Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  As soon as the queen’s messenger reached Le Mans, John started on the one gallant enterprise of his life. He came at once, covering eighty miles in forty-eight hours, riding through the night as well as the day. William of Les Roches and the garrison of Chinon joined him en route. They reached Mirebeau at dawn on 1 August. At the council of war just before the attack, William of Les Roches asked the king to promise to put none of his captives to death, to treat his nephew as though there was no war between them, and to confine Arthur’s supporters in the immediate locality until a truce had been arranged. John agreed, telling William that he and the other lords present could refuse their homage and cease to recognize him as their king if he broke his word. Then the royal army attacked, pouring into Mirebeau through the open gate.

  It was a hot night and, with no thought of danger, Arthur’s men had not bothered to sleep in their armour. When Geoffrey of Lusignan was interrupted during a hearty breakfast of roast pigeon and told that the king of England was attacking, he laughed and said that he would finish his breakfast. There was a bloody scuffle in the narrow little streets of Mirebeau, but Arthur’s troops had been caught in a trap from which there was no escape and they were hopelessly outnumbered. Their attackers quickly overpowered them.

  Indeed king John had won an extraordinary victory in the only engagement in which he personally commanded his troops during his entire reign. Arthur had brought no more than 250 knights but these included the two most important members of the Lusignan clan, Hugh the Brown and his uncle Geoffrey. The king had captured not only Philip II’s chief ally but the principal leaders of the revolt in Poitou. He had also captured Arthur’s heiress, his unmarried sister Eleanor of Brittany, who had adventurously ridden with her brother. It was a dazzling success, and should have completely altered the course of the war. If Richard had still been king, Philip would almost certainly have hastened to make peace. As it was, he abandoned the siege of Arques and retreated, and John was able to capture both Angers and Tours. But the English king did not know how to use his victory.

  Instead of keeping the promises he had made to William of Les Roches, John inflicted on his prisoners every humiliation he could think of. The noblest lords were packed ‘as though they were calves’ into ox carts and chained together, their faces to the beasts’ tails as an added refinement, and dragged in triumph through their own domains; to ride in a cart was the ultimate disgrace for any knight. Hugh the Brown was confined in a prison in Normandy, but most of his companions were shipped to England to await ransom, where some are said to have been blinded. Probably at least twenty were deliberately starved to death at Corfe castle because they could not find the money to buy their freedom. But the one man whom the king should have kept in prison — Hugh the Brown, the leader of the Lusignan party — was allowed to ransom himself.

  Beyond question, king John was fiendishly cruel and bloodthirsty. Quite apart from the prisoners of Corfe, he was to have all too many murders to his discredit. The barbarous massacre of 300 captives at Evreux has already been mentioned. There is little evidence for the popular tale that in order to make a Jew of Bristol disgorge his gold he tortured him by pulling out several teeth a day, but the story has the stamp of John’s peculiar sense of humour. Half a dozen chroniclers bear witness to a much more horrifying crime The wife of William of Braose — a once loyal supporter who eventually turned against the king — refused to hand over her children to John as hostages; when he caught Matilda of Braose, he deliberately starved her to death at Windsor with her elder son; their corpses were found after eleven days without food and it was seen that in her agony the mother had gnawed her own child’s cheeks. John hanged twenty-eight Welsh boys who were hostages for their chieftain fathers’ good behaviour. He also hanged a man and his son for prophesying (wrongly) the date when the king’s reign would end. Many others met a violent death in his dungeons or simply disappeared.

  In these circumstances, duke Arthur’s prospects were bleak. All that is known for certain about Arthur after his capture is that he was imprisoned at Falaise, where his gaoler apparently treated him well enough. According to Roger of Wendover — frequently unreliable, but he may well have been telling the truth in this instance — the young duke spent some months in a dungeon at Falaise, and then the king came to see him. It seems that for once John was in a merciful mood, if Roger is to be believed. The king told his nephew that he would set him free and give him back his duchy of Brittany if he would break with Philip II and promise homage and loyalty. But the young duke was not a Plantagenet for nothing and appears to have possessed all his father’s and his uncles’ insane pride. Even after a long and miserable imprisonment he showed his evil streak. (In 1199, discussing him with Hubert Walter, William Marshal had already discerned it.) Arthur answered fiercely that he would never make peace until he had obtained not merely Brittany but everything that had belonged to his uncle Richard, including the kingdom of England. John immediately ordered that Arthur should be moved to Rouen, where he was confined in a newly built tower, ‘and not long after that, Arthur suddenly vanished’.

