by Douglas Boyd
A few days after Eleanor gave birth to his first son in August 1153, Henry learned that King Stephen’s son Eustace of Boulogne had choked to death during a meal. In the hope of avoiding another protracted civil war, the grieving king of England agreed to name Henry his successor to the detriment of his surviving son, William, and this succession was confirmed by treaty negotiated by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and witnessed by fourteen bishops and eleven earls of the realm. Since Stephen was more than thirty years older than Henry, and thus an old man by the standards of the time, it was virtually certain that the young count of Anjou would soon inherit the crown of England without having to fight for it, although hostilities continued in a desultory fashion until November, when the Church arranged the Treaty of Winchester, in which cathedral the reigning king of England exchanged the kiss of peace with Henry of Anjou, who was formally adopted as his son and heir.
Whilst absent in England, he had left his mother’s iron hand in control of Normandy and Eleanor ruling their southern continental domains from the comital palace at Angers. The two duchesses’ courts could not have been more different. His mother’s in Rouen was austere and pious like her; while approving the match politically, Matilda disliked her daughter-in-law as an immoral opportunist, more given to pleasure than prayer. After years in Louis VII’s comfortless court on the île de la Cité in Paris and the months on the road with Henry, Eleanor was determined to enliven her own court in the spirit of her grandfather Duke William IX, inviting troubadours to compose poetry and risqué songs and jonglars to sing and entertain her in French and Occitan with songs like ‘A la entrada del tens clar’ (‘At the beginning of spring’):
Qui donc la vesés dançar e son gent còrs deportar
ben pogrà dir’ de vertat qu’el mond non aja sa par,
la reina joiosa!
[He who sees her in the dance, / sees her noble body twist and twirl, / must surely say that in all the world / for beauty there’s no equal/of this joyful queen.]
She also exercised her feudal right as matchmaker, pairing young gallants who met her standards of elegance with suitable young ladies of the court, neither party being able to marry without her consent.3 For this she was called, in Occitan, the language of southern France, la reina aurilhosa or the April Queen – a southern synonym for the Queen of the May in northern countries, where spring comes a month later than in Aquitaine.
Though far away across the Channel, Henry was not without news, or rather gossip, of the goings-on. Eleanor’s court attracted troubadours, one of the most famous of whom was Bernat de Ventadorn4, who, although low-born of a sergeant-at-arms and a cook, had the talent that enabled him to mix in high society. When he became a little too familiar with his duchess, he was summoned to join her husband’s itinerant court in England, as pleasure-less as the empress Matilda’s at Rouen. He lamented his exile in verse:
Aissí’m part d’amor e’m recrè.
Mòrt ma per mort li respond
e vau m’en, pos ilh no’m reten,
ciatius en eissilh no sai ont.
[I must leave my love and go away / banished I know not where / for she does not bid me stay / though this cruel exile I cannot bear.]
Giving birth to Henry’s first son, Eleanor expunged the ignominy of being considered the queen who had produced only daughters for Louis Capet. The supply of fashionable names for the nobility was limited, with many a William, Henry and Geoffrey, so the boy was named William after her father and grandfather and all the other Williams in her line. He was also given the courtesy title ‘duke of Aquitaine’. Some indication of Eleanor’s new-found independence is to be found in the charters she signed at this time without mentioning Henry, who was, after all, the titular duke of Aquitaine by right of marriage. Her vassal Archbishop Geoffroy proudly declared in Bordeaux that Aquitaine acknowledged her alone as its suzerain.5
However, while waiting to inherit the English crown, Henry returned to France to demonstrate his power by summoning Eleanor and their infant son to live in the ducal palace at Rouen. In return for a ‘fine’ of 1,000 silver marks,6 Louis VII agreed to cease including the title ‘duke of Aquitaine’ among his many others, which he had the right to do under a technicality of the annulment contract. That canny churchman Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux sniffed the wind of change and proclaimed that the master of Aquitaine was now Henry of Anjou.7 Henry, for his part, acknowledged his obligation as a vassal of King Louis in respect of his continental holdings by leading an army to help him pacify the restless territory of the Vexin, which lay between Normandy and Louis’ domains.
