by Marion Meade
Eleanor had done her best to personally inaugurate her son’s reign with memorable splendor, but despite her exertions to ingratiate her son with his subjects, she could not disguise the fact that Richard regarded the island as little more than a milk cow for the sustenance of his most important concern, the Crusade to rescue Jerusalem. His dilemma was clear. He had committed himself to a military expedition that would require enormous sums of money; at the same time, the royal treasury at Winchester, which had been quickly canvassed the moment he had arrived, proved to be virtually empty, and after the Saladin tithe that Henry had levied before his death, the pockets of the new king’s subjects were equally empty. Unfortunately. Henry’s levy for the Crusade had already been handed over to the Templars. Now. perhaps to Eleanor’s astonishment, her son demonstrated an ingenious talent for extracting money where none seemingly existed. Two days after the coronation feasts had ended, he put up for sale everything that he owned—castles, towns, manors, lordships, public offices, favors of all kinds. Every sheriff in England found himself removed from office until such time as he could redeem his position with hard cash. William Longchamp, one of Richard’s favorite attendants, paid three thousand pounds for the office of chancellor. Cities discovered that they might obtain new and more liberal charters in return for sizable payments. Monasteries whose privileges were abruptly revoked were able to buy them back for a consideration. When Abbot Samson of Bury Saint Edmunds offered five hundred marks, the assessed value, for the royal manor of Mildenhall, Richard had the temerity to reply, “My Lord Abbot, the amount you offer is absurd. Either you shall give me a thousand marks or you shall not have the manor.” The chronicler goes on to note that Samson also paid Eleanor her queen’s gold in the form of a golden cup worth one hundred marks, but that she returned the cup “on behalf of the soul of her Lord King Henry.” Eleanor’s attempts to ameliorate the effects of the great national auction did not prevent the entire business from degenerating into a most undignified and jocular spectacle. Suddenly nearly everything in the kingdom could be had, if the price was right, and even those who had taken Crusader’s vows were able to find release. The king, people said, was most obliging in relieving all those whose money had been a burden, and Richard himself joked, “I would sell London itself if I could find a buyer.”
Once the money began flowing in at a reassuring rate, Richard departed for the Continent; Eleanor, however, remained behind in a state of uneasiness. The popularity she had so energetically drummed up for him was already wearing thin as many dismayed subjects, reviewing objectively the new king’s actions during the first four months of his reign, declared that he must be unbalanced. Contrary to their expectation that he would be a more liberal sovereign than his father, he had multiplied their taxes until the kingdom had been squeezed dry, and he had recklessly overturned Henry’s government by firing experienced officials and giving their jobs to the highest bidders. No amount of public relations on Eleanor’s part could stifle these denunciations, nor could she scotch the persistent rumor that Richard never intended to return. How did it happen that a king would sell his income-producing property? It was said that he planned to turn over the kingdom to John and return to Aquitaine. It was said that he would mount the throne of Jerusalem. And it was said that he suffered from some secret malady and would never live through the Crusade. His arrangements for the administration of England during his absence struck many as dubious, and even Eleanor, who could find little fault with her son, would have recognized that he had inherited little of her political acumen and none of Henry’s knack for judging people’s characters. As regents, he had appointed two fairly sober and experienced men: William de Mandeville, a trusted friend of his father’s; and Bishop Hugh of Durham, a kinsman of the royal house and a man long experienced in politics, who nevertheless had been compelled to buy his appointment for ten thousand pounds. Unfortunately, de Mandeville died that autumn, and in his place Richard had substituted his chancellor, William Longchamp, a Norman making his first visit to England. Although Gerald of Wales’s description makes Longchamp seem like a repulsive, misshapen dwarf, no amount of tact could disguise his physical infirmities. He was short, lame, and unprepossessing; he spoke no English and, further, had an aversion to the country. On the positive side, he was unscrupulous in defending his master’s interests. Between the two regents, Richard left his mother as a balance wheel. Although some chroniclers and even historians of later periods have claimed that Eleanor was regent, this does not seem to have been the case. The most that can be said is that even though Richard gave her no formal appointment, he did regard her as an unofficial super-regent with full power to step in whenever circumstances warranted. Totally preoccupied with preparations for the Crusade, he must have felt that his mother, the most experienced sovereign in Europe, would guard his realm if the appointed officials failed in their duties.
In December, Richard kept his Christmas court in reasonable state at Bures in Normandy, but the minstrels, in whom he normally reveled, were missing. The talk was of ships and arbalests and the latest in military gadgetry. Having cut his teeth on Eleanor’s stories of the disastrous Second Crusade, he was determined to avoid the errors of Louis Capet, whom he had come to regard as an idiot. He would make no such stupid mistake as bringing his army overland through enemy territory, planning instead to travel to the Holy Land by sea. Already along the coast of England, the great fleet was being readied, one hundred ships and fourteen busses, “vessels of vast use, wonderful speed, and great strength. The lead ship had three rudders, thirteen anchors, thirty oars, two sails and triple ropes of every kind; moveover it had everything that a ship can want.” On board would be loaded the wealth of England translated into gold and silver, arms of all sorts, supplies of bacon, cheese, wine, flour, pepper, biscuits, wax, spiced meats, and syrups. No pilgrims or Amazons, no camp followers or troubadours, found their way into the ranks of Richard’s army. The Third Crusade, a purely military expedition, would be governed by strict rules of conduct. “Whoever shall kill a man on ship-board,” the king wrote, “shall be bound to the dead man and thrown into the sea.... If anyone shall be convicted of having drawn a knife, he shall lose his hand.... If any man shall curse, swear, or revile his fellows, he shall pay an ounce of silver for each offence.”
