Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  Richard then left Cyprus (which he later sold to the Knights Templars), and reached Acre with his fleet on 8 June 1191. The crusaders besieging the great Palestinian seaport were saved from a disaster in the nick of time.

  13 The Regent

  ‘Eleanor, by the wrath of God, queen of the English.’

  Eleanor’s letter to pope Celestine III

  ‘And who could be so savage or so cruel that this woman could not bend him to her wishes?’

  Richard of Devizes on queen Eleanor

  The next years show Eleanor at her most statesman-like. She had to defend Richard’s possessions from the ruthless greed of his brother John and also against Philip of France, both of whom were determined to take full advantage of the king’s absence, which proved unexpectedly long. But, in compensation, the queen mother possessed all the power she could desire, even if she was to know little peace.

  Count John — so called from his county of Mortain in Normandy — knew very well that Arthur of Brittany was his brother’s heir presumptive. He was therefore anxious to establish as strong a claim to the succession as possible, either to part of the Angevin empire or to the whole. Moreover he soon convinced himself that Richard would never return from the east, and he hoped to convince the people of England as well. Richard of Devizes informs us that the count travelled throughout the realm, ‘making himself known, as Richard had never made himself’, to people of all classes, installed his own garrisons in the royal castles, and circulated a rumour that Richard would never come back and that John was his heir.

  The stupidity of the chancellor and senior justiciar, William Longchamp, provided just the sort of troubled waters that John wanted. Not only was William repellently arrogant but, intoxicated by his elevation, he did not bother to court popularity; the chroniclers noted grimly his favourite saying, that the fate he dreaded most was to turn into an Englishman, and recorded how his unwilling subjects mocked at his puny stature, ‘snarling’ apelike face, hump back and lameness, and were constantly harping on the fact that his grandfather had been a serf. In addition it was widely believed that he was a pervert. His excessively splendid household and his lavish gifts of manors and offices, rich wardships and heiresses, to his relations particularly irritated the magnates. William had every intention of obeying Richard’s orders to the letter, but he was without any political sense whatsoever.

  When Geoffrey Plantagenet, armed with the papal confirmation given to him by Eleanor, tried to travel to England to claim his archbishopric of York, the chancellor gave orders that no port should allow him to land. When Geoffrey did land at Dover, in September 1191, he suffered the indignity of being arrested by William’s sister Richeut, who was the castellan’s wife. He tried to take sanctuary in a local Benedictine priory, but was pulled out by the legs and dragged through the mud to the castle, where he was thrown into a dungeon. To add insult to injury William confiscated Geoffrey’s horses and had them brought to him as though they were ‘spoils of war’.

  William Longchamp had gone too far: both the English barons and the English prelates were outraged. The Carthusian bishop of Lincoln, St Hugh, who was certainly no politician and whose motives were always impeccable, promptly and publicly excommunicated the castellan of Dover and his wife for sacrilege. Geoffrey was quickly released, but by now count John had seen his opportunity and had called the magnates of the realm to a special council at Reading. They responded enthusiastically, summoning the chancellor to come and explain his disgraceful behaviour. On 6 October the bishops excommunicated him. William took refuge in the Tower of London, after vainly trying to persuade the citizens that John was trying to usurp his brother’s throne. On 10 October in St Paul’s, an assembly declared that William was deposed from his office. Eventually he surrendered and was allowed to take refuge in Dover Castle. He tried to escape across the Channel, disguised as an old woman, and was discovered when a fisherman tried to kiss him. But count John allowed the wretched man to leave England after all.

  John did not benefit from the upheaval as much as he had hoped. He obtained possession of some of the royal castles, was recognized as his brother’s heir, and was given the empty title of ‘supreme governor of all the realm’, but that was all. The English magnates were interested only in ridding themselves of William Longchamp, not in replacing king Richard by his giddy and inexperienced brother. Instead there was a new justiciar: Walter of Coutances, archbishop of Rouen, who produced a specific mandate from Richard. One may detect Eleanor’s shrewd hand in this appointment. She had almost certainly anticipated the crisis; the testimony is her extraction of that special legateship for Walter from the pope, and she had probably arranged the mandate as well.

