by Marion Meade
Seven weeks later, on March 12, the king’s party landed at Sandwich and proceeded directly to Canterbury, where they gave thanks at the tomb of Saint Thomas. By the time they reached London, the city had been decorated, the bells were clanging furiously, and the Londoners ready to give a rapturous welcome to their hero and champion. Her eldest son “hailed with joy upon the Strand,” Eleanor looked in vain for the remaining male member of her family, but the youngest Plantagenet was nowhere to be found. Once Richard’s release had been confirmed, he had fled to Paris upon Philip Augustus’s warning that “beware, the devil is loose.” Despite a certain anxiety about her son’s whereabouts, the next six weeks were to be ones of great happiness for Eleanor. It was spring in England, the air opaque and moist, the budding earth exhaling aromas of ineffable sweetness. With Richard, she made a relaxed progress to Nottingham, to the forests of Sherwood “which the king had never seen before and which pleased him greatly,” to Northampton, where they celebrated Easter, and finally to Winchester, where Richard was crowned a second time. Despite the holiday atmosphere, Richard was impatient to sail for Normandy. On April 25, he and Eleanor went to Portsmouth, but their crossing was delayed by bad weather for more than three weeks. Not until May 12 were they able to reach Barfleur, where the Normans greeted Richard with the same enthusiasm as had the English. Their progress took them to Caen, Bayeux, and around mid-May, to the city of Lisieux, where they spent a few days in the home of John of Alençon, a trusted friend and the city’s archdeacon. It was here that the junior Plantagenet, fearful and trembling, appeared one evening at dinnertime asking to see his mother. It is clear from the reception John received that Eleanor had already discussed him with the king. Neither of them took seriously the boy’s antics; he was, after all, their kin. If he had played the fool, they would not reproach him; rather they would deal later with those who had led him astray. The important matter was to bring him back into the family and convince him that his future interests lay with them rather than with Philip Capet.
When John was brought into the king’s room, he threw himself at Richard’s feet and let loose with a flood of tears. But Richard pulled him up and kissed him. “Think no more of it, John,” he said gently. “You are but a child and were left to evil counselors. Your advisers shall pay for this. Now come and have something to eat.” He ordered that a fresh salmon, which had just been brought in as a gift, should be cooked for his brother.
According to the chronicles, “the king and John became reconciled through the mediation of Queen Eleanor, their mother.” In the circumstances, it seemed the safest course as well as the wisest. There was no doubt in Eleanor’s mind that the boy, now twenty-eight, could not be held responsible for his actions, that he was, as Richard of Devizes termed him, “light-minded.” But at that moment, he was the last of the Plantagenets. With luck, Richard might reign another twenty-five years or more. Who was to say that he would not produce an heir of his own? Thus the queen must have reasoned in the spring of 1194 when her son, after so many adversities, had come home to her.
In her seventh decade, Eleanor grew impatient with wars and politics. It was as if Richard’s capture and ransom had drained her emotionally, and now she sought surcease from the confusions of courts and councils. She had preserved his kingdom from wolves, she had expended her dwindling energies to rescue him from his enemies, she had served her people as peacemaker. If she did not go quite as far as Henry when he had said, “Now let the rest go as it will, I care no more,” at least she was beginning to remember her age. In 1194, she put between herself and a demanding world the plain high walls of Fontevrault, not as the abbess that Henry had attempted to make of her twenty years earlier but as a royal guest accompanied by a modest household. There on the border of Poitou and Anjou, where the river Vienne wound its silvery path through valley and forest, she made herself comfortable among the devout and learned sisters. In addition to the convent, Fontevrault included a residence for penitent harlots, a monastery for monks and lay brothers, a hospital for lepers, and an old-age home for monks and nuns. There was a vast complex of halls and refectories connected by cloisters and an elaborate octagonal kitchen with five fireplaces and twenty chimneys. For a woman who had always believed in the superiority of her own sex, Fontevrault, where the monks and nuns were ruled by a woman, provided a refuge much to Eleanor’s taste. Then, too, she must have felt as though she had come home to rest among familiar surroundings—her grandmother Philippa was buried there, and in the nun’s choir of the domed abbey church slept Henry Plantagenet, his hands calmly folded upon his breast.
