Eleanor Of Aquitaine (14 page)

Down some one of the highways leading to Eleanor's court there came, as the poetry of Ventadour suggests, the story of Tristram and Ysolt, not as the poet Thomas told it later in the court of England, but in some earlier form. And who can guess what other tales lost amidst the violent commotions of the Plantagenets were heard in the duchess' halls, where, "matter of Britain," and ,"matter of Byzantium" and the substance of ancient hero tales were all wrought together into something new and strange? All the factors for the creation of a new literature were there in a favoring atmosphere: the bountiful duchess herself, bent upon fashioning with befitting elegance her new milieu, a patron whom the biographer of the troubadours describes as given to liberality, to chivalry, and to poetry, together with her gay young household; returned crusaders like herself filled with eastern themes; storytellers out of Brittany purveying Arthurian romance; travelers upon the pilgrim routes; starveling poets, unemployed canons, chroniclers of the Normans and the Angevins —all commingling in an ancient tradition of learning, and all vying with each other to please a fair young world and earn the duchess' largess. In view of the circumstances, it is impossible to escape wondering whether the Tristram story was not dressed at this time by some necessitous
conteur
to have a pleasing, if veiled, topical significance for the duchess who had renounced a dull king for a bold young knight.

It was in the lyrical interval between her two roles as queen, and in the midst of her dalliance with the poet, that Eleanor, as if executing a final affront to her past and a salvo to the future, gave birth to her first son, whom, with a felicitous regard for both his Norman and Poitevin forebears, she christened with the name of Guillaume and hastened to designate as her own heir, the future Count of Poitou.

The Angevin star was in the ascendant in those years of the mid-century. The chroniclers report that the constellations in their courses were seen to conspire in Henry's favor.
¹³
In the summer of 1153 Stephen's son Eustace, in the midst of impious depredations on the properties of Bury Saint Edmunds, strangled on a dish of eels, and that fortuity, which removed Henry's most formidable rival for the crown, was seen by partisans of the Angevins as a judgment on the house of Blois.
¹⁴
When in the spring of 1154 the Duke of Normandy appeared upon the threshold of his ancestral high place, it was to greet his duchess and his heir with fortune and the fairest hopes. He came not merely as Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, but as the acknowledged successor of Stephen, the lineal heir of William the Conqueror, Henry Beauclerc, Matilda Empress. The success of his campaign in England enabled him to promise to his duchess such royal wealth and prestige as placed her quite beyond the reach of regret or the envying of any princess reigning in Christendom.

It was probably when Henry rejoined Eleanor after his campaign in England that she had opportunity to try her role as Duchess of Normandy in the seat of the Norman dukes in Rouen, of appraising the members of the dynasty to which she had attached herself, and of bringing her mind to bear upon the sudden political and territorial adjustments to which her divorce and remarriage had exposed the Kings of France and England. If her withdrawal from the court of France had reduced the ambitions of the Capets, it was plain that it had by somewhat more than the same measure expanded those of the Plantagenets.

In Rouen Eleanor was brought vis-a-vis her mother-in-law, that
maitresse femme
, Matilda Empress, at whose knee Henry had learned the first principles of statecraft. Under her tutelage Eleanor conned the hornbook of that science and learned something of the, "hungry falcon," politics by which the empress managed to impose her will and keep her vassals and her prelates docile and compliant. The substance was strictly feudal, yet distinctly tougher in fiber than the Capetian precepts Eleanor had learned in Paris, and so far as that distinction went, more like the philosophy to which she had been bred in Poitou. "Dangle the prize before their eyes," the astute empress taught her son, "but be sure to withdraw it again before they taste it. Then you will keep them eager and find them devoted when you need them."
¹⁵
A Scotch rigor, a Norman energy, the grave habits of a German chatelaine, merged in Matilda in a temper which had been uncertain and tenacious, but which, now that her destiny was fulfilled, reflected some of Henry Beauclerc's qualities of measure and benignity. Her court was solemnly reminiscent of her early days in Aachen as Empress of Saxony and the Holy Roman Empire, which her reluctant second marriage to Geoffrey the Fair had not enabled her to forget. It was seemly and decorous but not in the least flamboyant. Patron of arts and letters though she was, her favors went not to poets and mimes, but to men of substance and condition. It was she who taught Henry to avoid triflers and hangers-on and to closet himself in his little leisure with men of wisdom and with books. She was the one woman to whose ideas Henry listened with attention, the only one whose advice he sought; and to her precepts were attributed the more flinty elements of his policy.

