Queens Consort

by Lisa Hilton

  Given the background to her entrance to Messina, the reports of Berengaria’s reception are disappointingly low-key. Ambroise does his best to introduce a bit of romance: ‘For the news had been brought to him that his mother had arrived there, bringing the King his beloved. She was a wise maiden, noble, brave and fair, neither false nor disloyal. Her name was Berengaria and her father the King of Navarre had handed her over to the mother of King Richard, who was longing for her to be brought to him. Then she was named as Queen. For the King had loved her very much; ever since he was Count of Poitiers he had desired her.’3

  Other writers (none of them eyewitnesses) describe Berengaria as ‘of renowned beauty and wisdom’, ‘a beautiful and learned maiden’, ‘nobly born’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘of splendid parage’.4 Richard of Devizes strikes a discordant note amid this conventional praise with his contention that Berengaria was ‘more wise than beautiful’, though the Navarrese historian Manuel Sagatibelza Beraza loyally suggests that if her wisdom surpassed even her beauty, Berengaria must have been wise indeed. The Berengaria scholar Ann Trindade suggests that even within the constraints of medieval literary convention, some of her ‘distinctive personal qualities’ may be discerned from these descriptions, notably in the repeated use of ‘sage’ — wise — and Ambroise’s interesting choice of ‘preux’ meaning brave, an unusual adjective to apply to a woman. Both these qualities were to be tested in the next stage of Berengaria’s long journey to the altar.

  Since it was Lent, the royal wedding could not be immediately celebrated in Sicily, so on the Wednesday of Holy Week the huge crusader fleet of 219 ships set off for the Holy Land. Eleanor had spent only three days in Sicily with her children. Berengaria and Joanna travelled in the same vessel, modestly separated from Richard. Off the coast of Crete, the fleet was scattered by storms and the ship containing the Dowager Queen of Sicily and the queen-to-be of England was driven towards the coast of Cyprus. Isaac Comnenus, the island’s ruler, supposedly attempted to lure them ashore at Limassol in the hope of a fat ransom, and the ‘Itinerarium’ imagines the two shipwrecked queens gazing longingly across the violent waves, yearning for rescue. Richard then obligingly appears in full Lionheart mode, charging up the beaches, sword in hand, imprisons the ‘tyrant’ Comnenus and liberates his fiancée. In fact, the conquest of Cyprus had always been on Richard’s agenda, and the threat of shipwreck was merely an unmissable opportunity to add to the Lionheart legend.

  One of Richard’s greatest strengths as a military commander was his capacity for organisation away from the battlefield. He had already identified Cyprus as a vital staging post in the crusade supply line, and waiting until Philip Augustus had set off for the Holy Land before invading the island relieved him of the obligation to honour the agreement of a fifty-fifty division of spoils acquired in ‘God’s service’. On 6 May Richard appeared from Rhodes, where his own ship had docked, and within weeks he had control of Cyprus. Comnenus surrendered on 1 June, once he learned that Richard had taken his daughter prisoner, on the unusual condition that he not be bound in irons. Ever the gentleman, Richard supposedly had some silver chains made up. With his coffers fortified — Cyprus was an immediate source of revenue in the form of treasure and a tax levied on the inhabitants — Richard promptly sold the island to the order of the Templars for 100,000 Saracen bezants.

  It is quite possible that Richard had had it in mind to hold his wedding on Cyprus, provided all went according to plan, rather than in the embarrassing presence of the French King in Palestine. Whenever he made the decision, on 12 May, while his men were sweeping over the island, he and Berengaria were married in Limassol at the chapel of St George.

  The ceremony was performed by Richard’s own chaplain, Nicholas, later bishop of Le Mans, before Berengaria was crowned Queen of England by John, bishop of Evreux. The groom wore a rose silk tunic accessorised with a scarlet cap, gold embroidered cape and sash and a gold and silver scabbard. The bride’s outfit is not recorded. An English poem describes the wedding, suggesting it was celebrated in style:

  There King Ric spoused Beringer

  The King’s daughter of Navarre

  And made there the richest spousing

  That ever maked any king.