In February 1190, Eleanor left behind the fog and darkness of the English winter and crossed to the Continent as a free woman for the first time in seventeen years. Her memory, stretching back nearly seven decades, now enabled her to sort the chaff from the wheat. The crusading fervor that had enveloped Europe in a white heat of religious emotion lacked the power to rouse her, and with a cynicism reminiscent of her late husband’s, she saw the rescue of the Holy Land as a distraction from the important business of the Plantagenets. Let those who had nothing better to do fritter away their energies in Outremer; the real concern, as she saw it, was not Saladin but the preservation of the house of Plantagenet and especially the rock on which it had been built, England. In those months of early 1190, she detected a host of dangers threatening her house, both within and without. Perhaps at her insistence, a family council was held at Nonancourt in March to clarify the king’s arrangements for England and to weatherproof the kingdom during his absence. Present at the meeting were her youngest son and Henry’s bastard, Geoffrey, now archbishop of York, both of whom Richard required to take an oath that they would stay out of England for three years. His objective was fairly clear: to prevent two potential troublemakers from encroaching upon his royal prerogatives and to leave the regents a free hand in conducting the affairs of the kingdom. Eleanor did not, evidently, wholly agree with this policy, because soon afterward, she prevailed upon Richard to allow John’s return, no doubt believing this the lesser of two evils.
To judge from the charters she signed that spring and early summer, the queen resided in Anjou and Normandy. During this time, Richard made a trip to Aquitaine. but Eleanor, curiously, did not accompany him, nor did she visit her ho
meland on her own, the betrayals of 1173 possibly having left an unconscious residue of distaste for the land of her forebears. Despite her cynicism for the Crusade, she must have felt a pride in her warrior son that made up for all the years of imprisonment and struggle on his behalf. Already Richard Plantagenet was being extolled as the hero of the century, a prince to whom no amount of praise could do adequate justice. His contemporaries, unable to compare him to any great personage of their own time, looked to the pantheon of heroes from the past; he-had, they vowed, the valor of Alexander and Roland, the eloquence of Nestor, the prudence of Ulysses. “But why need we expend labour extolling so great a man? He needs no superfluous commendation. He was superior to all others.”
The Third Crusade was not, of course, a project of Richard alone—the leadership was to be shared with Philip Augustus—but even before it departed, the Capetian had been shoved into the background. When the crusading host convened at Vézelay in the first days of July, it was Richard to whom the knights flocked for information and counsel, it was Richard who looked like a god in his mantle spangled with silver crescents and his cap of scarlet and gold, his Spanish stallion equipped with a gorgeous inlaid saddle and a bridle set with precious stones. Already people called him a lion, and perhaps on that field in Burgundy many remembered Bertran de Born’s waspish sirventès, “Tell Sir Richard from me that he is a lion and King Philip seems to me a lamb.”
Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that by the time the Crusade set off on July 4—Richard bound for Marseille to meet his fleet, Philip heading over the Alps to Genoa—the king of the Franks had fallen into a bad humor. In recent months, he had grown increasingly hostile to Richard, a phenomenon that so puzzled their contemporaries that some put it down to the work of the devil. Bedfellows only a year earlier, they now sniped and snarled, their great affection failing to survive Henry’s death. To Richard’s dismay, Philip had insisted upon renewing his tiresome harangues about his half sister Alais. Now that Henry was dead, there was, of course, no reason for delay, and yet Richard seemed no more eager for the wedding than his father had been. A few weeks before departure, Philip had issued an ultimatum: Either Richard must marry Alais immediately or return her to her kin, along with her dower. Richard, however, proved as slippery as Henry in the matter of Alais. Since women were forbidden to join the Crusade, he stalled Philip by promising that the marriage would take place on his return from the Holy Land. And with this, Philip had to be content.
Not without cause did Eleanor despise Alais Capet. When Louis’s nine-year-old orphaned daughter had arrived at Poitiers in 1169, Eleanor had treated her as one of her own children, even going out of her way to love the child and polish her as a fit partner for her special son. Alais had been thirteen when Henry brought her, along with Eleanor and his other captives, to England in the summer of 1174, and somehow, soon after, he had seduced the girl. Eleanor did not know how that unnatural relationship started, but it affected her more deeply than Rosamond Clifford or any of Henry’s other women. Even though her husband had made his court a brothel after she had left him, Eleanor could excuse the other women who shared his bed. Lowborn, they could be charitably forgiven for responding to the overtures of a mighty king. But apparently she could not excuse a royal princess. In her eyes, Alais must have willed the affair, and for that, Eleanor could never forgive her. She knew, too, that Alais had borne Henry a child, although it did not survive. For years, Alais must have eaten at her like a cankerworm, because one of her first acts after Henry’s death had been to order her imprisonment. That a woman who had opened the dungeons of England because she knew the miseries of confinement firsthand would have decreed that selfsame fate for Alais Capet is an excellent measure of the intensity of her feelings.
