by Lisa Hilton
Academic obsession with dragging the Lionheart out of the closet may indicate no more than that to twenty-first-century eyes Richard was too convincingly straight for his own good, but what is interesting about the hermit story, the most compelling piece of evidence for some sort of extramarital antics, is the way it centres upon Richard’s reconciliation with his Queen. That such a reconciliation was called for has led some scholars to believe that the marriage was never consummated, but there is no reason to believe this was so. According to Howden, the King initially disregarded the hermit’s warnings, but during Holy Week he fell ill. He called for priests and confessed, then ‘received his wife, whom he had not known for a long time [this author’s italics], and renouncing unlawful intercourse, was united with his wife and the two became one flesh; then God gave him health of both body and soul’. This suggests that Richard had ‘known’ Berengaria at some point; that he had not done so for a long time is explained by the simple fact that he had not seen her. The King heard Mass, gave alms and ordered new church ornaments to replace those which had been impounded to raise his ransom. This pattern of reformation and reunion follows an earlier sequence in which Richard performed a similarly motivated penance in Sicily before departing on crusade, a penance capped by the arrival of Berengaria at Messina. Sin, sexual or otherwise, is followed by disease (a pious objective correlative), then repentance, symbolised by union with Berengaria, and a return to God. The point here is not the precise nature of the sins Richard committed, but the primacy given to the queen as a symbol of redemption and healing. Abuse of the sacrament of marriage leads to God’s displeasure and disease; the proper use of the queen’s body sets things right. In this light, the hermit story might be read as much as a celebration of the sanctity of sex within marriage as a hint of Richard’s love for men without it.
A likely date for Richard and Berengaria’s reunion is June 1194, at Loches. His English homecoming had been short-lived. In May, Richard and Eleanor sailed for Normandy, where Eleanor presided over a reconciliation between her sons at Lisieux. John prostrated himself before his brother and was forgiven — was Richard displaying the same kind of ill-judged leniency that had caused so many problems for his father Henry? — and after that it was back to business as usual, which for Richard meant war. Philip’s incursions into Normandy had to be stopped, and it was this mission that occupied the last five years of Richard’s life.
Berengaria was accompanied to Loches by her brother Sancho. Their father, Sancho El Sabio, died the following month and Berengaria’s brother, who had proved himself staunchly committed to the English alliance, returned to Navarre. In Poitou, Berengaria had been keeping a small household, moving between the castles of Chinon, Saumur and Beaufort-en-Vallée, but the next Christmas she and Richard may have been together at Eleanor’s palace in Poitiers. She was certainly present with him when Joanna was married to Raymond VI, the new Count of Toulouse, in Rouen in October 1196, in an ill-fated attempt to resolve the difficulties between the houses of Aquitaine and Toulouse. In 1195, the year given by Howden for the hermit’s visit, she and Richard purchased land together at Thorée and built a house there. This single attempt at constructing a marital home certainly suggests that Richard was at this stage committed to Berengaria, though there is no evidence that they ever lived there together, and nothing of this modest property, with its mill and fish pond, stands today. In 1216 Berengaria made a gift of it to the brothers of the hospital of Jerusalem.
Richard was also preoccupied with a far grander building project: the castle of Chateau Gaillard at Les Andelys, a magnificent declaration of defiance to the French (the name means ‘Saucy Castle’). Whomever else Richard loved, he loved his castle, even referring to it, rather sadly, as his ‘child’. Though he spent much time at the château, again, there is no indication that Berengaria ever visited him here; indeed, it has been claimed that, despite the reconciliation reported in the chronicles, Richard was during this period considering repudiating Berengaria, primarily on the grounds of her childlessness but also because her brother, now Sancho VII ‘El Fuerte’, was ‘insouciant about Richard’s diplomatic concerns’.10 In 1198, Richard had enlisted papal support to push Sancho over the matter of Berengaria’s dowry castles, Rocabruna and St Jean Pied-de-Port, and the newly consecrated Innocent III had duly written to Sancho, who appeared to do little about the matter. This request has been construed as evidence that the Navarrese alliance was under strain, since Sancho was now more concerned with politics to the south of the Pyrenees, and at the same time gathering vassals in Gascony whose first allegiance ought to have been to Richard. Though there is truth in both of these points, Sancho’s long-term policy towards the English suggests a continued relationship of mutual interest and support, indeed a certain dependence, which was later to become particularly relevant in the matter of Berengaria’s disputed dowry If Berengaria had ‘outlived her usefulness’,11 it was biologically, rather than diplomatically Whether or not Richard did experience sexual difficulties with women, he was fertile and had married in the hope of producing an heir. Berengaria did not provide one. The term ‘barren’ may be distasteful to modern ears, but as far as her contemporaries were concerned, Berengaria had failed in her primary duty as a queen, and when she was widowed in 1199, it became clear that the Angevin rulers, now represented by Eleanor of Aquitaine and John, had no further use for her.