  And crowned himself Emperor,

  And her Empress, with honour.5

  Berengaria got a three-week honeymoon on the island of Aphrodite and then, on 5 June, husband and wife set sail once again. Berengaria and Joanna were now joined by the captured Cypriot princess, whom Richard had entrusted to his wife’s care. Isaac Comnenus was deposited at the fortress of Margat on the Syrian coast before the fleet moved on to Tyre. Berengaria may have witnessed a sea battle when the rear of the fleet encountered a laden Muslim supply ship bound for the besieged garrison at Acre. Richard succeeded in taking the ship in a perfectly timed blow to Muslim morale.

  On 8 June the new Queen of England arrived at Acre and, for the next two years, while Richard was making his reputation as the greatest warrior in the west, remained in a curious limbo, a queen without a country, with no outlet for any of the traditional activities associated with her position. Pierre de Langtoft describes Berengaria and Joanna as coming together ‘like birds in a cage’, a sad image which suggests something of the restricted existence they led. Together with the Cypriot princess, they were housed first at Acre, then at Ramleh and Jaffa, but both cities were dangerous and there was little opportunity to explore their exotic surroundings. Weaving, embroidery, board games, reading and prayer were likely pastimes, and they were able to enjoy music, as the writer Ambroise mentions the presence of minstrels. Mindful of Eleanor’s dubious crusading reputation, Berengaria was bound to conduct herself discreetly and the silence of the chroniclers about Berengaria and Joanna suggests that their conduct was spotless: their lives were apparently so dull that there was nothing worth recording of them. One highlight was the Christmas court Richard held at Latrun, where the two queens proved a great attraction and Berengaria was able to perform the ceremonial role she had been led to expect would be required of her, at least for a short time. But for the most part Richard (again, perhaps recalling the failure of the Second Crusade, and the accusations that the presence of women had undermined it morally) was naturally inclined to keep them away from the action. We might imagine that sensually Berengaria’s experience was novel and exciting — the scents of strange and wonderful flowers and spices, the sounds of an unknown language, the flavours of orange water and olives — but for her the Holy Land was a country only glimpsed from behind the leather curtains of a litter or through the narrow window of a fortress.

  Berengaria and Richard said goodbye at Acre in September 1192. She and Joanna sailed for Europe on 29 September and the queen of England was not to see her husband again for nearly two years. After landing at Brindisi, their party made its way to Rome, where Berengaria stayed for six months. In April, she witnessed a charter on securing a loan, signing herself proudly as ‘Queen of the English, Duchess of the Normans and Aquitainians, Countess of the Angevins’. It is just possible that her attempt to raise money might have been connected to the capture of Richard in December by his old enemy Leopold of Austria, who had taken him prisoner as he made his way home from the Holy Land and handed him over to the German Emperor, Henry VI. Richard’s return to Europe had been complicated by the quarrels that had flared up during the crusade, and the coasts of southern France and Italy between Genoa and Pisa were barred to him. After a perilous journey on the high autumn seas, he reached Venice, from where he attempted to cross Austria. He was seized at Erdburg near Vienna, according to legend making a poor show of disguising himself as a cook. Richard’s captivity was a great boon to both Emperor Henry and Richard’s former friend Philip of France, and in February the King’s ransom was set at the impossible sum of 100,000 marks.

  It was not Richard’s wife who busied herself working for his release, but his mother Eleanor — an opportunity for action that marks the beginning of the greatest p
eriod of her queenship, albeit now as dowager. Berengaria, meanwhile, left Rome in June 1193, escorted by Cardinal Melior and Stephen of Turnham, and travelled to Pisa, Genoa and Marseilles, accompanied first by her brother-in-law King Alfonso and then by Raymond of Toulouse to the Aquitaine heartlands of Poitou. As Berengaria continued her stately progress, Eleanor was frantically trying to prevent her youngest son John from usurping his brother’s throne and to raise the enormous ransom for Richard’s release. John had wasted no time in profiting from Richard’s absence, manipulating the unpopularity of the chancellor, Walter Longchamp, to march on London to effect the officer’s dismissal and the sequestration of his estates. He then set off on a series of progresses designed to win popularity and to convey, prematurely, the impression that he was Richard’s heir-apparent. To some extent, Eleanor had condoned, if not supported, John’s activities until this juncture. She approved of Walter of Coutances, archbishop of Rouen, who had been appointed head of the regency council in Longchamp’s place, and had refused to receive the delegation of cardinals Longchamp had mustered in his support, even denying them safe conduct across Normandy. Now, though, John had gone too far.

