Eleanor of Aquitaine (30 page)
Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
King Stephen’s son, Eustace, disgusted at what seemed to him spineless conduct on the part of his father, left Wallingford reeling with rage. However much detested throughout England for his obnoxious qualities, Eustace considered himself the rightful heir to the throne. Plowing through the Suffolk countryside, he rode up to the Abbey of Bury Saint Edmunds, where he audaciously demanded money to pay his men. The monks, while welcoming him graciously, refused to part with their silver. On August 17, “he ordered all the country round about, and especially St. Edmunds’ harvests, to be plundered and all the loot to be brought to a nearby castle of his.” That evening, sitting down to a dinner of eels, he was said to have strangled on the first bite and to have died almost immediately.
Eustace’s sudden death can most likely be attributed to tainted fish, but to the twelfth-century mind it seemed a punishment direct from the hand of God, who seemed to be laboring in the cause of Henry Plantagenet. On November 6, 1153, his support tottering, his spirit collapsed, Stephen met with Henry at Winchester to discuss terms of peace. The two men traveled together to London, where, in the presence of the leading nobles of the land, a treaty was hammered out: “Be it known to you that I, the King of England, Stephen, have made Henry, Duke of Normandy, the successor to the kingdom of England after me, and my heir by hereditary right, and thus I have given and confirmed to him and his heirs the kingdom of England.” By the terms of the Treaty of Winchester, Stephen was to rule for the remainder of his life, with Henry, his “son and heir,” to succeed him. After a generation of civil war, the vows of fealty that the English nobles had made to Matilda had finally come to pass, and the way was paved for the first of the Plantagenet dynasty.
Stephen, however, was fifty-eight years old, in fairly good health, and although he had agreed that “in all the business of the kingdom I will act with the advice of the duke,” Henry knew that he had no real authority. He understood, too, that Stephen might live possibly another ten or fifteen years and that certain malcontents “whose teeth were spears and arrows” were already trying to sow discord between them. Having accomplished his objective and at a loss as to what to do next, Henry lingered anticlimatically in England until the spring of 1154. Around Easter, he decided to return to Normandy, where he “was joyfully received by his mother, his brothers and all the peoples of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou.”
During Henry’s sixteen-month absence Eleanor had produced a special triumph of her own. On August 17, the same day that Eustace had died, she had given birth to a son, whom she had taken upon herself to christen William, after the dukes of Aquitaine, and designate as heir to her duchy. If, as has been suggested, the name also honored Henry’s great-grandfather William the Conqueror, this surely must have been a secondary consideration in her mind. Although the chroniclers neglect to mention Henry’s wife in the list of those who joyfully welcomed his return, Eleanor had more reason than most for rejoicing. At thirty, she had killed off her past as certainly as if it had never existed, and it must have seemed as though the birth of her son represented a final ironic salvo to Louis Capet. One of the prices of divorce had been the loss of her daughters, with what anguish it is impossible to say, and any visiting privileges she may have been guaranteed had been immediately forfeit when she married Henry.
At last the self-contempt she had experienced through her inability to bear an heir for the Franks had vanished: at last the son for whom Louis had hungered had been born, but he would sit upon another throne. And as if to prove that her child were no fluke, no lucky accident from a woman almost past her prime as a childbearer, she became pregnant again just two months after Henry’s return. Looking ahead, she could see only days of honor and glory in which regret would play no part. Henry’s success in England had painted on her horizon the prospect of someday being the wealthiest, most prestigious queen in Christendom, and yet Eleanor was realist enough to understand that she never could have enjoyed that future had she not provided her young husband with a son. Henry seemed delighted with the eight-month-old infant, as he would be with all his children when they were young, spoiling them, making grandiose plans for their futures, lavishing paternal passion on them far in excess of what could be expected of the ordinary medieval father. Unknown to Eleanor at this time, William was not Henry’s only son. In the previous year, probably a month or two after William’s birth, a child had been born to an English woman of the streets, Ykenai, who, according to Walter Map, was “a common harlot who stooped to all uncleanness” and who had gulled Henry into believing the child his. “Without reason and with too little discernment,” chides Map, Henry had received the child as his own and named him Geoffrey.
