Eleanor of Aquitaine (61 page)
Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
“What are you doing?” he called out to John.
“I am looking at these gold pieces and thinking that, if I had had them a few days ago, I would not have given them to you but put them into my own purse.”
Blushing vehemently, the bishop said, “Throw them into the dish and begone.”
On the very day that this appalling levity scandalized the Easter worshipers at Fontevrault, Eleanor’s worst fears were rapidly materializing only thirty miles away. An army of Bretons led by Arthur and Constance had marched on Angers and won it without striking a blow, after which a gathering of barons from Anjou, Maine, and Touraine accepted Arthur as their rightful sovereign. On the Monday after Easter, John hurried to Le Mans, but its citizens received him coldly, and the garrison refused to admit him. Learning that the Breton army and a force under Philip were converging on the town, he only just escaped capture by slipping away before daybreak on Tuesday. That day, Philip and Arthur triumphantly entered Le Mans, where Arthur did homage to the Capetian king for the counties of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. With the capitals of Anjou and Maine under enemy occupation, John had no choice but to flee for the safety of Normandy, where he was proclaimed duke at Rouen on Sunday, April 25. The ceremony, notable for its lack of dignity, tells us as much about John’s unreliable character as it does about the causes of Eleanor’s apprehension. While the ducal coronet of golden roses was being placed on his head by Archbishop Walter, a group of John’s cronies began to chuckle audibly and make mocking remarks about the solemn rites, no doubt the idea of their boon companion as hero of the ceremony being too much for them. From time to time, John himself turned around to join in their revelry. At the moment when Archbishop Walter presented him with the ducal lance, he was paying attention to his snickering friends, and the lance slipped from his hands to the ground. In later years, this untoward incident would be interpreted as an omen, but the horseplay that had caused the mishap was ominous enough in itself.
Meanwhile, Eleanor was left to staunch the anarchy that her son’s death had loosed. Even though Philip and Arthur had been quick to seize the moment, she determined that their triumph should be short-lived. With her at Fontevrault she had Richard’s mercenary captain, and now she ordered Mercadier to bring up his routiers from Chalus, where they had been left at Richard’s death. Unheeding of her age or the possibility of danger, she herself went to recover Angers with her hastily recruited army of cutthroats. Apparently Arthur and Constance did not expect such alacrity from John and certainly not from an aged queen, because at her approach they hastily retreated and fell back to Le Mans, while Mercadier ravaged Angers and took a throng of prisoners. Inspired perhaps by his mother’s example, John collected an army of Normans and marched south to Le Mans, but by this time Arthur had moved on, and John was only able to wreak his vengeance by pulling down the city’s walls, razing its castle, destroying houses, and seizing its leading citizens. But the danger was by no means over. Twice the Plantagenets had tried to capture Arthur, twice they had bungled. For John to remain now in the southern counties would have been to leave Normandy open to attack and very likely to risk capture himself. Leaving Anjou and Maine to the care of his mother and Mercadier, he retreated to Normandy, and at the end of May, sailed for England with a few close friends. On May 27, he was crowned at Westminster in a ceremony that the chroniclers disposed of briefly and matter-of-factly: seventeen prelates, ten earls, and “many barons” were present; twenty-one fat oxen were supplied for the banquet afterward. Other than this, they have little to say. Obviously, Eleanor’s touch was missing.
Back at Fontevrault, Eleanor quickly took stock of the crumbling Plantagenet empire. It was hard to believe that decades of planning could be overthrown in a few weeks. Brittany was irretrievably lost, and despite her exertions, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine floated precariously within her grandson’s grasp. For the time being, she remained fairly sure of Normandy, if only because the Normans had no wish to put themselves under the rule of a Breton, and as for the English, there was never a moment’s question about their aversion to Arthur. Her own estates of Aquitaine remained a question. There was little that spoke of hope in the spring of 1199, but Eleanor, her iron determination never more in evidence, resolved to secure what provinces she could for John and check the aggressions of Louis Capet’s son. Toward the end of April, she left Fontevrault with a small escort and set off on a political tour of the land of her birth. Avoiding only the Limousin, where Richard had been killed, she paid official visits from the border of Anjou to the frontier of Spain: On April 29, she was at Loudon; on May 4, at Poitiers; and then she sped southwest to Niort and La Rochelle. On July 1, she visited Bordeaux, and on July 4, Soulac. Aware that her people had grown heartily weary of Plantagenets, she did not come as a herald of any son but instead cut a wide swath through her lands as duchess of Aquitaine and demonstrated the largesse that had characterized the grandest of her forebears. As she explained in one of the many charters granted at this time, God having still left her in the world at the age of seventy-seven, she felt obliged to provide for the needs of her people and the welfare of her lands. Her political insight honed to a fine edge, she understood that the time had passed for buying support with gestures such as emptying jails and relaxing oppressive laws. In this crisis, she felt the necessity of securing loyalties with more durable coin. From her ducal inheritance she plucked castles, tithes, and privileges, dispensing them with an open hand to the abbots and castellans who flocked to her side. Justice was dispensed, old grievances redressed, manors and castles traded for fortresses, and one of the assets she bartered away in this manner was the ducal hunting grounds at Talmont, the seaside preserve that had been her father’s favorite and where the newly wed Louis Capet had very nearly lost his life in an ambush.
