Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (50 page)
It was obvious to Henry that the time had come to put his house in order. If his heir mocked him, there still remained time to gather in the rest of the brood. Shortly, however, he discovered his mistake. “Soon after, the younger Henry, devising evil against his father from every side by the advice of the French king, went secretly into Aquitaine where his two youthful brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, were living with their mother, and with her connivance, so it is said, he incited them to join him and brought them back to France.” With three sons now beyond his jurisdiction, Henry still did not take the runaways terribly seriously. Childish petulance was all that troubled them. Apparently undisturbed, he had his hawks and hounds shipped over from England and passed the time hunting. More or less impotent for the moment, he was reduced to threatening Eleanor. Through Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen he appealed to her to end the game, adding assurances that if she and the boys returned home, all would be forgiven.
“Pious queen, most illustrious queen,” wrote the archbishop, “before matters come to a worse end, return with your sons to your husband, whom you are bound to obey and with whom you are forced to live; return lest he mistrust you or your sons. Most surely we know that he will in every way possible show you his love and grant you the assurance of perfect safety. Bid your sons, we beg you, to be obedient and devoted to their father, who for their sakes has undergone so many difficulties, run so many dangers, and undertaken so many labors.”
The archbishop then lifted before the queen’s eyes the specter of serious punishment. “Either go back to your husband, or by canon law we shall be compelled and forced to lay the censure of the Church on you. Although we say it unwillingly, unless you return to your senses we shall do this with grief and tears.”
Eleanor did not deign to reply, indeed there was no reason at all to pay the slightest morsel of attention to either Henry’s importunities or the archbishop’s threats of excommunication. As for her husband’s secondhand promises of “love” and “perfect safety,” she was wary of the word love on his tongue. At any event, by Easter of 1173, the dagger was poised for the thrust, with the Young King’s escape the signal for a widespread uprising against the king; in the half of western Christendom every baron with a grievance against his Plantagenet overlord saw that the hour had struck. The confederation, which months earlier had included mainly the queen, her sons, and her ex-husband, had now swollen to include a motley assortment of fresh recruits: the houses of Champagne and Flanders, liege men of the young princes, Poitevins burning for revenge, aggravated barons of Brittany, English lords eager to escape Henry’s crippling taxes, roustabouts who had followed in the wake of the popular Young King; in the far north, even King William of Scotland threw his support to Eleanor’s son. In England, Richard of Dover’s investiture as archbishop of Canterbury was broken off in midceremony by a messenger from the Young King protesting an election held without his consent. In Aquitaine, all officials appointed by the king were promptly shown the door; in Anjou, Brittany, and Maine, the king’s authority was stoutly repudiated. In that spring of 1173, only Normandy remained faithful to its overlord, and of all Henry’s family, “John alone, who was a little boy, remained with his father.” The Plantagenet edifice, constructed with such precision over the past two decades, seemed on the brink of folding like a house of cards.
Toward the end of June, the revolt began in earnest. On the twenty-ninth, Count Philip of Flanders invaded Normandy and captured Aumale north of Rouen, while Eleanor’s sons, “laying waste their father’s lands on every side with fire, sword and rapine,” received their first taste of real warfare at the siege of Driencourt Castle at Neufchatel. Louis Capet set up his stonethrowers and siege engines at Verneuil, one of Henry’s strongest fortifications on the Norman-French border. By midsummer Eleanor must have felt confident that Henry Plantagenet’s days on the throne were numbered. The king appeared to be stunned, not without good reason; Earl Robert of Leicester, the son of his former chief justiciar and one of his most loyal supporters, had deserted to the camp of the Young King, and the count of Flanders readied a fleet to invade England. Each day brought tidings of fresh disaster for the king and promises of a new regime for Eleanor. In August, however, the situation dramatically altered as the lion seemed to slowly shake himself awake and exhibit the speed he had shown in the early days of their marriage. With loyal vassals in short supply, certainly too few to form a decent army, Henry raided his treasury for funds to purchase mercenaries. Between August 12 and 19, he raced his army of ten thousand Brabantines from Normandy to Brittany at the rate of twenty miles a day. To Eleanor’s consternation, he began to stamp out, one by one, the fires of sedition.