Eleanor’s life underwent minor changes during the six months that followed Henry’s return. Throwing himself tumultuously into the business of ordering his affairs, he relieved her of the reins of government, an authority Eleanor may have relinquished with some relief at that time. Some of her vassals in Aquitaine, taking advantage of both duke and duchess’s absence, had begun to cautiously test their power, and Henry, after stopping at Rouen to see his mother, made a flying trip to the south in an effort to put down the smoldering fires of rebellion. Watching him in action, Eleanor was more aware than ever of the overwhelming force of Henry’s personality and his thunderous roars when thwarted. By the end of June, he was back at his mother’s court in Rouen, where Eleanor joined him and met her mother-in-law. In her relations with Louis’s mother she had been notably unsuccessful, mutual antagonism driving Adelaide from the court, but with Matilda it would be another story. There was much for Eleanor to admire in this remarkable, hard-headed dowager who had spent two decades fighting for her son’s inheritance. Fascinated by Matilda from a distance, she found, however, that it would not be easy to like her at close quarters. Aside from the empress’s cool, formal manner, she had a type of relationship with her son that immediately aroused Eleanor’s natural jealousy. From the outset, it was made plain to her that Henry truly valued only his mother’s opinion, and to a woman like Eleanor, with strong opinions of her own, this must have been exasperating indeed. The bond between Matilda and Henry, more akin to two generals than mother and son, stirred her antagonism. She soon discovered that if Henry wanted advice—and at this period he did, apparently, seek the opinions of others—it was to Matilda that he went for guidance; it was Matilda’s judgment on political affairs that he valued above all others. This must have been a disturbing revelation to Eleanor, who considered herself, by virtue of age, experience, and her capacity as his wife, to be a more fitting confidante.
Eleanor’s court was not able to survive the move from Angers to Rouen, since Matilda, though highly literate, preferred philosophers to poets; reluctantly, the troubadours made their way back to the more congenial southland. It promised to be an uneventful summer, although Eleanor would find the time passing quickly, and certainly she could never complain of boredom. Messengers, bringing news from London, Paris, and Rome, came and went continually. Henry, rarely home, had no sooner returned to Rouen than he began to think of leaving, once to besiege a troublesome vassal at Torigni, once in August to meet briefly with Louis Capet. In September, an illness sent him to bed, but he recovered rapidly, and by early October he was in the Vexin, campaigning again. During that summer reports about Louis’s private affairs drifted into the Rouen command post. Rousing himself from post-divorce lethargy, Louis set off on a pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela. Ostensibly a religious expedition, it was also for the purpose of inspecting the daughter of the king of Castile as a possible bride. Evidently Constance, a sober maiden who bore no resemblance in personality or looks to Eleanor, passed his scrutiny, for Louis returned to Paris betrothed. No doubt to Eleanor’s amusement, her former husband traveled all the way to Spain and back by way of Toulouse and Montpellier so that he would not have to ask Eleanor for a safe conduct nor step foot on her territory.
Toward the end of October, with Henry still away in the Vexin, only Eleanor and Matilda were in Rouen to receive a travel-stained courier from England, the bearer of an important message from Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury: On October 25, King Stephen had died at Dover from “a flux of hemorrhoids”—Henry must “come without delay and take possession of the kingdom.” The call, which no one had anticipated for a decade or more, had arrived like a thief in the night. Henry, who had a reputation for traveling faster than any other man in Europe, rushed back from the Vexin, and within two weeks he had collected a properly imposing retinue of soldiers, barons, and prelates, men who had long ago tied their destiny to his, as well as old crusading companions of Eleanor’s, and hurried them all to the windy harbor town of Barfleur to help him claim his first crown and Eleanor her second. Matilda, oddly enough, would not be among those present at Henry’s anointing, for she either volunteered or was requested to remain in Normandy to keep the peace, but among the party were Henry’s two younger brothers, Eleanor’s sister and brothers, and the infant Prince William.
In England, the throne remained vacant. Stephen was dead and with him had died a generation of misery and civil war. He was not regretted, but the new king, a mere lad, folk said, remained an unknown quantity. Still, people hoped great things of Henry, peace if nothing else, and the versifiers composed hopeful odes in his honor: “Then shall beam forth, in England’s happier hour/ Justice with mercy, and well-balanced power.”
Out to sea the thunder growled, and at Barfleur Henry, immobilized, stared at the Channel churning with sleet, rain, and violent winds. Each day he consulted his mariners and swore noisily; each day, restless as a caged lion, he scanned the leaden November sky for a break in the weather, but the storms perversely continued. Monotonously, the days wore on until they had tarried in the inns and taverns of Barfleur a whole month. Eleanor had time to watch the seabirds shrieking and to converse endlessly with Petronilla and her brothers, time to ponder the bizarre twists and turns that had brought her to this sleet-swept port. Whether directed by her own sagacity or by God or even by some happy conjunction of the planets, she had fastened her future to the Plantagenet star, which now seemed destined to dominate the heavens. The weatherbeaten youth she had scrutinized so carefully in Paris only three years earlier “seemed to have obtained divine favor in almost everything, not only from the beginning of his reign but even from his first year and his very birth.” At the same time, she could not have helped but reflect how the rise in his fortunes had been connected to deaths, most of them untimely: Prince William drowning in the White Ship, Geoffrey Anjou’s sudden passing, Eustace strangling on eels, Stephen’s death only a year after Winchester. Each man’s removal from the scene had brought Henry a step closer to the empire for which he hungered. She knew that his blood raced for yet more land, more power, because he had been known to say “that the whole world was too small a prize for a single courageous and powerful ruler.” With this man she could not predict where the future might take her. For the moment there was England to think of, and from everything she knew of the country—its cold, damp climate; civilization’s last frontier, inhabited by rude barbarians—it seemed the opposite of Aquitaine and far, far worse than Paris. But there would be no returning to Aquitaine, perhaps not for many years. Aquitaine must wait, as it had always waited for her, a fair and gracious sanctuary.
