Eleanor Of Aquitaine (27 page)

No
preux chevalier
bred in the queen's court could remain a mere martial hero. His was also the legacy of the troubadours, and his nurture was theirs too. The Countess of Champagne taught him to love poetry and romance. Under her tutelage he composed verse quite worthy of his Poitevin lineage. A little survives to give substance to the fame he enjoyed as a poet and musician bred in the tradition of his mother's race. It is said that it some times pleased him to appear in choir where he sang with gusto, encouraging his fellow choristers to give more breath to their psalmody.
¹⁹
At mass he was punctilious.

Richard was less affable in crowds than Henry, more selective in his friendships, and less accessible to general company. He lacked the charm that attracted a large personal following to the young king. He often ruffled his peers with an overweening brusqueness. His reputed popularity was, like that of the elder king, especially among small folk, whom he won by acts of condescension and generosity;
²⁰
Though he knew how to reward service and gain favor with largess, his giving was less indiscriminate than his senior's and his avarice was much more marked. In comparing the brothers Giraldus says, "Henry was a shield, but Richard was a hammer."

Geoffrey and John, Giraldus goes on to remark, were "corn in the ear and corn in the blade"—very like in some respects.
¹
Both were smaller in stature than their elder brothers and darker in coloring. Geoffrey was thought to have perhaps the best mind in the family, if ability meant an extraordinary ingenuity in intrigue and a persuasiveness that few could resist even when they knew they could not rely upon his plans or his promises. He had below the surface, says Giraldus, more aloes than honey in his constitution; but with ingratiating air, shedding oil in his speech, he succeeded with suavity in turning reason upside down and making black seem white with remarkable contrivance. Benedict of Peterborough names him "that son of iniquity and perdition." He was of reckless daring, bold, decisive, swift as lightning. When confronted with his own crookedness, he was shameless, crafty, full of excuses. John in the early seventies was still a child. He had been too young to share in the partitions of Montmirail.

It was upon these sons who had known nothing constant or permanent in life, who had been bred in the most different milieus, assigned to empty and vainglorious titles, dandled, according to the "hungry falcon" politics, with great expectations constantly deferred, placed in positions of inevitable rivalry, made witness to violent feudal conflicts and domestic scenes, that Henry was obliged to depend as the instruments of his policy. They were apter tools for the ripening schemes of Louis Capet and the injured queen.

The young Plantagenets, whose prospects were so magnificent, naturally drew a great following among their own generation, a swarming horde that gave deep uneasiness not only to Henry Fitz-Empress, but to the heads of noble famlies everywhere. The biographer of Guillaume le gives an idea of how this rabble of courtly
routiers
amused itself upon the jousting fields of western Europe. To the tournaments, occurring in a brisk season about twice a month from Pentecost to the feast of Saint John, flocked the young bloods, sometimes three thousand strong, taking possession of the nearest town. Thither also flocked horse dealers from Lombardy and Spain, from Brittany and the Low Countries, as well as armorers, haberdashers for man and beast, usurers, mimes and storytellers, acrobats, necromancers, and other gentlemen of the lists, the field, the road. Entertainers of every stripe found liberal patronage; troubadours singing of love and war and the
bel season
in the south country, storytellers out of Brittany, goliards from the Paris streets. For the elect there were feasts in upper chambers. We hear from the romance of
Joufrois
that for lesser dignitaries tables were laid in the streets, where candles set in blossoming pear trees assisted the moon to light the scene.
²³
The gossip of palace and fief and school, of shrine and cloister, of synod and assize, flew through the town. Forges rang in the smithies all night long to repair the jousters' gear. Brawls with grizzly incidents — a cracked skull, a gouged eye — occurred as the betting progressed and the dice flew. To cry up their champions in the field came ladies of fair name and others of no name at all. There was dancing below the pavilions on the greensward, with heralds and knights clapping the measures and calling out the changes.