  Eleanor had kept her Christmas court of 1191 in Normandy where, in January, Philip Augustus launched an attack on Gisors, in flagrant defiance of the truce of God, the agreement by which crusading monarchs agreed not to wage war upon one another. When the assault failed, the French King turned to John. He offered him all Richard’s French holdings if he would marry the abandoned Princess Alys (who, as no one knew quite what to do with her, was still languishing in the semi-custody of the English at Rouen) and surrender Gisors. John accepted with alacrity, but Eleanor managed to reach England just as he was preparing to sail for Normandy. She convened councils at Winchester, Windsor, Oxford and London to demand a renewal of the oath of loyalty to Richard and contrived to have John’s castles confiscated if he attempted to leave the country. This contained him for a time, but when news of Richard’s capture finally broke after months of puzzling silence, John lost no time in rushing to Paris to pay homage to Philip, claim Richard’s Angevin lands and confirm that Arthur of Brittany would be excluded from the succession. In April 1193, Philip invaded Normandy and attempted to besiege Rouen. John, meanwhile, had raised a mercenary force in Wales and taken Windsor Castle; he had also hired mercenaries in Flanders. Gervase of Canterbury reports how, under Eleanor’s orders, people of all social ranks, peasants, knights and nobles, manned the eastern coast of England to successfully repel them. Still, as Eleanor had to raise a sum of money three times the annual expenditure of the English government to secure Richard’s release, it was necessary to come to a swift accommodation with her treacherous son. John agreed to place the royal castles he had appropriated in Eleanor’s temporary keeping, and Eleanor set about her campaign.

  In the first of two extraordinary letters to Pope Celestine III, Eleanor recalls in no uncertain terms Henry II’s support for the papacy during the recent conflict between Rome and the Emperor Frederick. ‘Grief,’ she reproaches him, ‘does not recognise a master, is afraid of no ally, it has no regard for anyone and it does not spare them, not even you.’ The Pope’s reluctance to help Richard for fear of threatening the tenuous truce between Rome and the empire is ‘a mark of criminality and disgrace’. In reminding him of her husband’s loyalty in preserving the papacy, she remarks that Celestine’s failure to intervene on Richard’s behalf is bringing the Church into disrepute. ‘Indeed, among the public it casts a shadow over the Church and excites a rumour among the people (and it considerably damages your standing) the fact that in such a crisis, amid so many tears … you have not sent those princes even one messenger from those around you.’ Eleanor’s second letter is an impassioned outpouring of maternal grief, reinforced by references to her royal status and Marian imagery:

  I wish that the blood of my body, already dead, the brain in my head and the marrow of my bones would dissolve into tears, so much that I completely melt away into sorrow. My insides have been torn out of me, I have lost the staff of my old age, the light of my eyes; if God had assented to my prayers He would condemn my ill fated eyes to perpetual blindness so that they no longer saw the woes of my people … why have I, the Lady of two kingdoms, reached the disgrace of this abominable old age?

  Revisiting her previous charge that the Pope is being prevented from acting by worldly concerns, Eleanor has the temerity to ask: ‘Is your power derived from God or men?’ In her fury, she dares to accuse the Pope of being a coward, of keeping ‘the sword of Peter sheathed’. Despite these taunts, the Pope continued to dither, so she set about raising the entire ransom herself.

  Everyone in England, from the wealthy, who were taxed at 25 per cent, to the Cistercian monks, who had nothing to give but their sheep, was forced to contribute to the fund. Eleanor appointed a council of five to supervise the collections and the booty was stored in the vault of St Paul’s. Collectors rode all over Anjou and Aquitaine and Eleanor personally dunned the abbot of St Martial at Limoges for 100 marks. The Pope eventually stirred from his lethargy, kindly offering to place England under interdict if Richard’s beleaguered subjects did not melt down their plate fast enough, which was not quite the assistance Eleanor had been hoping for. But by the autumn, she was able to promise over two thirds of the ransom to the imperial envoys.