Although the twelfth century lies within the academic field of medievalists, the near-incessant warfare of the time can only be understood as the birth pangs of what we call the Middle Ages. European civilisation was in a state of flux, still emerging from the Dark Ages. Everywhere, might was right in this time of perpetual manoeuvre for advantage, each noble, baron or king, whatever the title he had inherited, having only the authority gained by his last confrontation. Alliances were made to be broken; feudal duty had constantly to be reimposed on his vassals by every overlord using fire and sword. Anyone who doubts that has only to see the thousands of castles that pock the face of France, built by barons but also by every local lordling to keep his enemies at bay.
Society was formally divided into three classes, pugnantes, orantes et laborantes – those who fought, those who prayed and the nameless many whose toil supported the totally unproductive knightly class. The Church attempted to moderate the worst excesses of this martial chaos, intervening on behalf of the peasants who bore the brunt of each invasion and raid, but was itself on occasion the cause of strife as it manoeuvred for temporal power under successive popes. If this is confusing for the modern reader, it was all the more so for those who lived through this time.
Shortly after Stephen’s death on 25 October 1154, messengers from Archbishop Theobald arrived to tell Henry that he was now England’s monarch, making Eleanor England’s queen. The devout Louis Capet was so discountenanced by this swift turn-around in the fortunes of his former wife that he departed on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Refusing to ask for safe conduct through her territory, he took a longer route through Catalunya, which also gave him an excuse to visit the Christian courts of northern Spain in search of a new wife.
Within two weeks of hearing the news from Canterbury, Henry assembled an impressive retinue including the most important barons and prelates of Normandy. The Empress Matilda was, diplomatically, not included in the party for fear her presence might alienate the many enemies she had made in England from her son’s cause. Eleanor, seven months pregnant, joined the party at Barfleur, to find herself facing many of the Norman nobility and churchmen who had enjoyed her humiliation on the Second Crusade when she was abducted in disgrace from her uncle’s court at Antioch.8 She would not have been human if she did not savour every minute of their discomfiture in now having to show supreme deference to the queen of England who was no mere consort, but a duchess and countess in her own right, whose possessions far outweighed theirs.
And there they stayed, in enforced proximity in the little Norman port, while November gales blew in from the Atlantic so violently that no ship could put to sea. In the back of everyone’s minds was the tragic loss of the la blanche-nef or White Ship, in the wreck of which Henry I had lost his heir and his bastard sons when it sank just outside the port in 1120, in an accident said by many to be God’s punishment for the sodomy practised by many aboard. By 7 December the patience of Eleanor’s husband was exhausted. Determined to be crowned before Christmas so that the coronation could take place before the austerity of Lent, he set out in defiance of the elements in a clinker-built vessel with high forecastle and raised poop very like the one that had sunk. Even with reefed sails, the ships of his little fleet soon lost contact despite bugle calls and horn lanterns displayed at mastheads during the night. For more than twenty-four hours the human and equine passengers were
buffeted by wind and pushed off-course by tides. With no compasses then available and clouds obscuring the stars, it seems a miracle that they all made landfall, although in harbours widely separated, on the south coast of England. The royal party landed near Lyndhurst in the New Forest, where King William Rufus had been assassinated under cover of a hunting accident, allowing Henry’s grandfather to seize the throne a few days later by locking up his elder brother for life.
Henry and Eleanor rode first to Winchester to secure the treasury of the realm, commandeering fresh horses along the way and acquiring a cortège of Anglo-Norman nobility and clergy eager to demonstrate loyalty to their new overlord. Archbishop Theobald awaited them at Westminster with the assembled bishops of the realm, but both the abbey and the palace of Westminster had been vandalised by Stephen’s mercenaries, forcing the royal party to set up home in the palace of Bermondsey, a low island in the unhealthy malarial marshes south of the River Thames. The coronation on the Sunday before Christmas took place in Westminster Abbey – a mixed scene of pomp and squalor.
