two weeks were spent in a leisurely progress, marked at every stop by scenes of rejoicing and cheering. Briefly, Richard and Eleanor stopped at Salisbury; at Marlborough to witness the wedding of John to Isabelle of Gloucester; at Windsor, where they greeted Richard’s half brother, Geoffrey. On September 1, the royal party made a splendid entry into London, where, in Richard’s honor, the streets had been cleaned and spread with fresh rushes and the house fronts festooned with tapestries and blossoms. The crowning was set for Sunday, September 3, an unlucky day according to the calendar, but Eleanor could not be bothered with superstition. With her superb sense of pageantry, she had devised a ceremony not easily forgotten, and in fact, the coronation of Richard Plantagenet would establish the procedure, still in use today, for crowning a monarch of England. Through the nave of Westminster Abbey wound the royal procession: the taper bearers and censers, the abbots and bishops, the officials bearing Richard’s spurs, scepters, sword, bonnet, and royal vestments. And then came the tall figure of Richard himself, walking under a canopy of silk and and looking like a young god. At the high altar he took three formal oaths, swearing that he would honor the Church and its decrees, grant justice to his subjects, and keep the laws and customs of the kingdom. After he had removed his robes and was dressed in the royal vestments. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury anointed him with the sacred oils and then lifted the crown from the altar and placed it upon his head. With a golden scepter in each hand and the crown on his head, the new king was led to the throne, and the abbey was filled with the sound of the Te Deum. Richard, duke of Aquitaine, had become Richard I of England. Three days of festivities followed, each state banquet as decorous as it was lavish, and the guests “feasted so splendidly that the wine flowed along the pavement and walls of the palace.”