by Marion Meade
The man born to be a hammer to the king of the English had pounded doggedly but, in the end, impotently upon the shields of Henry Plantagenet and Richard Coeur de Lion, but time had fought on Philip’s side. Finally, there remained only the feckless John, and even though it was common knowledge that he followed his mother’s advice, the eagle-eyed grandam, half dead at Fontevrault, had not been heard from in some time. When John failed to answer his summons, Philip first declared forfeit all John’s lands except Normandy and England and then he fell upon eastern Normandy. Not for Philip Capet any bold conquistadorial sally down the valley of the Loire; instead, he attacked piecemeal, raiding border towns, snatching a county here, besieging a castle there. At Gournay, in July, he knighted Arthur in the presence of the French barons and received the boy’s homage not only for Brittany but for all the Continental lands inherited by John save Normandy, which Philip intended to keep for himself. Furthermore, he betrothed Arthur to his five-year-old daughter by Agnes of Meran and then endowed his prospective son-in-law with two hundred Frankish knights and instructions to take possession of his inheritance. The first target: Poitou.
Hearing of these events, Eleanor took violent exception to Philip’s disposition of her domains. At eighty, she could not deny that her end was drawing near, but duty, pride, and no doubt anger would not allow her to lie in her abbey bed while Louis Capet’s hated son dismembered the Plantagenet empire. She must have acknowledged the likelihood that someday Philip and Arthur would seize Anjou and Maine, but one humiliation she would not tolerate: She would not permit them to have Aquitaine while she possessed life enough to stop them. Accompanied by a small escort, she left the safety of Fontevrault toward the end of July and set out for Poitiers, where perhaps she believed that her presence alone might stiffen her vassals’ resistance to Arthur’s onslaught. We do not know the precise state of her health that summer; it is conceivable that during her convalescence she had regained some of her strength, but even so, it is not hard to imagine her weakened condition. For this reason, she was compelled to travel slowly and break the fifty-mile journey now and then. In the last week of July, she was at the castle of Mirebeau on the border of Anjou and Poitou.
During that same week, John was in the vicinity of Le Mans. Ever since his peace treaty with Philip two years earlier, English barons had taunted him with a new nickname, John “Softsword,” but at this stage of the crisis he was behaving with remarkable capability. In the hope of diverting those Bretons intending to join Arthur, he had sent part of his forces to harass eastern Brittany, and his Norman garrisons he left to fend off Philip’s attacks. He himself rode south with a hastily recruited army of mercenaries to protect Maine and Anjou, the vulnerable heart-land of the empire.
In the meantime, Arthur, flushed with confidence and “marching forth with a pompous noise,” had arrived in Tours with his force of borrowed French knights. While waiting there for the arrival of his Breton barons and making preparations for the assault on Poitou, he was joined by three of the Lusignans. Impatient and full of strategies of their own, the brothers disdained to wait for the Bretons and instead urged an immediate attack on Poitou: indeed, they proposed an even bolder plan. Intelligence had come to their ears that the old queen was stopping at the castle of Mirebeau.
For fifty years, the Lusignan family seems to have been obsessed with the idea of kidnaping Eleanor. Twice before they had made attempts, the most recent of which had worked out with unexpected success. In this situation, her worth as a hostage would be considerable, for it would enable them to wrest from John any concession they liked. The loss of his mother would rob the king of his most sagacious counselor; furthermore, as duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, it was in Eleanor’s power to make Philip’s declaration of forfeiture null and void in Aquitaine so long as she lived to assert her claims. While Arthur had no feelings of loyalty or affection for his grandmother, he hesitated on the grounds that he wished to wait for reinforcements from Brittany. But in the end, the impetuous Lusignans prevailed. It would be an easy matter to take Mirebeau: The queen’s escort was insignificant, the risks minimal, and her capture would bring the soft-sworded Plantagenet king to his knees. In the closing days of July, the boy duke of Brittany and his Frankish knights followed the Lusignans down the back roads toward Mirebeau.