The Jersey poet Robert Wace described a banquet that may have been the coronation feast, with beef, pork and game consumed in large quantities, flavoured with herbs and imported spices. To finish, there were stewed and candied fruit, jellies, tarts, waffles and wafers – thin pastries served with sweet white wine – the servers then entertaining the assembly with tumbling, music and dance. There may also have been some wit – all in French, of course – from joculatores to raise a belly laugh and perhaps, riskiest of all, a joculatrix to make them laugh, although at such a moment political correctness must have been an uneasy line to tread.
The men were clean-shaven; beards were a sign of unfashionable Englishness. Henry’s short cloaks set a fashion: men had their long cloaks, favoured by Stephen, cut down to show their political sympathies, and wore their hair shoulder-length; women had longer hair. Both sexes wore furs for warmth in the ill-heated living quarters, where braziers of glowing charcoal exuded carbon monoxide fumes. The city of London was, in chronicler Walter Map’s words, a haunt of pimps and whores, though his less squeamish fellow-courtier William fitz Stephen thought it a noble city. Most houses were built of wood with thatched roofs; destructive fires ravaged the city repeatedly. But London was big, even for Eleanor who knew Paris and Constantinople: within its walls Paris covered only 25 acres; girdled by London Wall were 326 acres of homes, shops, taverns, cookhouses and the bustling port itself – all, as Richard would later decide, producing taxes for him to spend as he chose. So cramped were living conditions in this vast metropolis that richer citizens were already moving out to live in the meadows around Clerkenwell and St Clement’s Well where wells had water less likely to be polluted by the ubiquitous, stinking cesspits.
Roughly half of England was held as fiefs by the Anglo-Norman barons, the balance belonging to the Crown and the Church. To see things for himself, Henry immediately set off to tour his new possessions while Eleanor prepared for the birth on 28 February 1155 of her second son, named Henry after his father, who was absent in the North at the time, forcibly impressing upon some recalcitrant barons that he was their new master. At Whitsuntide Eleanor moved her familia or household into the palace of Westminster, renovated, refurbished and furnished at record speed by men working day and night under the workaholic young Thomas Becket, whose rise to become Henry’s chancellor displaced Eleanor from the royal councils. Recommended to the king by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury as the man most likely to bring the state finances into order after nineteen years of misrule, Becket forfeited sleep as a good courtier must, sharing not only the king’s working hours but also his leisure pursuits of horses, hawks and hounds or a game of chess or some learned discourse late into the night. Almost the only waking hours they were separated were during Henry’s womanising, which Becket refused to share.9
At Westminster, Eleanor found herself responsible for raising not only her own young sons but also Henry’s bastard Geoffrey by his Saxon mistress Ykenai until he was old enough to be sent off to be educated for high ecclesiastical office in the schools of Northampton. That old gossip Walter Map spitefully labelled Geoffrey’s mother meretrix – a prostitute10 – but Henry’s paranoia would never have let him take an interest in a mistress’ child of doubtful paternity.
There was little privacy in the modern sense of the word, whether at Westminster or on the road with Henry. It was then thought aberrant to wish to be alone – except in hermits, among whom it was considered a sign of their piety. The court when travelling slept in one great hall, with a solar at one end, so that all could see who was with whom and why. In September Eleanor moved to Winchester, which had been the capital of Saxon England, while Henry took time off to hunt in the nearby New Forest where, as in all the forests, it was forbidden for the hungry Anglo-Saxon inhabitants to seek food or even collect firewood.
By the Christmas court of 1155, held at Winchester, Eleanor was pregnant again and shortly to be abandoned by Henry when he crossed to France to placate Louis Capet and declare a brief war on his brother Geoffrey for daring to claim that an oath sworn by Henry on their father’s deathbed should be honoured, giving him territory of his own to govern. While Eleanor held no writ of regency, that did not stop her travelling the country in great pomp and style, furnishing her temporary lodgings with tapestries and favourite furniture, issuing charters over her own seal and arranging marriages that ensured the spouses owed her loyalty. In June she was back at Winchester for the birth of a daughter, christened Matilda in honour of her formidable grandmother, an event closely followed by the death of Prince William.