  Nobody knows what happened. Ralph of Coggeshall, who took pains to be as accurate as possible about most matters, says that because the Bretons were in revolt over their duke’s imprisonment ‘the king’s counsellors’ had already suggested that Arthur should be blinded and castrated ‘so that he would thereafter be incapable of princely rule’. Ralph further tells us that John had ordered Hubert de Burgh to do this, when Arthur was at Falaise, but that Hubert disobeyed him. (Ralph’s version is very likely the origin of Shakespeare’s scene, ‘Heat me these irons hot’.) There was also a contemporary rumour, perhaps put about by the court, that Arthur had fallen from a high tower while trying to escape. A French life of Philip II, the Philippide, says that John took the boy out onto the Seine in a boat, where he cut his throat and threw him overboard.

  The last story may contain an element of truth. Among the king’s counsellors at this time, William of Braose was one of the most important, perhaps the most important of all. A benefactor of the Cistercian monastery of Margam in Wales, William may have confided the secret to its monks after he turned against John. Certainly the Annals of Margan contain an extremely plausible account: at Rouen on Maundy Thursday 1203 the king, ‘when he was drunk and possessed by the devil’ (ebrius et daemonio plenus), killed Arthur with his own hand and then dropped the corpse into the Seine after tying a heavy stone to it. A fisherman dredged up the body in his net and it was identified and secretly buried at a nearby Benedictine priory ‘in fear of the tyrant’.

  In 1203 Maundy Thursday fell on 3 April. Not quite a fortnight later, on 16 April, king John sent a certain brother John of Valerant to queen Eleanor with a letter. The king said that God had been kind to him and that the messenger could tell her all about it. It has been suggested that the king was referring to the death of his nephew, with the inference that Eleanor may even have welcomed the murder. This seems most unlikely, as the letter was addressed to eight other people as well, including the archbishop of Bordeaux.

  The rightful duchess of Brittany was now Arthur’s elder sister, Eleanor, who had been taken prisoner with him at Mirebeau. Being unmarried, she constituted almost as much of a danger to John as had Arthur. Indeed she was also the heiress of the king himself, for the king was as yet childless. The fate of the ‘pearl of Brittany’ remained unknown for a long time: no doubt many contemporaries suspected that she too had been murdered. In fact she was merely taken to England and put in close confinement, apparently in some comfort; her uncle provided her with money, expensive clothes and other luxuries. Nevertheless, despite the pleas of the bishops of Brittany and the demands of the king of France, John always refused to release her. At one time it seems that he considered using her as a puppet duchess of Brittany and she was taken to France on one of the king’s later campaigns, but the scheme came to nothing and she remained in prison at various castles — mainly Bristol — until she died, forty years af
ter her capture. She was buried at the Fontevrault priory of Amesbury. (There is a curious legend that John’s son, Henry III, felt so guilty about the cousin who should have sat on his throne that he once presented her with a gold crown, but that she gave it back to him after a few days.)

  One may well ask whether queen Eleanor must take any of the blame for her grandson’s murder. Certainly Arthur and his mother had been her sworn enemies and he had tried to lay hands on her at the point of the sword: still more unforgivably, he had intended to take away her lands, power and independence. Knowing John, she must surely have foreseen what might happen to the wretched youth. Yet on the other hand, though plainly no friend to Arthur, it is quite likely that she thought he would simply remain in perpetual confinement, as in fact happened to his sister. One has to take into account the story that at one moment John actually thought of releasing Arthur. The most convincing testimony to Eleanor’s innocence in this matter is her shrewdness. She was too far-sighted a politician not to realize that the young duke’s murder would prove disastrous for her son’s cause. Not only did it give his enemies moral justification for making war on king John, but it also enabled Philip of France to claim homage from Arthur’s outraged vassals.