On this last grand tour of Aquitaine, a castle wall, the dip of a hill, an abbey, a mill, the sudden glimpse of a river brought back a flood of bittersweet memories. Here she had been born when the century was still young, and now, in a few months’ time, she would see the beginning of a new century. Around her that spring crowded unseen presences, ghosts from the far-off days of her youth: her quiet, sweet-faced mother and the baby William, who had deserted her so suddenly; William the Troubadour and his voluptuous viscountess of Chatellerault; her handsome father, who could eat enough for eight men and who had not returned from Compostela with the promised cockleshell; her uncle Raymond, the blond lion of a boy who could bend an iron bar and who had deliberately sought the blade of a Saracen sword in Outremer. Their bodies slept in crypts and churchyards all over Christendom, their souls had moved on to unknown planes, but the memory of their passages through these lands remained with her. Petronilla as a small, naughty girl who followed her like an adoring puppy; Petronilla, who could not live without her count of Vermandois; and later still, Petronilla with her only son, who had contracted leprosy. And there must have been others, too. The troubadours whose songs still eddied in her mind—Jaufre Rudel, Bernard of Ventadour, Marcabru with his cynical woman-hating verses. And the husbands that destiny and her own desires had brought to her—Louis Capet with his endless prayers and simple smile, and the man whose shouts of “By God’s eyes!” would always reverberate dimly in her ears. Henry FitzEmpress, Henry Plantagenet, King Henry II of England.
Her mind had become a library cataloguing the history of her time, all of which she had observed and much of which she had helped to make, and yet, unlike many aging people, there is good evidence that she refused to dwell in the past. Keenly aware of the changes that had taken place in her domains, she concentrated on the present and future. Where there once had been only cities and deserted countryside, now new conglomerates of people had sprung up, and in fact, the phenomenal growth of cities and towns had been the predominant characteristic of her era. These burghers and artisans who were proving so troublesome to local lords she released from their feudal obligations and invested with the civic liberties for which they clamored. At La Rochelle, she granted to the citizens a corporation “which shall enable them to defend and preserve their own rights more effectively,” and at Poitiers, where sixty years earlier Louis Capet had herded the burghers’ children into the main square as hostages because they had dared proclaim themselves a commune, Eleanor now presented the city with its charter of freedom. By granting these conciliatory charters of independence to town after town and releasing them from their obligations to local lords, she made it compulsory for them to contribute to their own defense, a strategy of such shrewdness that it would shortly be adopted by Philip Augustus. Did Eleanor perhaps foresee that one day these communes would impose on anarchistic Aquitaine the law and order that Henry had never been able to accomplish with fire and sword? One cannot know.
Between April and mid-July, Eleanor covered over a thousand miles, but the most personally difficult part of her mission still lay ahead. In July, she swallowed her pride and sought out Philip Augustus at Tours, where she did homage for her patrimony. A declaration of her independence from the struggle between Plantagenet and Capetian, which now had dragged on for two generations, this legal act excluded John from any claim to her inheritance and at the same time robbed Philip as well as Arthur of Brittany of any excuse to launch an offensive against her part of the empire. The accounts of the chroniclers provide only the barest details of this meeting, which must have been an unpleasant ordeal for both Eleanor and Philip, neither of whom had any illusions about the other. Philip, giving her the traditional kiss of peace, could not dispute her right to that vast territory that so many men had eyed hungrily, but he must have suspected that she was playing her cards close to her chest. What he could not know was that two months later, she would prepare a legal document ceding the duchy to John “as her right heir,” commanding her vassals to do him homage and receive him peaceably but retaining to herself sole sovereignty for the remainder of her own life.