Henry himself had developed perceptibly during the strenuous months of trying conclusions with Stephen in England. As his fortunes brightened, his horizon widened and new prospects expanded before him. He who had been born to inherit certainly only the Counties of Maine and Anjou had already at twenty-one seen Normandy and England retrieved from the house of Blois, and he had alienated from his overlord the wide and splendid provinces of Poitou and Aquitaine. A magnificent, an unforeseen destiny now engrossed him, a destiny owed not wholly to his own merit nor to Angevin contrivance, but also to some happy conjunction of the planets. These fortunate accessions, in their totality so vastly larger than his early hopes envisioned, opened before him a boundless space. He saw his star rising over an empire that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. It had been a lucky stroke determining the future fatefully — his unexpected capture of the Countess of Poitou. No one, not even the Holy Roman Emperor, certainly not his overlord in Paris, stood in so favorable a position to become the king of feudal kings in Europe.

In these arduous days he was driven by a prodigious energy that he applied fitfully to a great variety of undertakings. In exertions he wore out his hardiest associates. When not actually upon some foray or following his hounds or birds in chase until the light failed, he was riding fast and far to surprise in untoward moments his stewards and the keepers of his castles. He dismounted only to stand interminably in colloquy with men of pith and action, the burden of whose minds he unloaded into his own with a mental activity that matched his physical exertion. Men marveled at his information about every sort of thing. His senses were all alert at once, seizing a manifold experience. While he talked or listened, his fingers moved, touching things of use or beauty. He examined everything—armor, gems, stuffs, instruments, birds, or dogs — with eye, ear, and hand. When not in the saddle, he seldom sat except to eat or play a game of chess. When he at last retired, varlets rubbed his swollen feet, and entertainers with viol or book relieved the tension of his mind. Even at mass his glance roved, he plucked his neighbor's sleeve, shifted, scribbled, whispered, or paced about impatiently. His dress was rich and seemly, but carelessly worn. In manner and talk he was free and accessible, for one who could engage his interest, a genial companion. Yet no one mistook his restlessness for uneasiness, nor his geniality for want of sovereign authority.

Life in Rouen, as Eleanor saw it in 1154, was earnest, infused with vigor, edged with danger and anxiety. Epic events were plainly shaping just ahead. Into the capital of the Norman dukes, as emissaries came and went, flowed news from Rome and Britain, Paris and Bordeaux, from Flanders and the waning Kingdom of Jerusalem. For the duchess, time, mortal time, that had been wont in Paris to pour so slowly from the unstinted abundance of eternity, came, in Henry's company, to have a precious value for itself, as it raced over the sun clocks on the walls of Notre-Dame des Prés, or drained through the hourglass irrecoverably. If there was little practice of the
gai savoir
in Rouen, there was also no
accidia
.

*

As the Angevin star rose in the mid-century, Louis's star declined. The last prop he had inherited from Louis the Fat fell away. A few days after the birth of Eleanor's son, the Angevin Prince Guillaume, Abbé Bernard followed Abbé Suger and Thibault of Champagne in their, "migration from the world." The sins of his generation, the collapse of the crusade, the disastrous consequences of his efforts to square politics with the moral law, combined with the austerities of his monastic life to reduce the abbé to a frail ghost of himself. However, the adversities that beset his earthly pilgrimage could not becloud the virtue of his miracles. The movement for his canonization began in 1155, and in 1174 he was heralded throughout Christendom as Saint Bernard.

The birth of an heir to the Angevins drove Louis to bend his mind again to his own deficiency in that regard. In this time of eclipse he determined to solace himself with a pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostella, which he had long promised himself to add to his record as the most famous palmer of Europe. He did not ask for safe-conduct to pass through the territories of the Duchess of Aquitaine, but in company with the Count of Toulouse he traversed Languedoc, passed through Maguelonne (Montpellier), stopped off in Castres to venerate the relics of Saint Vincent, and thence made his way to Spain without trespassing on Gascony.
¹⁷
A Spanish annalist remarks that his pilgrimage veiled another object, that is, an investigation of the fitness of the King of Spain's daughter to be his queen.
¹⁸
Louis was richly entertained in Spain. When his scruples were satisfied, the Princess Constance (otherwise Marguerite) came to France a young maid of good countenance, and the French king was, as the chronicler declares, "better married than he had been."