The hazards, the concourse, the prizes of the tourney keyed men to the pitch of war. The stakes were magnificent, for the victor held his prize, horse and man, for ransom. And for these ransoms fiefs went in gage or the hapless victim fell into the hands of usurers, giving his men, and in extremity himself, as hostages. Fortunes were made and lost on the point of a lance, and many a mother's son failed to ride home.

The freehanded young king became the idol of his following. His household had gathered moss in rolling about and came to comprise a fine company of knights and squires dependent on the royal treasury when the loot from tournaments was not forthcoming.
²⁴
Guillaume le Maréchal , to whom his biographer says Henry committed the oversight of his heir, was a fortune seeker in the lists, like many another impecunious knight, but he was honest too, and it is easy to see that his service to both the elder and the younger kings at the same time strained to the utmost his chivalric virtuosity. He is seen laboring in his dual and inconsistent role. As master of the young king's household, he looks to the entertainment of the knights who gather before their tents on the day of combat, and of the
dames choisies
who ride down from the neighboring castles to the margins of the lists. He himself rallies the heralds, sings topical songs for the company after the manner of a good jongleur, claps the measures for the dances. In those flagging moments while the spectators wait for the jousting to begin, he brings off spontaneously the most brilliant and generous little exploits. Amidst bursts of laughter and applause, he unhorses a parading coxcomb knight and turns over his beautifully caparisoned mount to some eager young squire, who is thus made a prince for a day. But when the trumpets sound, Guillaume leads the young king's knights to victory in the field, and takes good care to bring in enough ransoms to keep the expenses of his lord's household somewhere near the inadequate allowances of the elder king for the maintenance of his heir. Even with his best efforts, the marshal could not contrive to make ends meet. "God," he said in this connection, "is kind and courteous, and comes to the aid of those that trust in Him."
²⁵
"As for the young king's personal exploits," says Guillaume, "neither Alexander the Great nor King Arthur himself accomplished so much in so little time."
²⁰
Ultimately King Henry and King Louis and the Pope were obliged to outlaw this pastime of the younger generation.
²⁷
The giving of hostages, the taxing of vassals for their lords' debts, contributed its bit to that movement which subsequently became known as the rise of the third estate.

It was not merely the young king's extravagance that bore down on the Angevin. His heir was restless and foot-loose and went about acquiring grievances. He was bored with the dull role of king's apprentice. Every argument with his father led to the same end. He wanted independence. He demanded England, or at least Normandy, or even Anjou, for his own domain. Had not his brothers the freedom of their own provinces? Then why not the principal heir of his? He railed at the meagerness of his subsidies, yet he was expensive too. He wanted to get away from guidance and surveillance on visits to Paris, Rouen, Arras, Poitiers, where the fresh breath of life stirred in the century. Reproached for vagrancy, he flew into Angevin rages. Though named king, he possessed no furrow in England nor in Gaul on which to set his foot. Stay where? He was only a pensioner on the king's bounty, generous or niggardly, as the case might be. Neither present cockerings nor future prospects soothed his spleen.

For a time Henry sought with gifts and promises and a slackening of his tether to assuage the young king. But before he could get his son in hand, the menacing aftermath of the Becket affair obliged him to turn his attention to his relation with the church. The Franks had overlooked no device for fixing responsibility for the lamentable tragedy in Canterbury on the King of the English.
²⁸
They besieged Alexander with demands for an interdict upon his lands, so that Henry was forced to send capable agents hurrying to pursue the Frankish envoys to the
curia
. These legists managed to get over the Alps in the dead of winter just in time to stay the censure. When the returning Frankish envoys reached Paris armed with the menace of interdict, they were astonished to hear that the Pope had already dispatched two special legates to Normandy to examine Henry's case and hear his appeal for clemency.

However, while these movements of doubtful issue went forward, the climate of the Continent seemed likely to prove unwholesome for Henry, especially if the envoys for the Franks should get him under censure before the arrival of the legates for whom he had himself appealed. The king therefore resolved to give his attention at this juncture to affairs in Ireland. He had, since the early seventies, had the conquest of that island in progress as a domain for John Lackland, and he had long since received papal assent to his avowed plan to bring its outlandish ecclesiastical practices into line with the usages of Rome.
³⁰
This was a mission certain not to provoke the
curia
.