As autumn drew near, Louis Capet decided to go home. His vassals had committed their time to Young Henry’s cause for only the traditional forty days of military service; if Louis remained in the field any longer, he would be obliged to pay them out of his own pocket, and even for his son-in-law, he would not go that far. From experience, Eleanor knew better than to trust Louis when it came to military ventures, but still she must have fumed to learn that he had requested a truce. On September 25, 1173, the two kings met under the spreading branches of a gigantic elm tree at Gisors in the Vexin, the traditional meeting place for the two rival powers. In the shade of the great tree, Henry’s three sons faced their father and listened impatiently to his offers of allowances and castles. Quickly, they realized that their situations had not changed, for Henry made no mention of authority. Rejecting what they considered bribes with the supreme disdain of those who have not yet tasted defeat, they confidently turned their backs on him and rode back to Paris with Louis. The fighting season had ended for the year, but in the spring they would strike again, and next time the attack would be aimed at the heart of his power, England.
It was late September now, and Eleanor must have sat uneasily in her high tower at Poitiers. Her sons may have been safe at the Capetian court, but no such security was vouchsafed to Eleanor, whose future suddenly appeared perilous. Rattling their way over the highroads of Normandy and Anjou came dismaying reports that her husband, having nothing to fear from Louis for the moment, was methodically moving his Brabantines in a southerly direction, slowly but unmistakably bearing down on Poitiers and eager to lay hands on the taproot of all his afflictions. In Touraine and northern Poitou he was capturing castles and razing walls, burning vineyards, and uprooting crops; hardly a day passed without the sight of terrorized refugees seeking safety behind Poitiers’s walls, their stomachs empty but their mouths full of horror stories about kin who had been captured and assigned to unknown Plantagenet dungeons. As the shadow of the king loomed closer, it was clearly time for Eleanor to leave her capital city, and yet she lingered. The reason for her delay can only be surmised: At that crucial moment when nearly the whole region north of Poitiers lay a smoking ruin, she must have disliked the idea of abandoning her province to the fury of her husband. Then. too, she must have experienced difficulty in coming to terms with the remaining alternative. If she fled, there was only one direction to go—the way of thousands of other refugees, including Becket and her sons. The wheel of fortune had made a cruel if complete revolution; at the age of fifty-one, was she reduced to abandoning her duchy and running to the Capets for protection? Undoubtedly, this was a step she wished to avoid at all costs, but in the end there was of course no choice. Even Ralph de Faye had deemed it prudent to winter along the Seine, and by the time Henry had set up his siege engines before the walls of Faye-la-Vineuse, he had already crossed into the Île-de-France. Only a few months earlier, one of Eleanor’s vassals had written boldly, “Rejoice, O Aquitaine, be jubilant, O Poitou, for the scepter of the king of the North Wind is drawing away from you,” but the rejoicing and jubilance had not survived the vintage.
When Eleanor finally decided to act, the last possible moment for flight had already passed. That she knew this is evident from the manner of her departure. She took with her no silken gowns or chests or maids. Disguised in a knight’s attire, she set out astride her mount, accompanied only by a few knights of her household. Along some road in the north of Poitou the queen’s little band was accosted, almost accidentally it seems, by a party of her own countrymen, unfortunately some of the few Poitevins still loyal to Henry Plantagenet and thus quick to assess the value of this prize that had dropped into their laps. Her capture was accomplished swiftly and silently. No chronicler had access to the facts, neither the date nor the place nor the names of her captors. The sole annalist to mention the episode was Gervase of Canterbury and then only to record his surprise that the most dignified queen in Europe should be found in men’s clothes—“mutata veste muliebri”—with her legs vulgarly straddling a horse. A twentieth-century historian suggests that her betrayers were four Poitevin barons who later received valuable grants from Henry; if that were truly the case, the men would have been known to her, no doubt vassals who had sworn homage, who had lazed about the Great Hall of her palace listening to the troubadours and partaking of her hospitality, and on whom she had tried to graft an enlightened consciousness. Whatever the manner of the confrontation between these men and their liege lady—whether men and horses crashed to the ground as her escort attempted a defense, whether her party was led away in helpless silence—the betrayal took place with secrecy and murderous efficiency. Nor did the king advertise the capture of his royal prisoner of war. Her proverbially disloyal countrymen had neatly taken care of his problems, both marital and martial, and now he would deal with her privately as the poorest villein would punish a faithless wife. Swiftly, the unrepentant queen was stored in a convenient fortress, Chinon perhaps, but for many months her whereabouts must have remained a mystery to her sons and supporters. She had disappeared as if swallowed up by an extraterrestrial invasion party. At one point, however, Eleanor and Henry must have faced each other in bitter colloquy. Did Henry threaten to execute her for treason? Did he fly into one of his Angevin rages and roll on the floor? The answers to such questions lie hidden in the mists of history, if indeed they were ever publicly known. Perhaps Henry forewent the pleasure of a tantrum and informed her with a deadly calm worse than rage that her future lay solely at his disposal. Despite the propaganda emanating from her court of love, she was, after all, his property. The principles of feudalism rode triumphant.