ELEANOR'S SUMMONS TO TAKE HER SECOND CROWN came sooner than any signs foretold. Stephen did not long survive his son's violent death and his own military reverses. On October 26, six months after Henry's return to Normandy, messengers from Thibault, Archbishop of Canterbury, brought news to Rouen of the king's death. After years of anxious delay, the call of the Angevins came like a thief in the night.

The brusque and urgent summons to grasp the crown of England found Henry on a campaign in the Vexin. He had lately risen from an all but mortal illness. However, scarcely a fortnight sufficed for him to muster such an escort of archbishops, bishops, and nobles as should signalize to anarchy in England the powerful ecclesiastical and secular auspices under which he assumed the crown of the conquerors.
¹
Eleanor, so far as records show, had no time to assemble a suitable Poitevin
mesnie
, but she found herself not altogether strange in the sudden company that gathered in Barfleur for the crossing. Here were certain Norman and Flemish bishops and barons who, in her previous dispensation as Queen of France, had shared with her and Louis the vicissitudes of their crusade, men who had seen her shine with the colors of France in the most glorious cities of Christendom, in Byzantium, Antioch, Jerusalem, and who now, as her liege lord's men, supported her pretensions to another crown. Matilda Empress stayed behind to maintain the peace in Normandy; but Henry's brother Geoffrey, whose ambush Eleanor had escaped on her way from Beaugency to Poitiers, was of the company. It was a man's world in which the Duchess of Normandy found herself engaged in the harbor town.

For a month in Barfleur the court looked out upon the Channel chopped with gales and driven sleet. Though the delay was intolerable to Henry, the time cannot, in that company, have sped altogether dully for Eleanor in the hostels of the port. Hourly the duke and his mariners scanned the November sky for a turn of weather favorable for the passage. Across the narrow gray stretch of sea, beyond a barrier of storm more effectual than stone, England waited kingless, and no news came through from thence to proclaim the loyalty of the castled Normans and the keepers of the treasure, all left in confusion and uncertainty by the untimely death of Stephen.

At length, determined to hold his Christmas court in London, Henry on December 7, 1154, gave orders to embark in defiance of the storm. If he heard warnings of the fate of the White Ship lost in those very waters with all its royal freight, he did not heed them. Demurs were silenced. The bishops and the barons were stowed in the rocking smacks. The duchess and the infant Guillaume were hurried aboard with the rest, and sail was set for England. For more than twenty four hours the ships, their lanterns and trumpets lost to each other in the tempest, toiled in their separate courses. On the second day they made their way into various havens. The royal smack, which had set out for Southampton, drew up in some harbor below New Forest. From Mont Saint-Michel in Peril of the Sea, the archangel had stretched forth his mighty arm and brought that precious company up living from the deep.

From their scattered landings the duke's escort emerged upon the highway from Southampton to Winchester. The rumor that Henry had ridden the storm flew with the gale, starting incredulous men from their hearth-sides in castle and town. Stephen's barons quaked, says Henry of Huntingdon, "like a bed of reeds in the wind for fear and anxiety," but no man stirred against the new authority. Along his route he marshaled an army of nobles and prelates of Britain to swell his continental following. The cortege stopped briefly in Winchester, where part of the royal treasure lay, and then pressed on to London.

Thibault of Canterbury, to whose offices Henry owed the tranquility of the interregnum, had assembled the bishops of Britain in readiness for the royal advent. The coronation that restored the line of Henry I to the throne of England was marked by strange contrasts of dinginess and magnificence. The ceremonies were richly but hastily contrived in a setting that bore witness to the long struggles of Stephen and Matilda Empress for the crown. Westminster y, already the traditional place for the consecration of the kings of England, was dilapidated from long neglect. Yet within its sanctuary on the Sunday before Christmas in 1154, Henry and Eleanor assumed their crowns in the presence of an august assembly offering by every token of affluence and splendor the general support of the new regime
³
On such occasions Henry, who knew the virtue of symbols, bore himself with magnificence and cut a royal figure His robust youth, his build and bearing, his lively countenance, his prowess in war and strategy, his arrival in defiance of season and tide, proclaimed to that eager and anxious assembly a king with courage and energy worthy of his conquering forebears, "In London," says Gervase of Canterbury, "the young king was received with transports of joy." Shouts of, "vivat rex," from the Normans and, "waes hael," from the Saxon burghers resounded the length of the Strand, welcoming the Duke of Normandy and the rich and famous Countess of Poitou to their noble city on the Thames.

