Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (64 page)
That year, John kept Christmas court at Caen, “feasting with his queen and lying in bed till dinner-time,” but the holiday was marked by a sense of uneasy triumph for Eleanor. In Poitiers, safe in her high tower above the Clain, she had genuine reason for optimism in that, for the moment at least, the Plantagenets held the trump cards in their struggle with Philip Augustus. If someone had told her that the triumph of Mirebeau would be the last great victory of an English king on French soil until the fourteenth century and that within the next two years even Normandy, the most loyal of the Plantagenet fiefs on the Continent, would virtually be lost, she might have laughed in derision. And then again she might not have. Even by Christmas of 1202 the ominous signs were there for those possessing the perception to read them. She was aware that John trod on extremely delicate ground with regard to the imprisonment of Arthur and the rebels, since these imprisonments had followed ruthlessly on John’s oath to William des Roches at Mirebeau that he would not take vengeance. Perhaps Eleanor herself had genuinely, if naively, expected John to keep his promise. But after des Roches and Amaury of Thouars had seen their relatives and friends tied to oxcarts on the road to Normandy, these barons and others had turned away from John in disgust and transferred their allegiance to the French king. By midautumn they had captured Angers, the city Eleanor had personally retaken in the weeks after Richard’s death, and soon the roads between Chinon and Poitiers became unsafe for travel. As Eleanor might have told John, victory in itself is meaningless if one lacks the intelligence to profit from it, but the closeness of her relations with her son at this period is unclear. With the rebels holding much of the territory between Poitiers and Chinon, communications were often poor. However, from rumor if nothing else she would have known of the pressure being brought to bear on the king for Arthur’s release, some of his vassals even offering their homage to Philip for the duration of Arthur’s imprisonment. In November, John had released the Lusignans, a foolish concession, because despite their pledges of loyalty, they immediately joined the rebel party.
Admittedly, the question of what to do with Arthur was a thorny one, and perhaps on Eleanor’s advice, John tried to make peace with his nephew. According to Roger of Wendover, he visited Falaise in January 1203 and ordered the boy brought to him. “The king addressed him kindly and promised him many honors, asking him to separate himself from the French king and to adhere to the side of his lord and uncle.” But the boy regarded John as he would a worm in a bowl of porridge.
Arthur ill-advisedly replied with indignation and threats, and demanded that the king give up to him his kingdom of England with all the territories which King Richard had possessed at his death. Since all these possessions belonged to him by hereditary right, he swore that unless King John quickly restored the aforesaid territory to him, he would never give him a moment’s peace for the rest of his life. The king was much troubled at hearing his words.
More than “much troubled,” John was infuriated at the youth’s audacity. After six months in the dungeons of Falaise, an experience sufficient to humble the most stiff-necked, the boy’s overweening pride remained intact, and his haughtiness seemed as strong as ever. But more than outraged, John grew panicky. Something about the interview frightened him and frightened him so badly that he at once began to consider drastic measures. Perhaps he was convinced that the boy seriously meant his threats and would truly remain a source of anxiety and potential uprising for the remainder of John’s days. Afterward, a chronicler said, John took counsel with certain advisers (which ones are unspecified) who urged him to have Arthur castrated and blinded so as to eliminate him as a rival. Orders for the mutilations were given, but the two men sent to carry them out lost their stomach for the ghastly operation upon hearing Arthur’s howls and finally his jailer, Hubert de Burgh, sent them away. After countermanding the king’s orders, de Burgh took it upon himself to announce that Arthur had died of natural causes; bells were rung at Falaise, and the boy’s clothing distributed to charity. This quickly proved to be a miscalculation on de Burgh’s part, because instead of removing the wind from the Bretons’ sails as he had hoped, the announcement only roused Arthur’s partisans to new heights of hysteria, in which they swore undying vengeance on John. At this point, de Burgh hastily amended his report and swore that Arthur was still alive; no one, however, believed him.