Of all the places that Eleanor might have stopped to rest, Mirebeau was the least secure. A half century earlier it had been a formidable castle; Geoffrey Anjou had bequeathed it to his younger son, and when the young Geoffrey planned his uprising against Henry in 1155, he had added fortifications to make it impregnable. By the summer of 1202, however, the walled castle encircled by a walled town had become as invincible as a child’s sand castle. Not only did it totter on the brink of collapse, but it was not stocked to resist a siege.
Arthur’s arrival did not catch the queen unprepared. She, too, had her sources of information, and before the first thud of hoofbeats reached her ears, she had already sent a messenger riding hard toward Le Mans in search of her son. It is generally believed that this was an urgent plea for rescue, but since John was not known for speed or military prowess, it seems equally likely that she dispatched the messenger only as a means of informing the king of his enemies’ movements. In any case, she knew that she could not hold out long. Few details of the siege have been preserved, but it seems that Arthur coolly opened negotiations with his grandmother by demanding her surrender and offering a promise of release if she would confirm Philip Augustus’s arrangements for her inheritance. In no position to disdain parley, Eleanor pretended to bargain, but she took care to play for time by drawing out the negotiations as long as possible.
By Monday, July 31, Arthur’s army had taken possession of the town as well as the castle, forcing Eleanor to withdraw into the keep with a few soldiers. Only the portcullis stood between her and capture. That evening she could stare down upon the comings and goings of her besiegers. Having barricaded all the town gates except one, which they left open to receive supplies, the soldiers began to settle themselves for the night. It was a warm evening with a sky full of magnificent stars. With their quarry at their mercy, the men seemed to be in a casual, almost festive mood. Putting aside their armor, they made their beds in the streets and in the inner enclosure of the castle under the open sky, and they fell asleep knowing that in the morning they could storm the keep without losing a man.
While Mirebeau slumbered, John and his forces were approaching the outskirts of the town. Traveling by day and night in an eighty-mile forced march from Le Mans, he had covered the distance in less than forty-eight hours with a suddenness reminiscent of Henry’s astounding ability to pop up in unexpected places as if carried effortlessly by the wind. With John came William des Roches, the seneschal of Anjou, who offered to lead the attack on the understanding that John would not put to death Arthur or any of the rebels, that captives would not be removed from the county until a truce had been established, and that des Roches would have a chief say in Arthur’s future. John agreed. Dawn was breaking on Tuesday, August 1, as des Roches and his men crept up to the one open gate. When they rushed in with drawn swords, Hugh le Brun and his brothers were having an early breakfast of roast pigeons, but most of the besiegers were still snoring or were slumped half-dressed. By the time that the sun broke through the clouds, the whole of Arthur’s forces had been either slain or captured; not a man escaped. Exultant over his victory, John himself described the feat in a letter to his English barons:Know that by the grace of God we are safe and well and God’s grace has worked wonderfully with us, for on Tuesday before the feast of Saint Peter ad Vincula, when we were on the road to Chinon, we heard that our lady mother was closely besieged at Mirebeau and we hurried there as fast as we could. And there we captured our nephew Arthur, Geoffrey de Lusignan, Hugh le Brun, Andrew de Chauvigni, the viscount of Châtellerault, Raymond Thouars, Savary de Mauleon, Hugh Bauge, and all our other Poitevin enemies who were there, being upwards of two hundred knights,
and not one escaped. Praise God for our victory.
