Eleanor of Aquitaine (56 page)

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Authors: Marion Meade

BOOK: Eleanor of Aquitaine
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In December, Richard kept his Christmas court in reasonable state at Bures in Normandy, but the minstrels, in whom he normally reveled, were missing. The talk was of ships and arbalests and the latest in military gadgetry. Having cut his teeth on Eleanor’s stories of the disastrous Second Crusade, he was determined to avoid the errors of Louis Capet, whom he had come to regard as an idiot. He would make no such stupid mistake as bringing his army overland through enemy territory, planning instead to travel to the Holy Land by sea. Already along the coast of England, the great fleet was being readied, one hundred ships and fourteen busses, “vessels of vast use, wonderful speed, and great strength. The lead ship had three rudders, thirteen anchors, thirty oars, two sails and triple ropes of every kind; moveover it had everything that a ship can want.” On board would be loaded the wealth of England translated into gold and silver, arms of all sorts, supplies of bacon, cheese, wine, flour, pepper, biscuits, wax, spiced meats, and syrups. No pilgrims or Amazons, no camp followers or troubadours, found their way into the ranks of Richard’s army. The Third Crusade, a purely military expedition, would be governed by strict rules of conduct. “Whoever shall kill a man on ship-board,” the king wrote, “shall be bound to the dead man and thrown into the sea.... If anyone shall be convicted of having drawn a knife, he shall lose his hand.... If any man shall curse, swear, or revile his fellows, he shall pay an ounce of silver for each offence.”
In February 1190, Eleanor left behind the fog and darkness of the English winter and crossed to the Continent as a free woman for the first time in seventeen years. Her memory, stretching back nearly seven decades, now enabled her to sort the chaff from the wheat. The crusading fervor that had enveloped Europe in a white heat of religious emotion lacked the power to rouse her, and with a cynicism reminiscent of her late husband’s, she saw the rescue of the Holy Land as a distraction from the important business of the Plantagenets. Let those who had nothing better to do fritter away their energies in Outremer; the real concern, as she saw it, was not Saladin but the preservation of the house of Plantagenet and especially the rock on which it had been built, England. In those months of early 1190, she detected a host of dangers threatening her house, both within and without. Perhaps at her insistence, a family council was held at Nonancourt in March to clarify the king’s arrangements for England and to weatherproof the kingdom during his absence. Present at the meeting were her youngest son and Henry’s bastard, Geoffrey, now archbishop of York, both of whom Richard required to take an oath that they would stay out of England for three years. His objective was fairly clear: to prevent two potential troublemakers from encroaching upon his royal prerogatives and to leave the regents a free hand in conducting the affairs of the kingdom. Eleanor did not, evidently, wholly agree with this policy, because soon afterward, she prevailed upon Richard to allow John’s return, no doubt believing this the lesser of two evils.
To judge from the charters she signed that spring and early summer, the queen resided in Anjou and Normandy. During this time, Richard made a trip to Aquitaine. but Eleanor, curiously, did not accompany him, nor did she visit her homeland on her own, the betrayals of 1173 possibly having left an unconscious residue of distaste for the land of her forebears. Despite her cynicism for the Crusade, she must have felt a pride in her warrior son that made up for all the years of imprisonment and struggle on his behalf. Already Richard Plantagenet was being extolled as the hero of the century, a prince to whom no amount of praise could do adequate justice. His contemporaries, unable to compare him to any great personage of their own time, looked to the pantheon of heroes from the past; he-had, they vowed, the valor of Alexander and Roland, the eloquence of Nestor, the prudence of Ulysses. “But why need we expend labour extolling so great a man? He needs no superfluous commendation. He was superior to all others.”
The Third Crusade was not, of course, a project of Richard alone—the leadership was to be shared with Philip Augustus—but even before it departed, the Capetian had been shoved into the background. When the crusading host convened at Vézelay in the first days of July, it was Richard to whom the knights flocked for information and counsel, it was Richard who looked like a god in his mantle spangled with silver crescents and his cap of scarlet and gold, his Spanish stallion equipped with a gorgeous inlaid saddle and a bridle set with precious stones. Already people called him a lion, and perhaps on that field in Burgundy many remembered Bertran de Born’s waspish sirventès, “Tell Sir Richard from me that he is a lion and King Philip seems to me a lamb.”
Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that by the time the Crusade set off on July 4—Richard bound for Marseille to meet his fleet, Philip heading over the Alps to Genoa—the king of the Franks had fallen into a bad humor. In recent months, he had grown increasingly hostile to Richard, a phenomenon that so puzzled their contemporaries that some put it down to the work of the devil. Bedfellows only a year earlier, they now sniped and snarled, their great affection failing to survive Henry’s death. To Richard’s dismay, Philip had insisted upon renewing his tiresome harangues about his half sister Alais. Now that Henry was dead, there was, of course, no reason for delay, and yet Richard seemed no more eager for the wedding than his father had been. A few weeks before departure, Philip had issued an ultimatum: Either Richard must marry Alais immediately or return her to her kin, along with her dower. Richard, however, proved as slippery as Henry in the matter of Alais. Since women were forbidden to join the Crusade, he stalled Philip by promising that the marriage would take place on his return from the Holy Land. And with this, Philip had to be content.
Not without cause did Eleanor despise Alais Capet. When Louis’s nine-year-old orphaned daughter had arrived at Poitiers in 1169, Eleanor had treated her as one of her own children, even going out of her way to love the child and polish her as a fit partner for her special son. Alais had been thirteen when Henry brought her, along with Eleanor and his other captives, to England in the summer of 1174, and somehow, soon after, he had seduced the girl. Eleanor did not know how that unnatural relationship started, but it affected her more deeply than Rosamond Clifford or any of Henry’s other women. Even though her husband had made his court a brothel after she had left him, Eleanor could excuse the other women who shared his bed. Lowborn, they could be charitably forgiven for responding to the overtures of a mighty king. But apparently she could not excuse a royal princess. In her eyes, Alais must have willed the affair, and for that, Eleanor could never forgive her. She knew, too, that Alais had borne Henry a child, although it did not survive. For years, Alais must have eaten at her like a cankerworm, because one of her first acts after Henry’s death had been to order her imprisonment. That a woman who had opened the dungeons of England because she knew the miseries of confinement firsthand would have decreed that selfsame fate for Alais Capet is an excellent measure of the intensity of her feelings.
The cries of Philip Augustus for Richard’s marriage to Alais affected the queen as little as the birds chirping in the trees. As she knew and as she had made Richard understand, the shopworn Alais Capet was no longer marriageable, at least not to the king of England. Eleanor was not above advising Richard to lie when it was necessary, and so Philip had been pacified with promises of Alais’s marriage at the conclusion of the Crusade. In the meantime, Eleanor determined to take the matter into her own hands. Her greatest anxiety since Henry’s death was the question of the succession. Of the five sons she had borne, only two remained, lion-hearted Richard and light-minded John, and the insecurity resulting from that unalterable fact must have been overwhelming. At the age of thirty-two, Richard still had not wed; he had no direct heirs, and if he should perish in the Holy Land, what would become of the Plantagenet empire?
There were three possible aspirants to the crown, none of them acceptable to Eleanor: her grandson Arthur, a child born posthumously to Geoffrey, was only three years old, but both the boy and his mother, Constance, were loathed by the Plantagenets. The second possibility was Henry’s illegitimate son, Geoffrey. Eleanor distrusted him, for despite his bastardy, she saw him as a possible pretender, and perhaps she had taken undue alarm over a report that he had placed a golden bowl on his head and called out in jest: “Is not this skull fit to wear a crown?” In order to discourage Geoffrey from any further thoughts in this direction, Eleanor reluctantly considered Henry’s deathbed wish that his son become archbishop of York. Geoffrey, hotheaded and quarrelsome, was noted for neither learning nor piety and, as far as Eleanor was concerned, totally unqualified for the position of archbishop. Nevertheless, she decided to support his cause, because the taking of holy orders would render him ineligible for further mischief. The third candidate for the throne was her youngest son, a strange and self-centered boy in whom she had no confidence whatsoever. In fact, the idea of John on the throne of England was a possibility not to be contemplated without crying aloud. In view of these distressing alternatives, Eleanor determined that Richard must marry quickly and produce heirs of his own. Quite apart from her wish to secure the succession, there was another special reason for her great concern over Richard’s marriage. Although he had always been close to her and even though he had been reared in a feminine court where women were to be respected, he did not like the female sex. Not only was he averse to marrying Alais because she had been his father’s mistress, he objected to marrying any woman. It would be interesting to know how this knowledge initially affected Eleanor, but surely it must have caused her some pain. For good or ill, she had molded him into a beautiful, glorious warrior, the Coeur de Lion, whose name would still be synonymous with valor eight centuries later. The only flaw in her planning was that her son was a homosexual.