  Eleanor left for Germany in December 1193. Rather wonderfully, the captured Cypriot princess was one of the ladies in her train. It has been suggested that she may have taken the oportunity to visit her first child, her eldest daughter with Louis, en route, as her journey took her through the northern regions of Champagne, and she and Countess Marie may have seen one another again at Meaux or Provins. Eleanor was in Cologne in time to keep the feast of Twelfth Night, and though John and Philip had offered the Emperor a last-minute bribe to delay Richard’s release, she was reunited with her son at Mainz in February. On 12 March, the King of England landed at Sandwich. Richard was determined to put his upstart brother in his place and, after giving thanks for his deliverance at Canterbury and at a reception in London, he set off for Nottingham to besiege the castle John had garrisoned. In his swift execution of his task, he introduced Greek fire for the first time, a crusading device which combined sulphur, pitch and naptha to ‘bomb’ the walls. On 17 April, Richard was crowned again in the ancient capital of Winchester, but once more, it was Queen Eleanor, not Queen Berengaria, who witnessed his triumph.

  Berengaria’s apparent lack of activity during this period has been interpreted as a sign of a breach in the marriage, but it is difficult to see how she and Richard could actually have had time to fall out. Since the moment they had embarked for the Holy Land, they had spent only a few weeks in one another’s company. Yet contemporary chroniclers such as Roger of Howden made it clear that there was something wrong with their relationship, and modern scholars have found a fruitful field of speculation in the supposed rift. The period of Richard’s Austrian adventures and captivity is exceptionally rich in Lionheart legend, and Berengaria, too, finds a place in it. However dubious their veracity, an examination of these stories and of how they have been used and interpreted brings us closer to an understanding of both twelfth-century and modern perceptions of the mystery at the heart of their marriage.

  The explanation, according to many modern commentators, is that there were two queens in the relationship. Despite being obliged to concede that there is ‘no direct evidence to prove that Richard was homosexual, and some direct evidence to prove that he was not’, a ‘majority’ of writers are determined to believe that the Lionheart was gay.6 Richard had at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, acquired a reputation for less than gentlemanly behaviour with the wives and daughters of his enemies and apparently so affronted a Fontevrault nun with his attentions that she declared she would rather put out the beautiful eyes that had seduced him than submit, but none of this is in itself proof that Richard did not also enjoy sexual relations with men. That he
did has been inferred from various chronicle accounts, the first of which deals with his relationship with Philip Augustus. Roger of Howden reports that during the period of their intense friendship in 1187, before the mutual alienation of the crusade, the two men ‘ate from the same table and drank from the same cup and at night they slept in the same bed. And the King of France loved him as his own soul and their mutual affection was so strong that because of the vehemence of their mutual affection the Lord King of England was dumbfounded.’7 Ann Trindade has highlighted the choice of the word ‘vehemence’, which is used by several writers in the course of describing sexual love, but there was nothing at all unusual about medieval men sharing either plates or beds, and if Richard was ‘dumbfounded’ it may well have been by the fact that he had achieved such friendship with his traditional enemy.

  The second often-cited piece of evidence concerns the visit of a hermit in 1195. The holy man warned Richard to be ‘mindful of the destruction of Sodom and abstain from unlawful things; or else God’s just retribution will overtake you’.8 Scholars disagree on the interpretation of the sins of Sodom. Some note that the term could be used to cover a range of sexually aberrant activities and is therefore applicable to Richard’s adulterous heterosexual behaviour at this juncture; others insist on texts which refer ‘consistently and unambiguously to male homosexual intercourse’.9 Later Lionheart legends certainly pick up on the theme of Richard’s sexuality. In the English romance Richard Coeur de Lyon, the imprisoned King falls in love with the King of Almain’s daughter, and when her furious father releases a ferocious lion into his cell, he reaches down its throat and rips out its heart. This seems a straightforward bit of heroic fantasy but it has also been interpreted as a ‘defensive’ anecdote, designed to counter the story of the hermit by casting Richard as aggressively heterosexual. The most famous of the legends concerning Richard’s captivity is perhaps that of the minstrel Blondel, who sang piteously before a number of German castles before hearing the voice of his beloved master. The story appears in the thirteenth century, and in some versions Blondel is portrayed as a rival to Queen Berengaria for Richard’s love. That it is entirely fictitious does not entirely dismiss the possibility that contemporaries thought Richard had love affairs with men and that the Blondel story could be a reformulation of collective rumours.