By December 6, after four long weeks of waiting, the wind slackened somewhat, but fog still shrouded the shore, and the sea looked as menacing as ever. Henry, however, had reached the limit of his patience, and “by God’s eyes” he would delay no longer: the next day. he announced, was the feast of Saint Nicholas, protector of sailors and travelers, and they would sail, regardless of the weather. Before dawn, the voyagers heard Mass and then filed into the galleys. The sea was so hidden in silvery fog that the world might have ended just beyond the harbor. Eleanor, seven months pregnant and carrying her fifteen-month-old son, boarded one of the heaving vessels, which cautiously proceeded into the wrinkled face of the Channel. With her across that stretch of choppy sea she took more than her children, born and unborn: she also transferred Aquitaine to the dominion of the English crown, thus planting the seeds of that century-long conflict that would only be resolved, ironically, by another woman, Jeanne d’Arc.
On December 8, after a day and a night of rolling in the fog, the convoy finally dropped anchor on the southern coast of England, although the ships were scattered for miles along the coastline. The royal vessel landed in a harbor near the New Forest, but Henry, feverishly impatient as usual, could not be bothered to wait for his escort. Immediately, he and Eleanor set out for Winchester, which housed part of the royal treasury. The others were left to catch up as best they could. The English, incredulous at the rumor that Henry had ridden the waves of the storm, emerged from their hearths, sat down by the frozen road, and waited for a glimpse of their twenty-one-year-old king with his ruddy, leonine face and the famous queen who had divorced a dull king for a bold young warrior and who would ever be known to the English as the Eagle. By the time the royal procession neared London, its ranks were swollen by local barons and prelates and by crowds of villagers with snow-damp feet trudging in the wake of history.
Eleanor’s first glimpse of London in that chill December must have given her a moment’s pause. There is no exact way to fix the population of the city in 1154, although from various accounts an estimate of forty thousand seems reasonable. The chronicler William Fitz Stephen chauvinistically called London “among the noble and celebrated cities of the world,” renowned for its healthy air, its honest Christian burghers and “the modesty of its matrons.” The women, he added, “are very Sabines.” Eleanor saw no Sabine women; rather it was a man’s city to which “every nation under heaven delighted in bringing their trade by sea.” By the docks along the Thames, she could see wine shops and painted women and ships being repaired with pegs and nails, ropes being hauled, and crews loading. “The Arabian sends gold ... the Nile sends precious stones; the men of Norway and Russia, furs and sables; nor is China absent with purple silk. The Gauls come with their wines.” London was a rich city, where trade was god and men thought mainly about making money, where one of the biggest attractions was the Friday horse fair at Smooth Field (Smithfield), where earls, barons, and knights came to buy the high-stepping palfreys with their gleaming coats, colts stepping with jaunty tread, war-horses with tremulous ears and enormous haunches, and where, in another part of the field, countryfolk perused cows with full udders, woolly sheep, and mares fit for the plow. London, like Paris, teemed with people. The streets were lined with rows of wooden houses, firetraps smeared with red, blue, and black paint, and many of the residents were tradesmen who manufactured goods on their premises. In Chepeside, the busiest street in the city, the shops of the drapers and goldsmiths displayed silk mantles from Damascus and enameled trinket boxes from Limoges. Londoners were inordinately proud of their city. “The only plagues of London,” conceded William Fitz Stephen, “are the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires.”
Other books
Zollocco: A Novel of Another Universe by Cynthia Joyce Clay
The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler
Just One Day by Gayle Forman
Miss Manners by Iman Sid
Breathless by Cheryl Douglas
The Dream Widow by Stephen Colegrove
Contagious by Emily Goodwin
Paradise Hops by Crowe, Liz
Miss Delacourt Has Her Day by Heidi Ashworth
Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth by Alice Hunt, Anna Whitelock