In September, Eleanor joined her son in Rouen, where she brought up urgent business. Shortly before Richard’s death, there had been talk of a family alliance between Plantagenet and Capet, a project that Eleanor believed might help to cement a lasting peace and that she now urged John to revive in the hope of stalling Philip’s schemes. But before Eleanor could put these plans into effect, she was beset with further tragedy. Her daughter, Joanna, former queen of Sicily, present countess of Toulouse, had not found happiness as the wife of Raymond VI, the son of Eleanor’s old betrayer. In the course of the queen’s tour that summer, she had unexpectedly encountered Joanna, who had a story of woe to tell. Her husband, evidently, had proved to be as unchivalrous as his father, and he treated Joanna, his fourth wife, with as little kindness or fidelity as he had shown his previous spouses. She had borne him a son and that year was pregnant again when, her husband away fighting one of his vassals in Languedoc, she had been compelled to put down a revolt. While besieging the castle of Cassès, some of her husband’s knights had betrayed her by sending supplies to the castle and, as the last affront, set fire to her camp. Somehow, Joanna had escaped, and unable to rely on her husband, she had been fleeing north to seek the help of Richard when she learned of his death. At Niort, Eleanor had taken charge of her grieving and ill daughter and had sent her to the nuns of Fontevrault to recuperate. In September, however, Joanna arrived in Rouen, where, to the astonishment of all, she demanded to be made a nun of Fontevrault. Despite the fact that such a proceeding would be highly irregular—she was married and pregnant—Joanna persisted, and no amount of reasoning would deter her. In the end, Eleanor had supported her aspirations, and canon law had been overridden. It must have been obvious that her daughter, sick and worn, had reached the end of her days. Unable to stand when she took her vows, she closed her eyes a few days later and, minutes after her death, was delivered of a son, who lived only long enough to be baptized. In Rouen that autumn, the queen mourned her many recent losses. Alix of Blois had gone, leaving a daughter who had become a nun at Fontevrault. The lovely Countess Marie of Champagne had died the previous year, some said of sorrow when she learned that her eldest son, Henry, the king of Jerusalem, had fallen to his death from the window of his palace in Acre. Then Richard, and now Joanna. Of the ten children Eleanor had borne, only two remained: her namesake in faraway Castile and John Lackland.
In the first days of January 1200, the kings of England and France met on their mutual border to formally conclude a five-year treaty of peace. John, finally accepted as Richard’s heir for the Plantagenet lands on the Continent, did homage to Philip as his overlord; Philip, for his part, relinquished his claims to Maine and Anjou in Arthur’s name and agreed that the boy should do homage to John for Brittany. He refused, however, to give up custody of the youth. The treaty was sensible and fairly simple. If John had to pay thirty thousand marks of silver for his overlord’s recognition, something neither Henry nor Richard would have been asked to do, times had changed, and such a sum of money only reflected the growing domination by the French monarchy in the affairs of Europe. At any event, part of the succession duty was designated as a dower for a princess of Castile, who, according to the treaty, should marry Philip’s heir, Louis. At the conclusion of the negotiations, Gervase of Canterbury reported, the two kings “rushed into each other’s arms.”
Eleanor’s chests had already been packed, her escort mounted, and once the treaty had been formally concluded, she set off with all possible speed to her daughter’s court in Spain to bring back a bride for the young Louis Capet. Her route took her south to Poitiers and then down the highroad toward Bordeaux. Just past Poitiers, she entered the territory of the Lusignans, that quarrelsome and very numerous tribe who, thirty years earlier, had tried to abduct her and against whom the youthful William Marshal had demonstrated his knightly prowess. That generation of Lusignans had passed away, but another, just as nasty, had risen to take its place; as if to prove that history repeats, Hugh le Brun waylaid the queen’s party and insisted that she visit his castle, a polite invitation to a kidnaping. Hugh did not intend to detain her unduly, only long enough to adjudicate a grievance that, apparently, she had overlooked during her goodwill tour a few months earlier. For some years, he had been vying with the lord of Angoulême for control of the rich sprawling county of La Marche to the east. Decades earlier, Henry had acquired the county from the Lusignans, and Richard had taken care to keep La Marche in his hands, but now Hugh made it clear that Eleanor would be released only on the condition that she surrender the highly prized fief. Knowing the uselessness of argument with Hugh le Brun, thrown back on her own resources, the queen exchanged the county for her freedom so quickly that within hours she was back on the road again. And so swiftly did she urge her escort through Gascony and over the Pyrenees that she arrived in Castile before the end of January.
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