The cries of Philip Augustus for Richard’s marriage to Alais affected the queen as little as the birds chirping in the trees. As she knew and as she had made Richard understand, the shopworn Alais Capet was no longer marriageable, at least not to the king of England. Eleanor was not above advising Richard to lie when it was necessary, and so Philip had been pacified with promises of Alais’s marriage at the conclusion of the Crusade. In the meantime, Eleanor determined to take the matter into her own hands. Her greatest anxiety since Henry’s death was the question of the succession. Of the five sons she had borne, only two remained, lion-hearted Richard and light-minded John, and the insecurity resulting from that unalterable fact must have been overwhelming. At the age of thirty-two, Richard still had not wed; he had no direct heirs, and if he should perish in the Holy Land, what would become of the Plantagenet empire?
There were three possible aspirants to the crown, none of them acceptable to Eleanor: her grandson Arthur, a child born posthumously to Geoffrey, was only three years old, but both the boy and his mother, Constance, were loathed by the Plantagenets. The second possibility was Henry’s illegitimate son, Geoffrey. Eleanor distrusted him, for despite his bastardy, she saw him as a possible pretender, and perhaps she had taken undue alarm over a report that he had placed a golden bowl on his head and called out in jest: “Is not this skull fit to wear a crown?” In order to discourage Geoffrey from any further thoughts in this direction, Eleanor reluctantly considered Henry’s deathbed wish that his son become archbishop of York. Geoffrey, hotheaded and quarrelsome, was noted for neither learning nor piety and, as far as Eleanor was concerned, totally unqualified for the position of archbishop. Nevertheless, she decided to support his cause, because the taking of holy orders would render him ineligible for further mischief. The third candidate for the throne was her youngest son, a strange and self-centered boy in whom she had no confidence whatsoever. In fact, the idea of John on the throne of England was a possibility not to be contemplated without crying aloud. In view of these distressing alternatives, Eleanor determined that Richard must marry quickly and produce heirs of his own. Quite apart from her wish to secure the succession, there was another special reason for her great concern over Richard’s marriage. Although he had always been close to her and even though he had been reared in a feminine court where women were to be respected, he did not like the female sex. Not only was he averse to marrying Alais because she had been his father’s mistress, he objected to marrying any woman. It would be interesting to know how this knowledge initially affected Eleanor, but surely it must have caused her some pain. For good or ill, she had molded him into a beautiful, glorious warrior, the Coeur de Lion, whose name would still be synonymous with valor eight centuries later. The only flaw in her planning was that her son was a homosexual.
- Despite the delicate nature of the subject, the question of Richard’s homosexuality seems to rest in the area of certainty rather than of probability. While contemporary historians were unwilling to discuss the matter at any length, they made repeated innuendoes about his unnatural appetites while at the same time making the nature of their charges abundantly clear. Not only was it backstairs gossip in every court in Europe, but Richard himself confessed to homosexual affairs on two occasions. Certainly, Philip Augustus, who may have been one of his partners, understood that Richard felt no inclination to marry Alais or any other woman. Whatever the dismay or grief Eleanor may have felt about this matter, in the end she came to view it as an irrelevancy. Richard’s unconventional sexual habits did not negate his primary duty as king: to marry and sire a male heir. She knew that he slept with women occasionally, because he had an illegitimate child from a woman of Cognac, a son then about five years old who had been named Philip in honor of his closest friend.
In those months between Henry’s death and the departure of the Crusade, Eleanor brought Richard to terms with the necessity of marrying and marrying quickly. Scanning the royal houses of Europe for a possible bride, one who would not be disqualified by consanguinity, Eleanor was careful to take Richard’s preferences into consideration. It seemed that some years earlier he had briefly made the acquaintance of the daughter of King Sancho of Navarre. While attending a tournament at Pa
mplona in the company of the king’s son, one of his favorite jousting companions, Richard had even addressed some passionate verse to the Princess Berengaria. This was enough for Eleanor. Barely had the Crusade left Vézelay than she stored Alais Capet, securely guarded, in Rouen and began a chevauchée into the deep south, traveling either to Bordeaux or, according to some accounts,. as far as Navarre to fetch the princess. On meeting Berengaria, the queen must have realized that this was not a woman to reverse Richard’s history of sexual deviation. There was no fault to be found with her; she was attractive enough, and even though the chroniclers called her “more learned than beautiful,” they also described her as “a prudent maid, a gentle lady, virtuous and fair, neither false nor double-tongued.” But Berengaria, for all her admirable virtues, lacked spirit. Unlike Eleanor, she was a passive female who would allow herself to be buffeted by the winds of circumstance and never raise a finger in her own behalf. No doubt overawed at the prospect of becoming Coeur de Lion’s queen, she delivered herself into Eleanor’s hands like a lamb being carried to slaughter.