In February or March, John “gave orders that Arthur should be sent to Rouen to be imprisoned in the new tower there and kept closely guarded.” And then, the chronicler added abruptly, “the said Arthur disappeared.”
The disappearance of Arthur of Brittany remained the great unsolved mystery of the thirteenth century. It is true that after the gates of Rouen clanged shut behind him, he was never seen again, but ugly rumors had circulated while he was still alive at Falaise. Sinister stories were told in Paris, in Brittany, even at the queen’s own court in Poitiers, to the effect that the king of England had murdered his own nephew. The fact is that no one, probably not even Eleanor, knew for certain what had happened to Arthur. The chroniclers could only report rumors: “Opinion about the death of Arthur gained ground by which it seemed that John was suspected by all of having slain him with his own hand; for which reason many turned their affections from the king and entertained the deepest enmity against him.” One of the few people in a position to know what actually happened was William de Braose, the man who had captured Arthur at Mirebeau and later the commander of the new fortress at Rouen, where Arthur was imprisoned after he left Falaise. One of John’s cronies, de Braose remained high in the king’s favor until about 1210, when he dropped so suddenly that he was forced to take refuge at the French court. Long after people had stopped guessing about Arthur’s whereabouts, monks at the Cistercian abbey of Margam in Wales set down in their annals a detailed account of the duke’s death. Since the de Braoses were patrons of the abbey, it has been concluded that the monks received their information from de Braose himself or some member of his family. The chronicler described the following events as taking place on April 3, 1203:
After King John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison for some time in the castle of Rouen, after dinner on the Thursday before Easter, when he was drunk and possessed of the devil, he slew him with his own hand and, tying a heavy stone to the body, cast it into the Seine. It was brought up by the nets of a fisherman and, dragged to the bank, was identified and secretly buried, for fear of the tyrant, in Notre Dame des Pres, a priory of Bec.
Toward the end of April 1203, Eleanor and her barons received a messenger bearing a letter from John, written at Falaise on April 16 and witnessed by William de Braose. “We send to you brother John of Valerant, who has seen what is going forward with us and who will be able to appraise you of our situation. Put faith in him respecting those things whereof he will inform you. God be thanked, things are going better for us than this man is able to tell you.” It has been suggested that this cryptic last line was John’s way of informing his mother that the Plantagenets had nothing more to fear from the duke of Brittany. If this was truly so and Eleanor was able to read between the lines of her son’s letter, she must have realized that Plantagenet rule in France had become no more substantial than a guttering candle.
It was spring again. The sap had begun to rise in the withered trees, the rivers gleamed like wax, plowmen turned over the good black earth, small birds swooped and dipped against the canopy of the sky. It was the season of renewal and also the season for going to war. The king of France roamed the Plantagenet provinces at will; sailing down the Loire by boat, he leisurely took possession of fortresses along his route, and in ensuing months, he would have those famous castles where Eleanor and Henry had kept their Christmas courts, brought children into the world, made love, and quarreled furiously: Domfront, Le Mans, Falaise, Bayeux, Lisieux, Caen, Avranches. “Messengers came to John with the news, saying that the King of the French has entered your territories as an enemy, has taken such and such castles, carries off their governors ignominiously bound to their horses’ tails, and disposes of your property at will without anyone stopping him. In reply to this news, King John said, ‘Let him alone! Someday I will recover all I have lost.’ ” By August 1203, Philip had reached the Rock of Andelys and cast his eyes up at Chateau Gaillard, the fortress that Richard had boasted he could defend if its walls were made of butter. The seat of Plantagenet power on the Continent, it was the one castle that by all logic the Capetian had no hope of winning and, by the same token, John had no fear of losing. Even so, Philip set up his siege engines and catapults.