Protected against life’s burdens and annoyances, Eleanor could pick and choose her activities just as she liked, and from now on her name figures rarely in the official records. We know that on one occasion she supported the archbishop of Rouen in requesting that the king remit part of a fine due from Reading Abbey and that on another she aided the abbot of Bourgueil, who was having difficulty paying a local wine tax. Also during these years, she was instrumental in arranging for the marriage of her widowed daughter, Joanna, to Raymond VI of Toulouse, a settlement that no doubt gave her wry satisfaction after two husbands had failed to reclaim her inheritance.
The years passed in comparative quiet, although those interminable struggles between the Plantagenets and the Capets continued. Alais Capet, finally returned to her kin at the age of thirty-five, had been promptly married to one of Philip’s vassals, Guillaume de Ponthieu, and stepped forever from the glare of history. In 1196, Richard had been compelled to return the Vexin, a disaster that boded ill as far as Eleanor was concerned, for Normandy now lay open to possible incursions by Philip. But far more worrisome than the loss of the Vexin was Richard’s lack of an heir. Although he had married to please her, he had done nothing more. He had ignored Berengaria at Messina, he had married her at Cyprus and ridden off within hours of the wedding, and during the war in Palestine, he had treated her like a leper who must keep its distance. Berengaria, queen of England, had not yet laid eyes on her kingdom, and the marriage that Eleanor had been so anxious to arrange remained a mockery, if in fact it had ever been consummated. Since Richard and Berengaria had parted in the Holy Land, she had lived in seclusion, virtually a widow, on her dower lands in Maine, while the king satisfied his sexual needs with men. In 1195, a hermit visiting the king took the occasion to warn of God’s vengeance if he persisted in the sin of Sodom, a sermon that Richard did not accept kindly. Soon afterward, however, he fell seriously ill and suddenly recalled the hermit’s warning. Calling his confessors, he spilled out the details of his misdeeds and received absolution; Berengaria was summoned to join him, but their reconciliation did not result in a pregnancy.
Despite the Treaty of Louviers, which had restored the Norman Vexin to Philip, neither he nor Richard regarded the agreement as definitive, and desultory warfare continued on their frontiers. In the summer of 1196, Richard began to construct a fortress that he hoped would act as a deterrent to any future moves that Philip might be considering in the direction of Normandy. At Les Andelys, on the right bank of the Seine, stood a mighty rock that offered a panoramic view of the entire river valley, and on this promontory Richard laid out an imposing stronghold that he christened Château Gaillard. His Saucy Castle, with its impregnable walls and powerful bastions, took three years to build, and when it had been completed, Richard, who had personally supervised its construction, could barely contain his pleasure. It was, he crowed, his daughter. From its lofty eminence he could look down in derision upon the king of the Franks and his schemes for the conquest of Normandy. When finally Philip got his first glimpse of the Saucy Castle, he could only bluster, “If its walls were made of solid iron, yet would I take them!”
When his defiant boast was relayed to Richard, he countered with his own oath. “By God’s throat, if its walls were made of butter, yet would I hold them securely against Philip and all his forces!” And as if to prove his patience with the Franks exhausted, he proceeded to
drive Philip out of the Vexin with such ferocity that Dieu-Donné was nearly drowned in the hasty retreat.
By the spring of 1199, Richard had turned his attention to other matters, one of them being the condition of his treasury. The construction of Chateau Gaillard had, unfortunately, helped to wipe out his resources. In March, his mind on the troublesome subject of money, he heard of an incident that immediately piqued his interest in that it seemed to offer the possibility of quick profit. A peasant plowing in a field on the outskirts of Chalus in the Limousin had accidentally unearthed what was claimed to be a treasure trove. The precious object was, the report said, a set of gold and silver figurines representing a king seated around a table with his family, perhaps some buried relic from Roman times. Viscount Aymar of Limoges, quick to claim the booty, failed to reckon with Richard’s interest, and when the king claimed his right, as overlord, to all buried treasures in his domains, Aymar apparently sent only a portion of the find. Richard’s response was to gather his mercenaries and hie himself to the Limousin. The castle of Chalus was but a puny fortress, virtually unarmed and surely no match for the great Coeur de Lion. Sappers were set to work on the walls.