Undoubtedly it was an astounding achievement for in a few hours, John had succeeded in capturing the most important of his rebel enemies. Some said that his demon ancestry had carried him to Mirebeau so swiftly, others called it a miracle, and Eleanor, continuing safely on her journey, may have felt for the first time in thirty-five years that her youngest son might be a great king after all. In Normandy, where the king of the Franks was occupied with the siege of Arques, the news of John’s incredible exploit cast the Capetian into a fit of depression. Dismantling his siege engines, he hurried south to see if anything might be retrieved from the disaster, but he was too late. His dream of reviving Charlemagne’s empire had been shattered by the stupidity of the Lusignans: Arthur captured, his best knights in chains, his Poitevin allies dispersed, the incompetent Lackland in control, and all for the sake of capturing an eighty-year-old woman whom the world would soon forget. Venting his frustration by setting fire to Tours, Philip Augustus could do nothing ultimately but smolder, and “at length he retreated to Paris and remained inactive there for the rest of the year.”
Meanwhile, John was making a leisurely progress through Anjou and Normandy, parading his manacled prisoners as a warning to those considering sedition. The spectacle of the leading barons and knights of France, Brittany, and Poitou in chains was not witnessed by Eleanor, who had reached Poitiers, but the wretched sight would be remembered by others and detailed with sad astonishment by the chroniclers. “Having secured his prisoners in fetters and shackles and having placed them in cars, a new and unusual mode of conveyance, the king sent some of them to Normandy and some to England to be imprisoned in strong castles.” Hugh le Brun, securely fettered, was consigned to a special tower at Caen, while less important prisoners were shipped to Corfe Castle and other strongholds in England, where some died of starvation and a very few managed to escape. As for the prize captive, the duke of Brittany was placed in a dungeon at Falaise on August 10.
That year, John kept Christmas court at Caen, “feasting with his queen and lying in bed till dinner-time,” but the holiday was marked by a sense of uneasy triumph for Eleanor. In Poitiers, safe in her high tower above the Clain, she had genuine reason for optimism in that, for the moment at least, the Plantagenets held the trump cards in their struggle with Philip Augustus. If someone had told her that the triumph of Mirebeau would be the last great victory of an English king on French soil until the fourteenth century and that within the next two years even Normandy, the most loyal of the Plantagenet fiefs on the Continent, would virtually be lost, she might have laughed in derision. And then again she might not have. Even by Christmas of 1202 the ominous signs were there for those possessing the perception to read them. She was aware that John trod on extremely delicate ground with regard to the imprisonment of Arthur and the rebels, since these imprisonments had followed ruthlessly on John’s oath to William des Roches at Mirebeau that he would not take vengeance. Perhaps Eleanor herself had genuinely, if naively, expected John to keep his promise. But after des Roches and Amaury of Thouars had seen their relatives and friends tied to oxcarts on the road to Normandy, these barons and others had turned away from John in disgust and transferred their allegiance to the French king. By midautumn they had captured Angers, the city Eleanor had personally retaken in the weeks after Richard’s death, and soon the roads between Chinon and Poitiers became unsafe for travel. As Eleanor might have told John, victory in itself is meaningless if one lacks the intelligence to profit from it, but the closeness of her relations with her son at this period is unclear. With the rebels holding much of the territory between Poitiers and Chinon, communications were often poor. However, from rumor if nothing else she would have known of the pressure being brought to bear on the king for Arthur’s release, some of his vassals even offering their homage to Philip for the duration of Arthur’s imprisonment. In November, John had released the Lusignans, a foolish concession, because despite their pledges of loyalty, they immediately joined the rebel party.
Admittedly, the question of what to do with Arthur was a thorny one, and perhaps on Eleanor’s advice, John tried to make peace with his nephew. According to Roger of Wendover, he visited Falaise in January 1203 and ordered the boy brought to him. “The king addressed him kindly and promised him many honors, asking him to separate himself from the French king and to adhere to the side of his lord and uncle.” But the boy regarded John as he would a worm in a bowl of porridge.
Arthur ill-advisedly replied with indignation and threats, and demanded that the king give up to him his kingdom of England with all the territories which King Richard had possessed at his death. Since all these possessions belonged to him by hereditary right, he swore that unless King John quickly restored the aforesaid territory to him, he would never give him a moment’s peace for the rest of his life. The king was much troubled at hearing his words.