Richard’s struggle with Philip of France over the territories of the Vexin and Gisors, which occupied the last years of his life, amounted to little more than two bald men fighting over a comb. Perhaps this explains why the Lionheart legends attempted to invest Richard’s pointless and premature death with one last bit of glamour by claiming that he went to besiege Chalus-Chabrol in search of buried treasure. In fact, the attack on Chalus, near Limoges, in March 1199 was a necessary part of the King’s strategy in his ongoing struggle to maintain control of his vassals in Aquitaine. But the great warrior had grown a little careless. Strolling outside his camp on the evening of 26 March, protected only by his helmet and shield, Richard was hit in the arm by an arrow fired from the ramparts. His health had been sporadically poor as a result of the illnesses he had suffered on crusade, and even though the arrow head was wrenched from his flesh, it became clear that the wound was infected and that he was not going to recover. A messenger was dispatched to his mother Eleanor at Fontevrault, and she arrived at his bedside in time to be with him as he died, on 6 April. The castle fell the same day.
Berengaria, who was at Beaufort-en-Vallée, was not summoned to Richard’s deathbed, supposedly because this would alert the French and allow them to take advantage of the situation. It is a measure of her political marginalisation that a visit from Eleanor should not have been considered suspicious, whereas Berengaria’s arrival would have signalled an emergency Instead Berengaria heard the news from Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, who had been en route to meet Richard when he was informed of the King’s death. According to Adam of Eynsham, Berengaria was ‘sorrowing and almost heart broken’ and Hugh said Mass for her and was able ‘to calm her grief in a wonderful way’. Hugh then departed for Fontevrault, where Richard was buried on Palm Sunday in the presence of Queen Eleanor. Although later chroniclers assumed that Berengaria was among the chief mourners, it appears that she did not attend the funeral, as she kept Easter at Beaufort with Bishop Hugh and her brother-in-law John. In response to an urgent message from Eleanor, John had rushed from Brittany to Chinon as Richard was dying to secure the royal treasure, then ridden on to Fontevrault, where he visited not only Richard’s tomb but that of his father and Henry the Young King, before going on to Beaufort. Three days later Berengaria did visit the abbey, where she witnessed a charter issued by Queen Eleanor. Why did Berengaria not take up her rightful position at Richard’s funeral? Was she too ill with grief to contemplate the journey? Or did she consider Fontevrault too much Eleanor’s territory? In later life Berengaria maintained some correspondence with the abbey, purchasing land for her
own foundation from the abbess in 1230, but she eschewed any connection with the royal mausoleum, unlike the next Queen of England, Isabelle of Angoulême. Berengaria had had little joy from her marriage, and John and Eleanor made it quite clear in the year after her widowhood that her concerns were of little importance to them. Her resistance to the Angevin way of death has something assertive about it, a little gesture of defiance towards the motherin-law who was the most powerful woman of her age.
During her brief meeting with the grieving Eleanor at Fontevrault, Berengaria discussed with the papal envoy, Cardinal Pietro di Capua, the prospective marriage of her sister Blanca. The bridegroom was Thibaut of Champagne, Eleanor’s grandson by her daughter Marie, who had succeeded to his brother’s comital title two years earlier. Berengaria accompanied her sister to her wedding at Chartres in July and acted as witness to the ceremony Marie, the former regent of Champagne, had died the previous year, but Berengaria’s association with the Champenois court highlights a neglected link that hints at a spiritual affinity between Richard and herself, whatever disappointments their marriage brought them.