On Whitsunday, May 12, 1174. Henry himself arrived in Poitiers to scoop up the remnants of Eleanor’s court—Queen Marguerite and the Princess Alais; Henry’s sister, Emma of Anjou, Constance of Brittany and Alice of Maurienne; his daughter, Joanna—and then he proceeded to clean house. The
chevaliers
and songsters were sent on their way, idlers and tourneyers banished, key rebels flushed from their burrows and assigned to chains. Trustworthy men were placed in charge of the duchy. Eleanor’s famous court, the scene of brilliant fêtes and female fantasies of power, stood empty now. The Young King had gone, and Richard and Geoffrey—all moved on to challenge their destinies in the Île-de-France. Countess Marie, who had remained until shortly before Henry’s purge, was now back in Champagne with her tales of Arthur and Guinevere. The countess of Flanders had returned to Arras, where her husband, refusing to tolerate Amazons or goddesses, hung a young man who had dared to practice the principles of Andreas’s De Amore. The court of love was vacant now and the land in which it had flourished left to the winds of anarchy.
chevaliers
and songsters were sent on their way, idlers and tourneyers banished, key rebels flushed from their burrows and assigned to chains. Trustworthy men were placed in charge of the duchy. Eleanor’s famous court, the scene of brilliant fêtes and female fantasies of power, stood empty now. The Young King had gone, and Richard and Geoffrey—all moved on to challenge their destinies in the Île-de-France. Countess Marie, who had remained until shortly before Henry’s purge, was now back in Champagne with her tales of Arthur and Guinevere. The countess of Flanders had returned to Arras, where her husband, refusing to tolerate Amazons or goddesses, hung a young man who had dared to practice the principles of Andreas’s De Amore. The court of love was vacant now and the land in which it had flourished left to the winds of anarchy.
All through that dreary winter and spring of 1174 we hear nothing of Eleanor. The kings and knights, bishops and castles, even the pawns, still moved about the political chessboard, but the queen had been deftly removed and pocketed. It can be supposed, however, that her hope of release remained high, and if communications from the outside reached her, she would have been encouraged to learn that the Young King and Philip of Flanders, their army and fleet assembled, now waited only for a favorable wind to speed their flotilla across the Channel. The revolt by no means over, there always remained the chance of rescue, either by her sons or by Louis or by some sympathetic jailer.
Suddenly in July, doors were unbarred and drawbridges lowered, but not by friends. Eleanor was carried under close guard to the port of Barfleur “where a considerable number of ships had been assembled against the king’s arrival.” In fact, forty vessels had been hired to transport across the Channel Henry’s assortment of captive rebels and innocent bystanders; amid the crowd could be found the queen with her jailers, the Plantagenet children and daughters-in-law anxiously bewildered, and a number of well-known earls, countesses, and barons dragging their chains. The Channel was rough and the Norman coast lashed by summer storms. The first time Eleanor had watched the foaming breakers and waited for weather in this port, she had been thirty-two years old and held the world in the-palm of her hand. In a storm, she had crossed with her virile young husband to claim a crown, but now, in another storm, she may have seen the Channel as a runway to the tomb. She was an elderly woman whose moment had come and gone.
Storms had not stopped Henry in 1154, and they surely did not deter him now. To the terror of his sailors and captives, he ordered the fleet to sail on the morning of Monday, July 8. Standing on the deck of his ship, he lifted his eyes to the stormy skies and shouted above the gale a message to God, his attitude toward the Almighty always being that of one businessman to another, an equal from whom he expected fair dealing. “Lord, if in my heart I nourish plans which will bring peace to the clergy and the people, if the King of Heaven has decreed in His infinite mercy that my arrival shall mark the return of peace, then may He grant that I come safely to harbour. If He is opposed to my purpose and has decided to punish my kingdom, may I never be allowed to reach its shores.” The fleet rode into Southampton that same evening.
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