The palace of Westminster, rebuilt upon its ancient Saxon site by William Rufus and further enriched for the court of Henry Beauclerc, had been so despoiled by the followers of Stephen that it could not be occupied. The Plantagenets were obliged to take residence in Bermondsey.
⁴
But the situation at the busy east end of the city, below the old bridge and nearly opposite the Tower, commanded a wider view of London's spread and activity than the newer palace. What was this vaunted city by the Thames which Eleanor had exchanged for the citadel of philosophy upon the Seine?

"London," says the contemporary tale of Tristram, "is a right rich city, a better not in Christendom, nor a worthier, nor a better esteemed, nor a better garnished of rich folk. Much they love largess and honor, and lead their life in great pleasance."
⁵
London from the quarter of Bermondsey, as it spread to view westward from the Tower, can have been like nothing Eleanor had seen before in all her many journeyings among the feudal aeries of the world. It was not a lofty seat at all, but a vast crowded area in which the domes and belfries of innumerable churches with their ys and schools thrust up among the tiles and thatch of sharp house roofs. Whereas in Paris the Seine was the encircling moat of the Ile, in London, Thames was the city's central thoroughfare. Across the river from the royal quarters London wall framed three sides of an old town, but crumbled away before the traffic of the river, where streets ended in docks and wharves, cook shops and wine shops along the Strand. A hearty smell of fish, wool, and beer rose from the water side, and the calls of boatmen and eel-wives filled the air with babel. The ancient bridge, with its jumble of narrow houses, gathered swarms of smacks and wherries about its landing stairs. Along the wharves the shipping of the north countries, of Flanders and Rouen, of Nantes and La Rochelle, even of Syria, lay in haven, their oars banked, their colored sails furled against the wintry fury of the sea. Opposite Bermondsey the tower of the conquerors, its mortar drenched, as legend said, with the blood of beasts, its dungeons already rich with the harvest of history, stood grimly fortified against the times that were to unfold before her. Beyond the walls the newer city spread in unconfined suburbs set among wintry orchards and stockaded gardens.

Whereas Paris swarmed with students and resounded with their irresponsible levity, London thronged with burghers — merchants, shippers, changers, masters of guilds — who went soberly, but with a cheerful and prosperous air, from their rich homes to their profitable stalls and warehouses upon the Strand. The town houses of bishops and nobles were of princely elegance and wide hospitality. "Nowhere," writes a contemporary, "are faces more joyous at the board, or hosts more eager to please, or entertainments more sumptuous." Not only beside roaring chimneys was there a conviviality that dispelled the fog and chill; even in the open there was ado and gaiety. In times of bitter cold, the queen saw a novel sight upon the marshy fields toward Clerkenwell — burghers' sons of London, the shin bones of animals thonged to their shoes, careening in lusty play upon the ice.

London was a right rich city garnished of rich folk that led their life in great pleasance. But it seemed to be a man's city. The parish bells of London cut through the fog with a frosty sound. Where in the rime by Thames bloomed those April flowers of Ventadour, red, yellow, white? The women of London, says her chronicler, were paragons of virtue, "very Sabines." But they were unlearned in the
gat savoir
. However, for her first weeks in Britain the queen, peering at London from the residence that marooned her in a rural seclusion, had diversions of her own. In February, two months after her stormy passage and her coronation, Eleanor gave birth in Bermondsey to her second son, a prince born in the purple. The Bishop of London christened him with the king's name, and he was designated as the future Count of Anjou.

*

In the first lively years of their reign, Henry Plantagenet and the Countess of Poitou were the hammer and the anvil of a single enterprise — to weld the widespread and individual provinces that were theirs by conquest and inheritance into a massive domain, and to plant thereon a dynasty owing subservience to no temporal potentate, and least of all to their feudal overlord in Paris. To round out the edges and compact the core of this domain became the controlling object of their desire. In this enterprise they saw eye to eye.