  There were also more dangerous matters to worry her. She was keeping Christmas at Bonneville-sur-Touques in Normandy when unexpected news came that king Philip was back from the Holy Land and was already at Fontainebleau. He had fallen dangerously ill from fever during the siege of Acre, losing all his hair, and had used his sickness as an excuse to be dispensed from his crusader’s vow. He returned with the intention of exploiting his rival’s absence as much as possible. He began at once to increase his garrisons on the Norman frontier and by 20 January 1192 was besieging Gisors. He also sent messages to count John, inviting him to visit the French court and offering him all the Plantagenet lands in France together with the hand of his ill-used half-sister, Alice. Unscrupulous as always, John immediately began to assemble an army at Southampton.

  Eleanor took prompt action. All frontier garrisons in Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Poitou and Aquitaine were put on the alert, their seneschals receiving exact orders. Philip was told firmly that to try to seize the property of a man on crusade was to break the ‘truce of God’: he reluctantly bowed to convention and retreated. Meanwhile the queen mother took ship and crossed the Channel on 11 February, before John could sail.

  Richard of Devizes, a monk of Winchester, gives a glowing and even sentimental account of Eleanor’s handling of the situation:

  Suspecting that this irresponsible young man might attempt some scheme, suggested by the French king, his mother grew anxious and tried every possible means of stopping him from going abroad. Remembering the fate of her two elder sons, how both had died young before their time because of their many sins, her heart was sad and wounded. She was therefore determined, with every fibre of her being, to ensure that her younger sons stayed true to each other, so that their mother might die more happily than their father had done …. Through her tears and the pleading of the nobles of the land she managed with great difficulty to make him promise not to cross the Channel.

  In reality, instead of wasting time arguing with John, Eleanor summoned the great council of the realm to meet at Windsor, at Oxford, at London, and at Winchester. With the unanimous support of the magnates, she and the chief justiciar forbade him to leave England and made it clear that if he did so he would forfeit all his English lands and revenues. For the moment at least, Philip and John were held in check.

  Richard had been a glorious success in the Holy Land. In a few weeks he captured Acre, which had resisted the crusaders for two years, although on arrival he had immediately been struck down by a vicious local fever. He had high hopes of recapturing the entire Latin kingdom, where he stayed for over a year. On 7 September 1191 he won a magnificent victory on the plain before Arsuf, routing Saladin’s cavalry. Unfortunately he delayed to refortify Jaffa, and when he eventually marched on Jerusalem in November, the winter rains ruined his campaign. The king then began to negotiate with Saladin. One interesting proposal was that his widowed sister Joanna should marry the sultan’s brother Saphadin and that they should rule Palestine together as king and queen of Jerusalem, all Christians being allowed access to the Holy City. Richard even went so far as to knight Saphadin, but Joanna was horrified by the proposal and publicly refused to co-operate, on grounds of religion. In August 1192 Richard again managed to defeat Saladin, at Jaffa, but at once fell ill. In the end pea
ce was reluctantly concluded for three years, guaranteeing the towns reconquered by the crusaders and allowing pilgrims limited access to Jerusalem. A king was found for the realm that had been so miraculously saved from extinction, in the person of Eleanor’s grandson, Henry of Champagne. Richard finally left Palestine on 9 October 1192, having sent Joanna and his wife before him to say that he meant to keep Christmas in England. He left behind him a legend: a century later Arab mothers were using the name of the warrior English king to quieten their children, and horsemen spoke it to their mounts to curb them.

  The king had every reason to return home as quickly as possible. In April, letters had come from his mother to tell him of Philip II’s invasion of Normandy and of how John was plotting to seize the throne. She had begged him to come as soon as he could. It does not seem that she sent further letters to say how successfully she had coped with these threats. If so, one can hardly blame her: she wanted her favourite son back.

  But Richard then disappeared, much to Eleanor’s alarm. Throughout England, prayers were offered and candles were lit for his safety. Many people must have suspected that he had been drowned at sea in some storm. It was known that his sister and his wife had reached Brindisi safely and were on their way to Rome. All that was known of the king’s ship, the Franche-Nef — which had sailed unescorted — was that it had put in at Cyprus and Corfu and had then apparently made for Marseilles, although another vessel that met it en route thought it was bound for Brindisi. In fact the royal ship was blown back by a storm towards Corfu. No news of the king had reached England by Christmas; then, on 28 December, a messenger arrived from the archbishop of Rouen with the amazing news that the duke of Austria had arrested Richard somewhere near Vienna.