Until their deaths, Richard and his half-sister Marie had shared a confessor, Adam de Perseigne, abbot of the eponymous Cistercian abbey in the diocese of Le Mans. The Cistercians were much favoured by Berengaria’s Navarrese family, a tradition she was to continue in her own foundation, and in her widowhood Adam remained a staunch supporter and friend to her. Unlike many clerics of the day, he sustained warm relations with women (though he was sharp on the frivolities of Blanca’s court), and while none of his letters to Berengaria survive, he also corresponded with her sister and appears as a signatory and witness on several documents relating to Berengaria, as well as assisting in the establishment of her own Cistercian house and personally selecting his successor, Gautier de Perseigne. Richard and Marie had enjoyed a close relationship, the strongest attestation of which is a poem written in captivity by Richard addressed to his ‘Countess sister’. The connection with Adam de Perseigne suggests that Berengaria was less marginalised among the second generation of Angevin royalty than has previously been assumed. Through him she was linked to one of the most significant female rulers of her day, and their friendship after Richard’s death indicates that both husband and wife had confided and trusted in this astute, literary cleric. The interests and values they shared with Adam were clearly mutual, and such confidence implies a subtle degree of sympathy between Richard and Berengaria.
Blanca of Champagne herself was soon widowed: Thibaut died in 1201, leaving her the mother of one child and expecting another. Her court provided a refuge for Berengaria over the next few years, as both Eleanor and John were too absorbed in the upheavals of the Angevin succession to concern themselves with her welfare. Another sadness had come with Joanna’s death late in 1199. Raymond of Toulouse had spent much of their marriage warring with his own barons, and had proved to be a neglectful and, it seems, cruel husband. Joanna had decided to leave him and turned to Richard for protection, but as she travelled to meet her brother, ill and pregnant with her second child, she received the news of his death from Eleanor at Niort. By August, she had managed to rejoin her mother and brother John, who were keeping court at Rouen, and when it was obvious that she was dying she asked to take the veil as a nun at Fontevrault. Eleanor was able to persuade the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, to set aside canon law to admit this unconventional vocation, and though Joanna was too unwell to stand up in church to make her profession, she was able to ensure her entitlement to be buried as a veiled nun after her death. She was interred alongside her father and brother at Fontevrault. Her child, possibly born by Caesarian section, lived only a few hours. Joanna made no mention of Berengaria in her will, but then this princess who had been a queen had nothing to leave but 3,000 marks given in charity by her brother John, which she requested be distributed among the poor. The Cypriot princess who had shared Berengaria and Joanna’s experiences of the Holy Land seems to have had a knack for being in the right place at the right time: she became the next Countess of Toulouse.
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Eleanor of Aquitaine had spent much of the period between Richard’s reconciliation with John at Lisieux in 1195 and his death in 1199 in relative seclusion at Fontevrault, where she still lived in royal style, albeit on a smaller scale. When, on his deathbed, Richard finally confirmed John, rather than Arthur of Brittany, as his heir, Eleanor knew she would have to intervene to ensure the succession. Richard’s decision has been attributed to Eleanor’s influence, but why was she so keen for John, who had repeatedly shown himself to be so disloyal, to inherit over Arthur, who, as Geoffrey’s son, arguably had the better hereditary claim and could also add Brittany to the Angevin power bloc? One answer is Eleanor’s powerful dislike of Arthur’s mother, Constance of Brittany Since Arthur was barely into his teens, a crown for the son would mean a regency for the mother. The reduction of the governance of a large area of Europe to a squabble among women is typical of the way in which Eleanor’s legend has subsumed her political acumen. Underage kings were inevitably surrounded by destructive factionalism, and the aggressive tactics of Philip of France would require a strong opponent with a united baronage to oppose them. Moreover, John had effectively been king of England for some years, he was experienced and, with the backing of Eleanor’s status in Aquitaine, stood a better chance of holding the Angevin lands together.