  20 The End of the Angevin Empire

  ‘What! mother dead?

  How wildly then walks my estate in France!’

  Shakespeare, King John

  ‘Now boast thee, death! In thy possession lies A lass unparallel’d.’

  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

  It can truly be said that the Angevin empire died with Eleanor of Aquitaine. In a sense it had only come into being because of her, and it passed with her, although it was no fault of her’s that it came to an end: indeed it was the Norman and Plantagenet possessions that were lost, not Aquitaine. Perhaps she realized that her unbalanced youngest child would find it impossible to hold such a vast inheritance, and that Richard’s death had spelt its doom. Yet, shrewd as she was, probably even the old queen found it hard to believe that Philip II was capable of conquering her sons’ great fiefs in France. And while she lived, she could try to stave off disaster.

  Nevertheless, one person considered that Eleanor was responsible for the coming débâcle, which he foresaw only too clearly. When the bishop of Lincoln, St Hugh, lay dying during the last months of 1200 he made a dismal prophecy:

  The descendants of king Henry must bear the curse pronounced in Holy Scripture: ‘The multiplied brood of the wicked shall not thrive; and bastard slips shall not take deep root nor any fast foundation,’ and again: ‘The children of adulterers shall be rooted out.’ The present king of France will avenge the memory of his virtuous father, king Louis, upon the children of the faithless wife who left him to unite with his enemy. And as the ox eats down the grass to the very roots, so shall Philip of France entirely destroy this race.

  The early thirteenth century was accustomed to bloodshed but it is clear that contemporaries were genuinely shocked by the murder of Arthur, although they could only guess at what had happened. As late as October 1203 Philip II did not know whether the young duke was dead or alive, but he obviously had his suspicions. William of Les Roches, to whom John had sworn that Arthur should come to no harm, turned against the king of England, almost certainly from revulsion. William was a serious loss; he was not only one of the greatest lords in Anjou, and its seneschal, but also one of John’s most capable commanders. Many others of the English king’s subjects were outraged, not least those in Brittany, where the young duke seems to have been extremely popular. Philip of France called upon John in the name of the Bretons to show that Arthur was still alive.

  In any case Philip’s troops were already invading Normandy, while a Breton army was attacking it from the south-west. The Norman border was quickly conquered and then strongholds in the heart of the duchy began to fall, some surrendering because John had not made proper provision for their defence, and others because they preferred to be ruled by king Philip. For the Normans were war weary, crushed by savage taxation and by the ravages of John’s mercenaries. Furthermore the suspicious English king would not trust the Norman barons and set them against him by preferring to use his own paid henchmen.

  King John wandered aimlessly through eastern Normandy, with his treasure and his hostages, apparently incapable of any proper plan for a defensive campaign. By the end of 1203 probably only the Cotentin, Mortain and Rouen remained loyal to him. Château-Gaillard was still holding out, although it had been besieged since August and an attempt to relieve it had failed. The king could do nothing but mutter helplessly, ‘Let me alone!’ as news of fresh enemy advances kept on coming in; ‘One day I shall reconquer all I have lost’. At the beginning of December John gave way to despair and left Normandy for England, never to return.

  In March 1204 Philip made sure of victory in Normandy, taking Château-Gaillard by assault. The greatest stronghold in France had fallen, although it was supposed to be impregnable. The French king struck westwards to join forces with the Bretons. Early in the summer Falaise, also thought impregnable, surrendered after a siege of only seven days, and then Caen and Bayeux went too. Avranches was taken by the Bretons. By the end of May only Rouen, the ducal capital, continued to hold out for John. Its garrison commander, Peter of Préaux, sent a desperate appeal to the king in England, but was told that he would have to help himself. Accordingly, on 24 June Rouen surrendered to Philip II. Save for the Channel Islands, king John had lost the entire Norman heritage bequeathed by his great-great-grandfather, William the Conqueror.

