Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (60 page)
When his defiant boast was relayed to Richard, he countered with his own oath. “By God’s throat, if its walls were made of butter, yet would I hold them securely against Philip and all his forces!” And as if to prove his patience with the Franks exhausted, he proceeded to drive Philip out of the Vexin with such ferocity that Dieu-Donné was nearly drowned in the hasty retreat.
By the spring of 1199, Richard had turned his attention to other matters, one of them being the condition of his treasury. The construction of Chateau Gaillard had, unfortunately, helped to wipe out his resources. In March, his mind on the troublesome subject of money, he heard of an incident that immediately piqued his interest in that it seemed to offer the possibility of quick profit. A peasant plowing in a field on the outskirts of Chalus in the Limousin had accidentally unearthed what was claimed to be a treasure trove. The precious object was, the report said, a set of gold and silver figurines representing a king seated around a table with his family, perhaps some buried relic from Roman times. Viscount Aymar of Limoges, quick to claim the booty, failed to reckon with Richard’s interest, and when the king claimed his right, as overlord, to all buried treasures in his domains, Aymar apparently sent only a portion of the find. Richard’s response was to gather his mercenaries and hie himself to the Limousin. The castle of Chalus was but a puny fortress, virtually unarmed and surely no match for the great Coeur de Lion. Sappers were set to work on the walls.
After supper in the early evening of March 25, Richard went for a stroll around the walls to check on the sappers’ progress. Arrows flew sporadically from the castle’s garrison, but Richard, careless of his own safety, paid little attention. Perhaps he was amused when his men pointed out a fellow standing on the walls with a crossbow in one hand and a frying pan in the other. All day he had been fending off missiles by using his frying pan as a shield, and now, when he deliberately aimed an arrow at the king, Richard greeted the bowman with a shout of applause. Suddenly, however, another arrow whistled through the dusk and, unerring, came to rest in the king’s left shoulder near the neck. Without uttering a cry, Richard mounted his horse and rode back to camp as if nothing had happened. In the privacy of his tent, he tried to pull out the arrow but only succeeded in breaking off the shaft. The iron barb remained imbedded in the rolls of fat on his shoulder. A surgeon of sorts was summoned—Hovedon called him a “butcher” who “carelessly mangled the king’s arm”—and by lantern light finally managed to extract the arrow. Even though lotions and unguents were applied and the wound bandaged, it immediately became inflamed and began to swell. While Richard’s army kept up its assault on Châlus, his wound grew steadily worse, and when gangrene set in and he was forced to acknowledge the fact that he would not survive, he sent for his mother.
With an old friend, Abbot Luke of Torpenay, and a small escort, Eleanor set out for Limoges, over a hundred miles from Fontevrault. Even though she traveled day and night, her son was beyond anyone’s help by the time of her arrival. There remained only the disposition of his possessions. He bequeathed to John his lands on the Continent and his kingdom of England, the island for which he cared so little that in a reign of ten years he had spent only six months there, and to his nephew Otto, the son of his sister Matilda, he left his jewels. He further willed his heart to be buried at Rouen and his body at Fontevrault at the feet of his father. To Aquitaine, for their perfidy, he bequeathed his entrails, and to England, the land that would worship him as a national hero and fill their squares with statues, he left nothing. His affairs in order, he sent for the crossbowman who had wounded him. He proved to be little more than a lad.
“What evil have I done to you that you have slain me?” asked Richard.
“Because,” replied the boy, “you slew my father and my two brothers and you would have killed me. Take on me any revenge that you think fit for I will readily endure the greatest torments you can devise now that you, who have brought such evils on the world, are about to die.”
“I forgive you my death,” Richard answered, but the boy continued to stand there in scowling disbelief. “Live on,” Richard assured him, “and by my bounty behold the light of day.” He ordered the youth, variously called Bertran de Gurdun, John Sabroz, and Peter Basili by the chroniclers, who did not know his real name, to be released and sent away with a gift of one hundred shillings.