After supper in the early evening of March 25, Richard went for a stroll around the walls to check on the sappers’ progress. Arrows flew sporadically from the castle’s garrison, but Richard, careless of his own safety, paid little attention. Perhaps he was amused when his men pointed out a fellow standing on the walls with a crossbow in one hand and a frying pan in the other. All day he had been fending off missiles by using his frying pan as a shield, and now, when he deliberately aimed an arrow at the king, Richard greeted the bowman with a shout of applause. Suddenly, however, another arrow whistled through the dusk and, unerring, came to rest in the king’s left shoulder near the neck. Without uttering a cry, Richard mounted his horse and rode back to camp as if nothing had happened. In the privacy of his tent, he tried to pull out the arrow but only succeeded in breaking off the shaft. The iron barb remained imbedded in the rolls of fat on his shoulder. A surgeon of sorts was summoned—Hovedon called him a “butcher” who “carelessly mangled the king’s arm”—and by lantern light finally managed to extract the arrow. Even though lotions and unguents were applied and the wound bandaged, it immediately became inflamed and began to swell. While Richard’s army kept up its assault on Châlus, his wound grew steadily worse, and when gangrene set in and he was forced to acknowledge the fact that he would not survive, he sent for his mother.
With an old friend, Abbot Luke of Torpenay, and a small escort, Eleanor set out for Limoges, over a hundred miles from Fontevrault. Even though she traveled day and night, her son was beyond anyone’s help by the time of her arrival. There remained only the disposition of his possessions. He bequeathed to John his lands on the Continent and his kingdom of England, the island for which he cared so little that in a reign of ten years he had spent only six months there, and to his nephew Otto, the son of his sister Matilda, he left his jewels. He further willed his heart to be buried at Rouen and his body at Fontevrault at the feet of his father. To Aquitaine, for their perfidy, he bequeathed his entrails, and to England, the land that would worship him as a national hero and fill their squares with statues, he left nothing. His affairs in order, he sent for the crossbowman who had wounded him. He proved to be little more than a lad.
“What evil have I done to you that you have slain me?” asked Richard.
“Because,” replied the boy, “you slew my father and my two brothers and you would have killed me. Take on me any revenge that you think fit for I will readily endure the greatest torments you can devise now that you, who have brought such evils on the world, are about to die.”
“I forgive you my death,” Richard answered, but the boy continued to stand there in scowling disbelief. “Live on,” Richard assured him, “and by my bounty behold the light of day.” He ordered the youth, variously called Bertran de Gurdun, John Sabroz, and Peter Basili by the chroniclers, who did not know his real name, to be released and sent away with a gift of one hundred shillings.
On Tuesday, April 6, “as the day was closing, he ended his earthly day” in Eleanor’s arms. Her son was forty-one and childless except for his bastard son, Philip. For his greed over a few gold figurines “the lion by the ant was slain,” and even his last act of chivalry came to nothing, because Mercadier, his mercenary chief, seized the boy with the frying pan and, once the king was dead, had him flayed alive.
One son remained.
The Last Battle
On Palm Sunday, Eleanor laid to rest her dearest son in the abbey church of Fontevrault, but circumstances permitted few moments of solitude in which to embrace her inexpressible sorrow. In those dark, confused hours following Richard’s death at Châlus, she had been torn not simply by grief but by a sense of impending doom, and yet, she refused to stand by helplessly. Messengers had been secretly dispatched to publish the tragic news to those who must know: John, who was, ironically, visiting her grandson Arthur in Brittany; Berengaria; William Marshal; the Abbess Matilda of Fontevrault; and a few others. To the rest of the world, she announced nothing, and it was not until the dead king’s cortege began to make its long, slow journey through the Limousin that men and women came out of their halls and huts and markets to huddle in silent amazement by the side of the road. Coeur de Lion was dead, but who among them could hail long life to his successor? Indeed, it was a matter of uncertainty who would be the next king.