  It was the first step down in a very gloomy descent indeed. John’s reign became steadily more disastrous. His oppressive government and savagery alienated not just his vassals in France but the English baronage as well. He also made an enemy of the Church, which eventually excommunicated both king and kingdom. His road led to Runnymede and the humiliating concessions of Magna Carta. It ended in an invasion of England by Philip II’s troops during which the country was nearly lost to the Plantagenets; a septuagenarian William Marshal saved the throne with difficulty for John’s son, the boy king Henry III.

  In the meantime William of Les Roches seized Angers and quickly won control of all Anjou. In August 1204, in his capacity of seneschal, he surrendered the county to Philip. By 1205 Maine and Touraine, together with the north and east of Poitou, had gone the same way.

  In Poitou, however, there had been some genuine resistance to Philip. Eleanor had a loyal and efficient commander in the seneschal, Robert of Thornham. Moreover, Philip was to some extent deterred by the fact that in theory he had no legal quarrel with Eleanor, who had done homage to him as his vassal. One may guess, too, that the defence was stiffened by the indomitable old lady. She had now moved from Fontevrault to Poitiers; after her unpleasant experience at Mirebeau she had been forced to stay in the safety of the capital, since the entire county was torn by war. Even Eleanor could not stop the rot in her own territory. The Lusignan party had become too deeply entrenched, and too many of the other Poitevin lords had been outraged by John’s behaviour. She was too old and frail to lead a full-scale campaign against them. Nevertheless she still had just enough strength to try to keep the county loyal, although well over eighty and obviously failing. As late as 1203 she wooed the citizens of Niort by granting them a charter.

  John did nothing to help her. Some historians have attempted to show that he tried to halt the Capetian invasion, but a contemporary troubadour tells a very different story. Writing apparently at the beginning of 1205 Bertran de Born’s son composed a sirventés (or satirical ballad) ‘to make king John blush for shame’. It seems that he did so at the request of one of John’s most loyal officers, Savary de Mauléon. The troubadour says that the king ought to be ashamed to think of his ancestors after having abandoned Poitou to Philip II ‘for the asking’, and that all Aquitaine regrets lo rei Richart, whom his brother is so plainly incapable of emulating. The younger Bertran adds sarcastically that one can scarcely compare Jo
hn to Sir Gawain (the Arthurian hero), and that the king prefers hunting or sheer idleness to anything else, which is why he has lost both his honour and his lands. The poem ends by calling John a flabby coward who does not know how to fight and can inspire loyalty in no one.

  No doubt the queen mother felt increasingly that her own end was near, when she heard almost every day how some fresh disaster had befallen her son. It has been suggested that the news of the loss of Château-Gaillard — Richard’s creation — killed her. There are varying accounts of her last days, but it seems most likely that she left the security of Poitiers and returned to her dear Fontevrault. Here, apparently, she died as she must have hoped, wearing the black-and-white habit of its nuns. This was on either 31 March or 1 April 1204. She was buried in the crypt of the abbey church. On 10 August 1204 Philip II rode into Poitiers and took possession of the Maubergeon.

  Shakespeare was probably correct in guessing that king John regarded his mother’s death as the final ruin of all his hopes in France. In the words of bishop Stubbs, Eleanor was ‘the great source and prop of his continental position …. John’s fortunes are not wholly hopeless until he loses his mother’. Even when she was too aged to be of any active assistance, she must still have had considerable value as a focus of loyalty and a symbol of strength. She could have been yet more useful as an adviser, although the king was probably too stupid to ask her advice, as he demonstrated by his murder of Arthur. Indeed apart from their dramatic meeting at Mirebeau there is little evidence that he saw anything of his mother during her final years. It was therefore fitting that he should not be present at her deathbed. She had never felt much love for him, nor had she ever been tolerant of failure, and certainly she had never known failure on such a grand scale as that of John. Out of all the Angevin empire in France, only Aquitaine remained, except for a strip of south-western Poitou. Admittedly Aquitaine may have had little wish to be ruled by a northern Frenchman such as king Philip II. Yet it is conceivable that the Aquitainians preferred to stay loyal to John simply because he was the son of their magnificent duchess.