John was invested as Duke of Normandy on 25 April 1199 and crowned King of England at Westminster on Ascension Day the same year. The English and many of the Norman lords accepted his accession, but the situation on the Continent was far from clear. Arthur continued to behave as if his rights superseded John’s, for example, in presuming to appoint William des Roches as seneschal of Anjou. Accompanied by Des Roches and his mother, he then led an army to the city of Angers, which promptly surrendered to him. The lords of Anjou, Maine and Touraine now came out in support for Arthur, and Eleanor was obliged to come out of retirement at Fontevrault to go to war. She selected Mercadier, one of Richard’s most loyal military captains, as her general, and accompanied him to Angers. Constance and Arthur fled north and the city was sacked on Eleanor’s orders as punishment for accepting Arthur. Eleanor then commanded that the surrounding countryside be laid to waste. If the dating of these incidents is correct, then it is an impressive example of Eleanor’s energy at the age of seventy-three. In the space of a fortnight she had travelled from Chalus to Fontevrault after Richard’s death, buried her son, campaigned in Anjou and arrived back at Fontevrault to make a grant to the abbey of St Marie de Turpenay for the celebration of Richard’s anniversary, witnessed by Berengaria, on 21 April.
Eleanor could have rested for only a few days at Fontevrault, because on 29 April she was at Loudun, then at Poitiers on 4 May, Montreuil-Bonnin the next day, followed by Niort (where she broke the news of Richard’s death to Joanna), Andilly, La Rochelle, St-Jean d’Andely, Saintes and Tours. By 1 July she was in Bordeaux, and in Rouen by the end of the month. The purpose of this progress was most obviously to consolidate support among her own people, but she also initiated a small political revolution when, at Tours in June, she paid homage to Philip Augustus of France for her Aquitaine dominions. This was an extraordinary act for a woman to perform independently While it was not unknown for women to hold lands in their own right, Capetian tradition had always deemed that a man — a husband or a brother — paid homage as her proxy. To do so personally made a powerful symbolic statement about a woman’s ability to wield authority. Moreover, it was a shrewd move in the campaign against Arthur. By paying homage herself, Eleanor was effectively separating Aquitaine and Poitou from the other Angevin dominions. Having already exchanged a series of charters with John designating him her heir, she was able to deprive Philip of France of any legal cause to invade her lands or interfere there to Arthur’s advantage. To have acted so quickly, in such a compressed period of time and under the strains of bereavement and war shows not only an informe
d knowledge of the law but a remarkable ability to apply it.
Eleanor displayed similar ingenuity in her inauguration of communes or corporations in several towns, including La Rochelle. Based on a set of rules known as the Establishments of Rouen, these charters have sometimes been seen as evidence of a proto-democratic strain in Eleanor’s governance, but in fact by granting ‘independence’ to towns, Eleanor was incorporating the relatively new commercial power of the urban bourgeoisie more firmly into the older system of vassalage. The flattered burghers were permitted a mayor (subject to Eleanor’s approval) and the freedom to order some of their own affairs, but along with the right to defend themselves and their customs came an obligation to participate in the levy when Eleanor summoned her vassals to war.
Swindled by Richard out of her dower properties, Berengaria was eventually obliged to throw herself on the mercy of the French and spent the remainder of her life as Lady of Le Mans. From this point she no longer used any of the titles that had accompanied her signature in Rome over a decade before. Now she signed herself ‘humilissima regina quondam Anglorum’ — ‘most humble former queen of the English’. Berengaria had been a queen without a kingdom, but in the city of Le Mans and its suburbs, a total of thirty-seven parishes, she found her own small realm. She was permitted to appoint her own seneschal, Herbert de Tucé, and members of her household included Paulin Boutier, a knight, Pierre Prévot, her cantor, Simon and Garsia, her clerks, Adam and then Gautier de Perseigne, her chaplains, and her women, of whom one, Julian eta, was an embroideress. Thus established, she began to take an active and rather contentious part in local politics.