The fact that on his deathbed Richard had designated John as his heir was influential but, as Eleanor understood, not at all decisive. The confusion about the rules of hereditary succession that had so troubled Henry that he had made an archbishop of his chancellor and had crowned his eldest son with illusions of grandeur now came to rest resoundingly around the queen’s head. She was all too familiar with the debate circulating among contemporary jurists as to whether John Plantagenet or Arthur of Brittany took precedence. Ranulph de Glanville, Henry’s justiciar, had expressed doubt whether a king’s younger brother or the son of a dead brother had a better claim to the inheritance and, after presenting arguments on both sides, he had ended by favoring the nephew; on the other hand, a Norman legist had decided that “the younger son is the nearer heir to the father’s inheritance than the child of the elder brother who had died before the father.” Although there is no way of knowing Eleanor’s private views about this question, it is reasonable to assume that she felt much the same as William Marshal. On the evening of April 10, the news of Richard’s death reached Marshal at his lodgings near Rouen just as he was going to bed. Dressing hurriedly, he hastened to the residence of Archbishop Hubert Walter of Canterbury, who was staying nearby. Apart from their grief and consternation, what most troubled the two men was the future.
“My lord,” said Marshal, “we must lose no time in choosing someone to be king.”
“In my opinion,” declared the archbishop, “Arthur should rightfully be the king.”
Marshal disagreed. “I think that would be bad. Arthur is counseled by traitors and he is haughty and proud. If we put him at our head, we shall suffer for it because he hates the English.”
“Marshal,” asked the archbishop quietly, “is this really your desire?”
“Yea, my lord, for unquestionably a son has a nearer claim to his father’s land than a grandson. It is only just that John should have the crown.”
“So be it then,” said Hubert Walter, “but mark my words, Marshal, you will regret this more than any decision you have ever made.”
Marshal had no illusions about John Lackland, whom he had known for thirty years. “Perhaps you are right,” he answered, “but I still believe it best.”
For Eleanor, as for William Marshal, the most important question was not which of Richard’s possible heirs had the better legal claim to the throne—it was not even which of the two would make the most satisfactory sovereign—but which would make the least unsatisfactory king. In the end, it was a m
atter of choosing between evils, and of the two, she was obliged to select John, a choice she did not make on the basis of kinship nor of his character nor of any personal feelings of affection. She knew John—by this time everyone knew John—and contemporary historians had already rendered their evaluation. “Hostis naturae Johannes, ” wrote William of Newburgh, “nature’s enemy, John.”
We do not know how well Eleanor knew Arthur of Brittany or, for that matter, whether she had ever met him. What the twelve-year-old boy might someday become was impossible to say, but still she knew enough about him to understand that he must not be permitted the throne. His very name was ominously significant. Arthur had been born to Constance of Brittany on March 29, 1187, eight months after Geoffrey’s death in Paris. Henry had wanted the infant to be named after himself and his grandfather, but Constance had defiantly refused; instead, as a badge of Breton independence and hostility toward the Plantagenets, she had named the child Arthur after the legendary king who the Bretons, claimed had once ruled their land and who, the prophets said, would return. From the time of Henry’s death, Constance had more or less governed Brittany in her son’s name and trained him to insubordination against Plantagenet rule, but more alarming to Eleanor, Arthur had been taken into custody by Philip Augustus in 1196 and raised in Paris with Philip’s own son, Louis. To confer the Plantagenet throne on Arthur would be to lay the empire at the feet of the king of the Franks. It was the consciousness of this fact that had caused Richard to abandon any momentary thoughts of designating Arthur as his heir and that now made Eleanor, her eyes wide open to John’s faults, fight for his succession to the throne.