  What had happened was a veritable Odyssey. After being blown off course, Richard hired two Greek pirate ships as an escort and sailed up the Adriatic. He put in at Ragusa but when he continued his voyage he was caught in another storm and, after being driven past Pola, was wrecked on the coast of Friuli. He decided to continue overland, although he was in the territory of Mainard, count of Gortz, who was a vassal of the duke of Austria. Leopold of Austria was the sworn enemy of Richard, who had insulted him during the siege of Acre; when the duke had disobeyed the king’s orders, Richard had had the banner of Austria thrown down and trodden into the mud. The English king disguised himself as ‘Hugo, a merchant’, and despite being recognized managed to evade capture for a while, but was eventually caught at the village of Ganina on the river Danube near Vienna; here he was arrested on 21 December in a common tavern, dressed as a cook and pretending to turn the spit. Duke Leopold imprisoned him in the hill-top castle of Dürnstein.

  The young German emperor, Henry VI of Hohenstaufen, was a ferociously cruel and ruthless megalomaniac with dreams of universal empire, who would stop at very little in order to achieve his ambitions. He had good reasons for disliking the English king. First, Richard had allied himself with Tancred of Sicily, to which kingdom Henry was himself the legitimate heir. Second and worse, Richard was the brother-in-law and close friend of the leader of the Welf party, the pugnacious Henry of Saxony, who was the Hohenstaufen’s most bitter foe. Henry therefore wrote with relish to Philip of France to inform him that Leopold had arrested ‘the disturber of your realm, Richard, king of the English’, having called to mind ‘the treason, treachery and mischief of which he was guilty in the Promised Land’. Probably the emperor hoped that the prisoner might prove useful in bringing Philip to heel. In May 1193 Henry succeeded in forcing duke Leopold to hand over his precious captive, in return for a promise of part of the ransom, and incarcerated him at Speier.

  As soon as Eleanor heard of Richard’s arrest, she took control of affairs of state, although she did not formally adopt the title of regent. The man through and with whom she ruled was the new justiciar, the king’s official deputy in the eyes of the law. This was her old aquaintance Walter of Coutances. A Cornishman despite his name, he was a typical career churchman of the period. He had been seal bearer to Henry II and treasurer of Rouen besides being archdeacon of Oxford and bishop of Lincoln. His appointment to the archbishopric of Rouen dated from 1184. It was Walter who had secretly begun the attack on William Longchamp in 1191, by persuading count John to rouse the English magnates. While helping to organize opposition to Longchamp behind the scenes, Walter pretended to remain his friend — Richard of Devizes roundly accuses him of double dealing. Then, when he had become justiciar in Longchamp’s place, he immediately seized the latter’s lands on behalf of the crown. In later years Walter would quarrel with king Richard over trivial matters, and in the next reign he would go over to Philip II. However, Eleanor had no difficulty in making use of the undoubted political and administrative talents of this greedy and rather devious cleric.

  The queen mother also had the benefit of other excellent servants during her ‘regency’. Of these the foremost was the extraordinarily able Hubert Walter, who later became justiciar himself as well as archbishop of Canterbury. A tall, handsome East Anglian, taciturn and apparently more than a little masterful in manner, Hubert Walter was the nephew of an earlier justiciar, Ranulf Glanvill, and according to his enthusiastic admirer bishop Stubbs, ‘had been fitted by education to be a sound lawyer and financier as well as a good bishop and a successful general’. Hubert had begun his career as one of Henry II’s chaplains and had since been a royal judge and a baron of the Exchequer. His merits were recognized and gained him the deanery of York and then the bishopric of Salisbury. He had accompanied Richard on the crusade as treasurer and his heroic efforts to help the sick and often starving rank and file during the siege of Acre made him extremely popular. Unfortunately he was still on his way back from the Holy Land and did not return to England until the spring of the following year. In later years he showed himself an administrator of genius who let ‘the pressure of his master’s hand lie as lightly as he could upon the people’. As flexible and accomodating as he was strong, Hubert would find no difficulty in working with the queen mother, who must have come to regard him as a tower of strength in those fearful days.