On Tuesday, April 6, “as the day was closing, he ended his earthly day” in Eleanor’s arms. Her son was forty-one and childless except for his bastard son, Philip. For his greed over a few gold figurines “the lion by the ant was slain,” and even his last act of chivalry came to nothing, because Mercadier, his mercenary chief, seized the boy with the frying pan and, once the king was dead, had him flayed alive.
One son remained.
The Last Battle
On Palm Sunday, Eleanor laid to rest her dearest son in the abbey church of Fontevrault, but circumstances permitted few moments of solitude in which to embrace her inexpressible sorrow. In those dark, confused hours following Richard’s death at Châlus, she had been torn not simply by grief but by a sense of impending doom, and yet, she refused to stand by helplessly. Messengers had been secretly dispatched to publish the tragic news to those who must know: John, who was, ironically, visiting her grandson Arthur in Brittany; Berengaria; William Marshal; the Abbess Matilda of Fontevrault; and a few others. To the rest of the world, she announced nothing, and it was not until the dead king’s cortege began to make its long, slow journey through the Limousin that men and women came out of their halls and huts and markets to huddle in silent amazement by the side of the road. Coeur de Lion was dead, but who among them could hail long life to his successor? Indeed, it was a matter of uncertainty who would be the next king.
The fact that on his deathbed Richard had designated John as his heir was influential but, as Eleanor understood, not at all decisive. The confusion about the rules of hereditary succession that had so troubled Henry that he had made an archbishop of his chancellor and had crowned his eldest son with illusions of grandeur now came to rest resoundingly around the queen’s head. She was all too familiar with the debate circulating among contemporary jurists as to whether John Plantagenet or Arthur of Brittany took precedence. Ranulph de Glanville, Henry’s justiciar, had expressed doubt whether a king’s younger brother or the son of a dead brother had a better claim to the inheritance and, after presenting arguments on both sides, he had ended by favoring the nephew; on the other hand, a Norman legist had decided that “the younger son is the nearer heir to the father’s inheritance than the child of the elder brother who had died before the father.” Although there is no way of knowing Eleanor’s private views about this question, it is reasonable to assume that she felt much the same as William Marshal. On the evening of April 10, the news of Richard’s death reached Marshal at his lodgings near Rouen just as he was going to bed. Dressing hurriedly, he hastened to the residence of Archbishop Hubert Walter of Canterbury, who was staying nearby. Apart from their grief and consternation, what most troubled the two men was the future.
“My lord,” said Marshal, “we must lose no time in choosing someone to be king.”
“In my opinion,” declared the archbishop, “Arthur should rightfully be the king.”
Marshal disagreed. “I think that would be bad. Arthur is counseled by traitors and he is haughty and proud. If we put him at our head, we shall suffer for it because he hates the English.”
“Marshal,” asked the archbishop quietly, “is this really your desire?”
“Yea, my lord, for unquestionably a son has a nearer claim to his father’s land than a grandson. It is only just that John should have the crown.”
“So be it then,” said Hubert Walter, “but mark my words, Marshal, you will regret this more than any decision you have ever made.”
Marshal had no illusions about John Lackland, whom he had known for thirty years. “Perhaps you are right,” he answered, “but I still believe it best.”
For Eleanor, as for William Marshal, the most important question was not which of Richard’s possible heirs had the better legal claim to the throne—it was not even which of the two would make the most satisfactory sovereign—but which would make the least unsatisfactory king. In the end, it was a matter of choosing between evils, and of the two, she was obliged to select John, a choice she did not make on the basis of kinship nor of his character nor of any personal feelings of affection. She knew John—by this time everyone knew John—and contemporary historians had already rendered their evaluation. “Hostis naturae
Johannes,
” wrote William of Newburgh, “nature’s enemy, John.”
Johannes,
” wrote William of Newburgh, “nature’s enemy, John.”