More than “much troubled,” John was infuriated at the youth’s audacity. After six months in the dungeons of Falaise, an experience sufficient to humble the most stiff-necked, the boy’s overweening pride remained intact, and his haughtiness seemed as strong as ever. But more than outraged, John grew panicky. Something about the interview frightened him and frightened him so badly that he at once began to consider drastic measures. Perhaps he was convinced that the boy seriously meant his threats and would truly remain a source of anxiety and potential uprising for the remainder of John’s days. Afterward, a chronicler said, John took counsel with certain advisers (which ones are unspecified) who urged him to have Arthur castrated and blinded so as to eliminate him as a rival. Orders for the mutilations were given, but the two men sent to carry them out lost their stomach for the ghastly operation upon hearing Arthur’s howls and finally his jailer, Hubert de Burgh, sent them away. After countermanding the king’s orders, de Burgh took it upon himself to announce that Arthur had died of natural causes; bells were rung at Falaise, and the boy’s clothing distributed to charity. This quickly proved to be a miscalculation on de Burgh’s part, because instead of removing the wind from the Bretons’ sails as he had hoped, the announcement only roused Arthur’s partisans to new heights of hysteria, in which they swore undying vengeance on John. At this point, de Burgh hastily amended his report and swore that Arthur was still alive; no one, however, believed him.
In February or March, John “gave orders that Arthur should be sent to Rouen to be imprisoned in the new tower there and kept closely guarded.” And then, the chronicler added abruptly, “the said Arthur disappeared.”
The disappearance of Arthur of Brittany remained the great unsolved mystery of the thirteenth century. It is true that after the gates of Rouen clanged shut behind him, he was never seen again, but ugly rumors had circulated while he was still alive at Falaise. Sinister stories were told in Paris, in Brittany, even at the queen’s own court in Poitiers, to the effect that the king of England had murdered his own nephew. The fact is that no one, probably not even Eleanor, knew for certain what had happened to Arthur. The chroniclers could only report rumors: “Opinion about the death of Arthur gained ground by which it seemed that John was suspected by all of having slain him with his own hand; for which reason many turned their affections from the king and entertained the deepest enmity against him.” One of the few people in a position to know what actually happened was William de Braose, the man who had captured Arthur at Mirebeau and later the commander of the new fortress at Rouen, where Arthur was imprisoned after he left Falaise. One of John’s cronies, de Braose remained high in the king’s favor until about 1210, when he dropped so suddenly that he was forced to take refuge at the French court. Long after people had stopped guessing about Arthur’s whereabouts, monks at the Cistercian abbey of Margam in Wales set down in their annals a detailed account of the duke’s death. Since the de Braoses were patrons of the abbey, it has been concluded that the monks received their information from de Braose himself or some member of his family. The chronicler describe
d the following events as taking place on April 3, 1203:After King John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison for some time in the castle of Rouen, after dinner on the Thursday before Easter, when he was drunk and possessed of the devil, he slew him with his own hand and, tying a heavy stone to the body, cast it into the Seine. It was brought up by the nets of a fisherman and, dragged to the bank, was identified and secretly buried, for fear of the tyrant, in Notre Dame des Pres, a priory of Bec.
Toward the end of April 1203, Eleanor and her barons received a messenger bearing a letter from John, written at Falaise on April 16 and witnessed by William de Braose. “We send to you brother John of Valerant, who has seen what is going forward with us and who will be able to appraise you of our situation. Put faith in him respecting those things whereof he will inform you. God be thanked, things are going better for us than this man is able to tell you.” It has been suggested that this cryptic last line was John’s way of informing his mother that the Plantagenets had nothing more to fear from the duke of Brittany. If this was truly so and Eleanor was able to read between the lines of her son’s letter, she must have realized that Plantagenet rule in France had become no more substantial than a guttering candle.