“In the meantime,” Roger of Wendover writes, “the king was staying inactive with his queen at Rouen, so that it was said that he was infatuated by sorcery or witchcraft, for in the midst of all his losses and disgrace, he showed a cheerful countenance to all, as though he had lost nothing.” The chronicler omits a few important facts. At the end of August, John devised an imaginative plan for the relief of Chateau Gaillard, a night operation to bring supplies to the castle by land and water, but a miscalculation of the tides on the Seine turned the expedition into a disaster, and John’s army was repulsed with heavy losses. The king’s failure to relieve Chateau Gaillard provided the final blow to the confidence of his Norman barons. By the autumn of 1203, his military resources were exhausted, and even William Marshal bluntly advised him to abandon the struggle.
“Whoso is afraid, let him flee!” answered John. “I myself will not flee for a year.”
“Sire,” Marshal pointed out, “you have not enough friends. You who are wise and mighty and of high lineage and whose work it is to govern us all have not been careful to avoid irritating people.”
By the first week of December, there remained on the Continent little that John could call his own except Rouen, the beleaguered Rock of Andelys, and the Norman shores of the Channel. On December 5, he sailed from Barfleur with Isabella, William Marshal, and a few others. He was leaving, he said, to seek the aid and counsel of his English barons; he would, he promised, return soon. Exactly three months later, on March 6, 1204, the Saucy Castle hung out a white flag. Those Norman barons who had remained loyal sent couriers to England notifying the king of their precarious position, “to which messages King John answered that they were to expect no assistance from him but that each was to do what seemed best to him.”
Among those thus cast upon their own resources was Eleanor, but by this time she had, evidently, slipped into a coma, the annals of Fontevrault stating that she existed as one already dead to the world. She would not live to witness the loss of Normandy, to watch Louis Capet’s son march into Poitiers, to hear of Runnymede or Magna Charta, and of course she would never know that only one king of England would be named John. Perhaps even the fall of Coeur de Lion’s Chateau Gaillard failed to penetrate the private cocoon into which she had withdrawn.
The last months of her life are blank. The chroniclers were too busy documenting the smoking rubble of Henry’s great dream to concern themselves with an octogenarian queen, and later, they would not even agree on the place where she had spent her last days. The chronicle of Saint Aubin of Angers claimed that she died in her native city of Poitiers, but others declared that prior to her coma, she had made her way to Fontevrault, where she took the veil. During those last fatal months, whether at the ducal palace of her forebears or among the veiled women at Fontevrault, she had been a queen for sixty-six years, but she did not count the time. Born with one foot on fortune’s throne, crowned with garlands of rare intelligence and beauty, loving when she could and hating when she must, she had traveled a long weary road through the highest citadels of Christendom. On April 1, 1204, her turbulent pilgrimage ended.
Eight centuries later, the traveler driving along the Loire toward Tours may turn down N 147 at Montsoreau village and ride the few miles to Fontevrault Abbey. There in the cool south transept of the . church can be seen Eleanor of Aquitaine lying between the second of her husbands and her beloved Coeur de Lion. The Gothic effigy on her tomb, ravaged by time and revolution, shows her lying full length, her ageless face framed by a wimple, her expression radiating dignity and the faintest suggestion of a smile. Her graceful fingers clasp a small open book—and who can tell from the stone image whether it is a missal or a volume of those cansos that meant so much to her? In the shadows, alone with her book, she reads on in peace and serenity.
Notes and Sources
3 “Aquitaine, wrote Ralph”: Ralph of Diceto, vol. 1, p. 293.
5 “When they set themselves”: Ibid.
5 “Nowadays, scornfully wrote”: Geoffrey of Vigeois, Delisle, vol. 12, p. 450,
6 “Unlike their counterparts”: Barber, p. 79.
6 Arrival of the troubadours: Briffault, p. 85.
A Child in the Land of Love7 “Duke William IX”: In the following account of Eleanor’s grandparents and parents I have relied mainly on Alfred Richard’s Histoire des comtes de Poitou, 778-1204, unless otherwise indicated.
9 Pope Urban’s speech at Clermont: Viorst, pp. 40-44.
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