Necessarily, its first phase was to quench the anarchy bequeathed to them by Stephen; to recover into their own hands the license gained by bishops and barons during his unsteady reign; to restore order and security; and to exact the royal revenues. For such labors the young Angevin had not only the ability of his race, but he had had an unusually varied experience and the most astute of teachers. To impose order, to ferret out disloyalty and incompetence, to secure the administration of a common justice, the sovereigns at once undertook wide peregrinations in which they visited the most important castles and cities of their realm.
⁸
The queen's experience as an Amazon in the wilds of Paphlagonia had prepared her to accompany Henry on the bedlam and unseasonable
chevauchées
that became the despair of his hardiest followers.

Sudden as a pestilence, Henry was wont to appear, here, there, and everywhere, when he was least expected. Even his own clerks bringing him news of importance could not find him or catch up with him. He moved, says Map, in stages intolerable, like a common carrier. It pleased his humor to vex his stewards with the pandemonium and uncertainty of his plans. The royal household, from chamberlain to scullion, often numbered at least two hundred souls,
¹⁰
equipped with chapel, bed furnishings, kitchen utensils, plate, treasure, garments, vestments, documents, and all the services thereunto pertaining. If Henry announced his departure for sunrise and kept his courtiers and servants all night in a turmoil of preparation, he was almost, but not quite certain, upon some shallow pretext, to delay his departure until ten o'clock or noon. When his orders came at last, the cortege made off with an infernal clamor and commotion. The abbots of monasteries where the king was privileged to billet his horses and his men would rather have welcomed a swarm of locusts than the royal company. The queen, when not riding herself, made these journeys with her household and the royal children in litters or in barrel-topped wains, safe from rain, but not from the abysses of roads often hardly wider than a bridle path. Says Map, who often shared the stress of Henry's progresses, "We wear out our garments, break our bodies and our beasts, and never find a moment for the cure of our sick souls."
ⁿ

Henry already knew his island; but in the course of these early journeyings, Eleanor had her first sight of the realm for which she had forsworn the more settled domain of her overlord in Paris. England was deeply scarred by the recent civil wars. The queen saw once busy towns half emptied of their folk, grazing lands gone to bramble, deep forests infested with dispossessed men turned poachers and robbers, on every tor a ruined citadel or one marked for doom. With her household and with her gear trussed up in leather sacks or stowed in chests, she drew up for the king's Christmas and Easter courts and his provincial assizes in the great fortress castles of Winchester and Wallingford, Nottingham, Oxford, Lincoln, Marlborough. Now and again she presided over those more privy gatherings in the forestal palaces of Clarendon or Woodstock, that favorite retreat of the Norman kings, and made a part of Henry's hunting parties at Brill and the Peak, and along the windings of the Glyme. In these progresses, as high symbol of the king's wealth and consequence, as the mother of princes, she shone like a sunstone among the lesser things of his treasury.

However, from the beginning of Henry's reign it was clear, in spite of the long struggle for England, that the focus of Plantagenet interest and ambition was still beyond the Channel. England gave Henry his status with kings; it should become the fertile source of revenues for the establishment of peace and security among the disparate parts of his continental empire. But his desire burned for the old familiar cities of Rouen and Angers, Tours, Le Mans, and Poitiers. The king made haste to set his island realm in order, so that he might be secure and free to pursue his courses overseas.

The wide dispersal of the Plantagenet provinces and their partition by the Channel gave Henry urgent need for a man of high endowment and of character to whom he could delegate affairs of first importance. In the circumstances, what the Angevin required was a man of large ability whom he could trust as another self, a chancellor — and something more, an intimate whose loyalty and intelligence should enlarge his own administration, yet who should, in the last resort, be subject to the royal will. Henry looked as a matter of course to Thibault of Canterbury to supply the needed paragon. Thibault had labored for the settlement between Stephen and Henry that had brought the Angevin to the throne; and his household was the best school of the day for preparing young men for careers whether in church or state. The forethoughtful archbishop, who felt grave concern for the prosperity of the church under the new regime, had already trained this public servant for the king.