  Another useful man was the Breton scholar Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath and later of London, who since 1191 had been acting — seemingly on a part-time basis — as Eleanor’s chancellor or Latin secretary. It was a post of crucial importance, because all charters and letters were written in Latin. Peter was a person of considerable learning: so highly did contemporaries rate his professional skills that Henry II, a former employer, had had a collection made of his more historic letters. (Peter thought they were good too — Helen Waddell tells us that in one of them he ‘modestly concludes that they will outlast ruin and flood and fire and the manifold procession of the centuries’.) He was a difficult creature — vain, pedantic and disappointed by lack of preferment — but the queen mother was able to make good use of his undoubted talents.

  Although she now knew that her son was a captive, Eleanor had no idea where he was confined, or what were the plans of those who held him prisoner. She therefore sent the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge to Germany to search for the king, while the bishop of Bath went direct to the emperor to learn his intentions. There is no evidence for the romantic tale that Richard’s favourite troubadour, Blondel, was the person who tracked him to Dürnstein and identified the king by his ability to join in a tenso (two-part song) that the minstrel sang from beneath the battlements, but it is quite in keeping with Richard’s love of the fantastic.

  Meanwhile the queen mother wrote terrible letters to the pope, drafted by that eloquent stylist, Peter of Blois. She complained furiously that the arrest of her son had violated the ‘Truce of God’, the hallowed convention that crusaders were free to come and go as they liked. She accused the pontiff of doing nothing to help when ‘the kings and princes of this earth have conspired against my son, the Lord’s annointed’. Richard ‘is held in chains while another lays waste his lands … and all this while the sword of Peter stays in its scabbard’
. She bemoans the young king and Geoffrey of Brittany who ‘sleep in the dust’ while ‘their unhappy mother lives on, tortured by their memory’. In Richard, she continues, ‘I have lost the staff of my age, the light of my eyes’. She even hints that she will bring about a schism and divide Christendom: ‘The fateful moment draws near when the seamless robe of Christ shall be rent again, when St Peter’s yoke shall be broken, when the Church shall be split asunder.’ In one letter she calls herself ‘Eleanor, by the wrath of God, queen of the English’. Despite this alarming correspondence Celestine III, who was now eighty-seven, was too old and timid to take swift action.

  Understandably, Philip II and John were delighted by the news of Richard’s misfortune and immediately began to exploit so golden an opportunity. The former seized Gisors and then besieged Rouen where, however, he was successfully defied by Eleanor’s old friend, the earl of Leicester, who sarcastically invited the French king to come in and try his hospitality. But at last Philip had the Vexin. John crossed the Channel and summoned the barons of Normandy to meet him at Alençon and acknowledge him as his brother’s heir. The summons fell on deaf ears, so he went to Paris, where he offered to do homage as duke of Normandy and duke of Aquitaine, and even as king of England, to confirm the surrender of the Vexin, and to divorce his wife and marry the unfortunate Alice of France. He then went back to England with an army of mercenaries, where he garrisoned Windsor and Wallingford, tried to occupy various other royal strongholds, and attempted to persuade the English barons to join him: he put it about that Richard would never return.

  Eleanor’s reaction to John’s plotting was what one might expect from so shrewd a mother and so sophisticated a politician. Instead of confronting her youngest son, she simply out-manoeuvred him. She and the justiciars called out the English fyrd (home-guard). In the words of the chronicler: ‘On the orders of queen Eleanor, who was then ruling England, in Passion week, at Easter and later, nobles and commons, knights and serfs, took up arms to guard the sea coast that faces Flanders.’ Most of John’s mercenaries were arrested as soon as they landed, and put in irons. John himself and a small party managed to reach England in secret and engaged a band of Welsh mercenaries. He and his supporters then established themselves at Windsor and at Wallingford. The queen’s men at once besieged John in Windsor castle, besides investing all his other strongholds. Yet he might one day succeed to the throne after all, and Eleanor may have detected a certain nervousness in the English magnates. John held out stubbornly. Everything depended on how soon Richard would return to his kingdom.