We do not know how well Eleanor knew Arthur of Brittany or, for that matter, whether she had ever met him. What the twelve-year-old boy might someday become was impossible to say, but still she knew enough about him to understand that he must not be permitted the throne. His very name was ominously significant. Arthur had been born to Constance of Brittany on March 29, 1187, eight months after Geoffrey’s death in Paris. Henry had wanted the infant to be named after himself and his grandfather, but Constance had defiantly refused; instead, as a badge of Breton independence and hostility toward the Plantagenets, she had named the child Arthur after the legendary king who the Bretons, claimed had once ruled their land and who, the prophets said, would return. From the time of Henry’s death, Constance had more or less governed Brittany in her son’s name and trained him to insubordination against Plantagenet rule, but more alarming to Eleanor, Arthur had been taken into custody by Philip Augustus in 1196 and raised in Paris with Philip’s own son, Louis. To confer the Plantagenet throne on Arthur would be to lay the empire at the feet of the king of the Franks. It was the consciousness of this fact that had caused Richard to abandon any momentary thoughts of designating Arthur as his heir and that now made Eleanor, her eyes wide open to John’s faults, fight for his succession to the throne.
On Richard’s accession, Eleanor had been obliged to ingratiate him with the public, but Coeur de Lion had offered a splendid figure for this sort of exploitation; in John’s case, her task can only be described as thankless. She understood that some people possess a talent for ruling, while others do not; John clearly fell into the latter category. A lack of intelligence was not the problem, since he had very real ability and had inherited much of his father’s energy and genius for administration. When Henry twenty-five years earlier had dragged the bored Young King on a tour of England’s law courts, these lessons in the profession of governing had been wasted on his eldest son, but young John, who often accompanied his father, developed a lifelong fascination for public business and in years to come would prove himself an indefatigable ruler. He also possessed whimsical charm, the reason that Eleanor and Richard were able to treat his lapses as the peccadilloes of a wayward boy, and he was something of a farceur who could not resist a joke, even a dangerous one. By temperament inclined toward indolence, he loved to saunter through life enjoying the best food and drink, jewels and rich garments, pretty women and amusing companions with whom he could while away hours in chatter and eternal games of backgammon. But, as no one knew better than Eleanor, John had always lacked balance and self-discipline, his moods shifting unpredictably from brilliance to the most inordinate stupidity and cruelty. Whether responsibility would teach him discretion, perhaps even wisdom, remained to be seen, but she intended to keep him under close watch in the hope of preventing any fatal misstep.
During Richard’s last hours, Eleanor had sent messages to John instructing him to leave Arthur’s court at once and take control of the great fortress of Chinon that held the Angevin treasure, and at the same time she persuaded the seneschal of Anjou to surrender the castle and swear fealty to John as Richard’s successor. While these matters prevented John from attending Coeur de Lion’s funeral on Palm Sunday, he finally arrived at Fontevrault on the Wednesday before Easter in the company of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, whose low opinion of Eleanor’s son could not have been more apparent. Wishing to view his brother’s tomb, John pounded furiously on the choir door. He was told, however, that Abbess Matilda was away and no visitor, however eminent, might enter without her permission. Standing on the porch with the bishop, he withdrew an amulet from around his neck and said that it had been given to one of his forebears with the promise from Heaven that whoever of the Plantagenets owned it would never lose their dominions. Annoyed, Hugh advised him to trust in God instead of stones and, pulling him over to a sculpture depicting wicked kings being cast into eternal hellfires on the Last Judgment, delivered a solemn lecture on the perils and responsibilities facing a ruler during his brief time upon earth. John, unimpressed, dragged Hugh to another sculpture where angels were leading righteous kings to everlasting happiness. “You should have shown me these,” he said, “for it is the example of these kings that I intend to follow.”
During the next three days at Fontevrault, John assumed a posture of exaggerated piety so completely uncharacteristic that he only succeeded in arousing suspicion. Finally, on Easter Sunday, his mask of humility dropped suddenly to reveal that prospective kingship had not altered his behavior one whit. At High Mass, Bishop Hugh took the occasion to preach, for John’s benefit, a lengthy sermon on the characters of good and bad kings and the future rewards of each. The congregation, which probably included Eleanor, listened patiently, but John, who had as little patience as his father for sitting still in church and receiving lectures from the clergy, began to grow fidgety. Three times during the sermon he interrupted the bishop with demands to cut short his sermon. He wanted, he declared loudly, his dinner. When Hugh ignored him, he horrified the congregation by jangling some gold coins that he had brought for the offering. Finally, Hugh could tolerate the disturbance no longer.
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