It was while getting things in hand over there that disquieting rumors of sedition in his own household reached his ears. In those barbarous parts he learned that the great hall in Poitiers with its brilliant assemblies of
preux chevaliers
, his vassals and the queen's, had become a hotbed of sedition, a rendezvous for traitors. He heard the queen herself was the center of an unnatural confederation which included not only the disaffected barons of Brittany, Aquitaine, and Anjou, whom his oppressive measures had moved to revolt, but his own sons, Richard, Count of Poitou, and Geoffrey, Count of Brittany, those beardless youths with whom he had dealt so liberally at Montmirail; his own cousin, Philip of Flanders, whose countess sat in the courts of love; his heir, the young king, whom he had crowned with honors. He heard an incredible thing: that all these beneficiaries of his bounty were moving toward a coalition with his inveterate enemy, the King of France.

These tidings may have somewhat softened Henry's conscience in the Becket matter. At any rate, he hastened to return to Normandy to meet the legates and make his peace, not at any price, but at a good price if necessary, for whatever unwitting share he might have had in the martyrdom of Canterbury. He arrived unostentatiously from England, but so suddenly that Louis gave him credit for some supernatural means of locomotion. "Now in Ireland, now in England, now in Anjou, the King of the English seems rather to come on wings than by horse or boat."
³¹
He met the legates sent to him in Savigny. He found them more stern than he had hoped in their terms for absolution and undertook to whittle these down. Henry let the cardinals know how far he would go in reconciliation. At length in dudgeon, he reined in his horse as if to leave the parley.

"I will go back to Ireland," he said, "where I have plenty of business to engage me."

Some of the king's Norman bishops followed him to Avranches on the western marches of Normandy and persuaded him to a second conference. There for some days they awaited the arrival of the young king so that he might witness and confirm the agreement.

Presently a gathering at the cathedral of Saint w, which still marks the site, witnessed a signal event.
³³
The king, in the presence of a concourse of prelates and nobles, submitted to an examination of his reported crimes against Thomas, in which he showed himself spiritually humble, contrite, and very reasonable. With his hands on the Gospels and certain holy relics, he swore publicly that he had neither ordered nor desired the death of the archbishop, and that the news of it had been a terrible shock to him. Of his own free will he added that the death of his own father had scarcely affected him more grievously. He admitted, however, that his conscience troubled him for fear he might have had something to do indirectly with the martyrdom. He confessed that he had been exceedingly angry upon hearing of the excommunication of his bishops, and that it was possible that the discomposure of his face, the flashing of his eyes, and certain choleric words that had slipped from his lips in that moment of passion, had put it into the heads of the assassins to avenge his indignation. He would, therefore, he said, not pretend to escape from Christian discipline. He was prepared to accept whatever the cardinals might decree for penance in the circumstances. He was ready to go on pilgrimage to Rome, to Compostella, or even to Jerusalem, if they thought best.
³⁴
The cardinals were convinced that he had "purged his conscience" in the most salutary manner. They must have been puzzled over the stories of his stiff-necked impiety that had circulated through the agency of the Franks in Tusculum and Rome.

At the end of the confession, the cardinals conducted the king to the porch of the cathedral where sinners beyond the pale were customarily dealt with. There Henry knelt upon the pavement and attendants stripped off his outer garment disclosing to astonished spectators a hair shirt, which he was wearing underneath. This too was taken off to expose his bare back to scourgings. A delegation of monks then told off each one his prescribed number of stripes. Everyone was profoundly moved.
³⁰
There was hardly a dry eye among the assistants Even the cardinals wept. No one records the effect of the scene upon the young king who witnessed the penitential flagellation of his father for a confessed share in the crime against his dear master Becket.