- Despite the delicate nature of the subject, the question of Richard’s homosexuality seems to rest in the area of certainty rather than of probability. While contemporary historians were unwilling to discuss the matter at any length, they made repeated innuendoes about his unnatural appetites while at the same time making the nature of their charges abundantly clear. Not only was it backstairs gossip in every court in Europe, but Richard himself confessed to homosexual affairs on two occasions. Certainly, Philip Augustus, who may have been one of his partners, understood that Richard felt no inclination to marry Alais or any other woman. Whatever the dismay or grief Eleanor may have felt about this matter, in the end she came to view it as an irrelevancy. Richard’s unconventional sexual habits did not negate his primary duty as king: to marry and sire a male heir. She knew that he slept with women occasionally, because he had an illegitimate child from a woman of Cognac, a son then about five years old who had been named Philip in honor of his closest friend.
In those months between Henry’s death and the departure of the Crusade, Eleanor brought Richard to terms with the necessity of marrying and marrying quickly. Scanning the royal houses of Europe for a possible bride, one who would not be disqualified by consanguinity, Eleanor was careful to take Richard’s preferences into consideration. It seemed that some years earlier he had briefly made the acquaintance of the daughter of King Sancho of Navarre. While attending a tournament at Pamplona in the company of the king’s son, one of his favorite jousting companions, Richard had even addressed some passionate verse to the Princess Berengaria. This was enough for Eleanor. Barely had the Crusade left Vézelay than she stored Alais Capet, securely guarded, in Rouen and began a
chevauchée
into the deep south, traveling either to Bordeaux or, according to some accounts,. as far as Navarre to fetch the princess. On meeting Berengaria, the queen must have realized that this was not a woman to reverse Richard’s history of sexual deviation. There was no fault to be found with her; she was attractive enough, and even though the chroniclers called her “more learned than beautiful,” they also described her as “a prudent maid, a gentle lady, virtuous and fair, neither false nor double-tongued.” But Berengaria, for all her admirable virtues, lacked spirit. Unlike Eleanor, she was a passive female who would allow herself to be buffeted by the winds of circumstance and never raise a finger in her own behalf. No doubt overawed at the prospect of becoming Coeur de Lion’s queen, she delivered herself into Eleanor’s hands like a lamb being carried to slaughter.
The passage of time pressed heavily upon the queen’s shoulders. She had no intention of waiting until the Crusade had returned for Richard to be married—the risks of death in the Holy Land were all too familiar to her—and before Christmas, with Berengaria in tow, she was already on the road, hastening to overtake the army. The prospect of a winter journey through the Alps would have daunted the hardiest knight, but Eleanor, like Henry, refused to wait for weather. Fortunately for her purposes, the combined armies of Richard and Philip were wintering at Messina in Sicily, and it was there that the queen hoped to present her son with a bride, although one receives the impression that she would have followed Richard to the gates of Jerusalem if necessary. For several months her exact whereabouts are unrecorded, but next she comes to light at Lodi, near Milan, and then it is possible to trace her steps down the western side of the Italian boot from Pisa to Naples and finally to Brindisi, where one of Richard’s ships waited to bring her safely to Messina. The terrain was not unfamiliar; forty years earlier, a Crusader herself, she had come to Brindisi, sick in mind and body, to collect a shipwrecked husband. It was in these lands that she had learned of Raymond of Antioch’s death and here that she had laid her hopes in the hands of a kindly pontiff, only to be outsmarted. Louis, Raymond, Eugenius, all of her generation and even some of the next already lay in the dust.

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