She lost little time in grieving, travelling to France to be present when Henry was in her lands. The cartulary of the important abbey of La Sauve, lying east of Bordeaux, records their visit with a glittering retinue that included ‘Thomas of London’11 who constantly had Henry’s ear. So busy was Henry with punishing anyone who flouted his ducal authority, and razing their fortifications when the mood took him, that it was rumoured his speed in operations must be due to his use of widespread treachery. At some point in their separate progresses back to the North, Eleanor must have met up with her husband, for she was pregnant again when she returned to England in February 1157 – this time with the son who would be her favourite.
NOTES
1. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 114.
2. Ibid, p. 113.
3. For a fuller account of Eleanor’s court, see Boyd, Eleanor, pp. 137–9.
4. Also sometimes called Bernard de Ventadour.
5. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 116.
6. A mark was equivalent to one-third of an English pound.
7. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 116.
8. For greater detail see Boyd, Eleanor, p. 136.
9. William fitz Stephen, Life of Becket, ed. J.C. Robertson, Rolls Series No 67 (London: Longmans, 1875), Vol 3, p. 17.
10. Map, De Nugis, pp. 238, 246. His phrase meretrix quedam publica more likely expresses Anglo-Norman contempt for an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman.
11. C. de la Ville, Histoire de l’Abbaye de La Sauve Majeure (Paris: Mequignon junior and Bordeaux: Th. Lafargue, 1877), p. 177.
3
Court Whores and Confusion
This, then, was the turbulent Plantagenet family into which Richard was born at the palace outside Oxford. The name of the dynasty founded by Henry and Eleanor is said to come from Richard’s grandfather Geoffrey the Fair, who wore a sprig of planta genista or bright yellow broom – genêt in French – in his helmet to make him instantly recognisable in fast-moving equestrian combat.
When the royal family was gathered together for a Christmas or Easter court the sibling rivalry and tensions must have made life hellish for the four princes and three princesses, not least because their father had inherited from his Norse ancestors a tendency to go berserk when angry or thwarted. He would then fall down in a fit, foaming at the mouth and rending his clothes in fury to roll among the rotten re
eds that covered the flagstones of whichever palace they were in – reeds that, if not freshly laid, were fouled with food scraps and the excrement of dogs and other animals.
Even family members mysteriously came and went, adding to the children’s insecurity. Before Richard’s fifth birthday, his elder brother Henry was sent to continue his education in the London house of Chancellor Thomas Becket. This sending away of noble sons to be brought up in another household was not unusual at the time, but Princess Matilda was also sent away young – to Germany when only 12, having long been betrothed by her father to Duke Henry of Saxony, known as Henry the Lion. There were also additions to the royal family. Henry II’s obsession with alliances would lead him to inveigle Eleanor’s first husband Louis VII of France to hand over two daughters by his second wife: Princess Marguerite was betrothed to Prince Henry and Princess Alais was betrothed at the age of 9 to Richard, who had previously been betrothed after the Christmas court of 1158, when he was only seventeen months old, to Berengaria – a daughter of the count of Barcelona, not to be confused with Berengaria of Navarre, to whom he was later married by Eleanor’s wiles during the Third Crusade. For similar political reasons, Alix of Maurienne was betrothed in infancy to Prince John and Constance of Brittany was betrothed to Prince Geoffrey.
Marriage was a political tool, as when, in October 1160, Richard’s father stole a march on Louis VII. He ordered Eleanor to bring Prince Henry from England to Normandy and thence to do homage to Louis for the duchy of Normandy. With the connivance of certain papal legates, he then had Prince Henry married in Neubourg to Louis’ daughter Princess Marguerite. The groom was aged 7 and the bride a mere 3 years old, so this was in direct breach of the agreement made two years before with Louis: that the marriage would be effected when she reached puberty. The purpose of the marriage was simply to secure Marguerite’s dowry, which included the strategically important castle of Gisors, on the borders of Normandy and Louis’ domains, and two other important castles.1 Work was immediately put in hand to strengthen the fortifications at Gisors, with moats deepened and a new curtain wall running around the castle for 800 metres, protected by eight new towers.