Eleanor Of Aquitaine (28 page)

FOLLOWING THE PENANCE IN AVRANCHES, Henry undertook to get the young king in hand. Fearing to allow this furious malcontent out of his sight, he dragged him from the spectacle in Saint w's to the province of Auvergne. There the young man found himself, to his surprise, witness to his father's prearrangement of a marriage of John Plantagenet with the heiress of the vast estates of Maurienne.
¹
What did this portend — this aggrandizement of the infant John with a great province spreading southward and eastward from the region of Lake Geneva and about the base of the Alps to the frontiers of Italy and the edges of Provence, controlling all the mountain passes and blocking the land routes from Toulouse to Rome? And what, besides the five thousand marks of silver covenanted on the spot, was the
quid pro quo
? When the Count of Maurienne inquired what dower the king meant to set aside for John in his own estates, Henry mentioned the three master castles of Chinon, Loudun, and Mirebeau, marking the triangle where the domains of the three elder Plantagenets converged on the marches of Anjou, Poitou, and Brittany, a region cut from the young king's inheritance.
²
Henry had likewise recently designated for John central estates in England taken also from the portion of the young king.

The family conclave summoned to Limoges to confirm the pact, at which Richard and the queen were present, fell into alarm.
³
What was the meaning of this negotiation? The king was reserving for John strategic strongholds at the very heart of his English and continental domains, carving out an inheritance for this belated scion of the house from portions already assigned to his elders. Was it a scheme for the surveillance of frontiers, and did it presage other whittlings in other provinces? Ireland, Maurienne, and now these castles? At this rate, would John outtop them all? The elder Plantagenets viewed their cadet with bitter hostility and stoutly refused to ratify the pact. However, pledges were exchanged; the Count of Maurienne carried home the marks of silver and Henry took the infant princess into his custody.

While this conclave was in progress, the Count of Toulouse came privily to Henry and warned him of seditions brewing in Poitiers and of the evil influences besetting the young king among his intimates.
⁴
Henry when perplexed was wont to thrust mongers away and take counsel with himself. He decided to examine the subjects of these rumors. Accordingly, he took young Henry and some of his roistering cavaliers on a hunting expedition in the valley of the Aveyron, and there in the windings of the forest and by the cascading streams where they let their falcons fly, he studied the native qualities of these young men and made his own observations on the pernicious doctrines of Poitiers and the joyous freedom of the jousting fields. What he learned alarmed him; wherefore, when he returned to Limoges, without warning or if-you please, he banished several
preux chevaliers
from the munificence of the young king's household to their own estates or to whatever brigandage their calling laid in their way. These scurrying fugitives carried their own rancors and the young king's to distant quarters of Gaul. Having purged some of his son's intimates from his following, Henry has tened to provide his heir with more reliable associates.

He furthermore decided to withdraw the youth from the noxious influences of Poitiers and with that intent dragged the prince, hot with resentment and chagrin, a virtual prisoner to Chinon.
⁸
But while the elder king was in a forty-fathom sleep after a hard day, that light-footed young man escaped from his father's very bedchamber, passed the fortress drawbridge, which only treachery could have opened, and made off before cockcrow for Paris to lay his case before the just tribunal of his father-in-law and overlord, Louis Capet.? Unable in two days of posting with relays to overtake the renegade, Henry sought to get his younger sons in custody, only to learn that the queen had already dispatched them also to Paris, where Louis had knighted Richard and was giving the brothers all the help and comfort that he could.

The Easter court in Paris was a signal for a general uprising, which had waited only for the escape of young Henry from his father's surveillance. All of a sudden a hundred helpless individual grievances, some of them reaching far back in time, flowed into a common river bed, whose streams rushed to the city of the Capets. Dispossessed barons, heirs mulcted of their inheritance, vassals impressed for service, adventurers looking for a new disposition of feudal prizes, liege men of the princes, fugitives from the young king's
mesnie
, partisans of the rebellious queen, the watchful houses of Capet, Champagne, and Flanders — all found that their hour had struck.

When Henry's headlong pursuit of his son from Chinon to the French frontier had left him empty-handed, he sent messengers to Paris demanding his father's right to have his heir sent back to Normandy.
⁸
The bishops who carried his demand to Louis were mild and courteous. Let the young king return to his father, they said, and if he were found to have suffered a grievance, it would be amended. The French king's response was lofty.

"Who is this," he asked, "that makes these demands of me?"

"Sire, the King of the English," came the reply.

"That cannot be," said Louis, "for the King of the English is here with me, and he makes no demands of me by your agency. But if perchance he who was formerly King of the English makes these demands, know that he is king no more. If he is eager to 'amend' anything, the best thing he can do is to cease playing the part of king, since everyone knows that he resigned the kingship to his son."

The bishops returning to Henry to report these things warned him to look not only to the safety of his castles but to the security of his person.

From Rouen, after the flight, the keeper of the young king's seal, whom Henry had placed in office, restored that instrument to the elder king, and with it he sent some of the reliable associates that Henry had added to his son's household, together with their sumpter horses and trappings and such treasure as lay at hand. But, except for the seal, Henry refused to accept these reversions and sent the retainers back with conciliatory gifts of plate and fabrics and injunctions to serve their young lord faithfully.

As for the seal with which the young king had been provided at his coronation, who cared for that trumpery thing? Louis had a new one made for him in Paris. When this was ready, the King of the Franks convened a brilliant assemblage in his city. The foremost bishops and barons of the realm were summoned to confer with the brothers Plantagenet: the house of Champagne, the Counts of Flanders and Boulogne, besides all the conspirators from Henry's domains. Oaths were exchanged. Louis's liege men swore to make no peace with the "former King of the English" without Louis's consent. The new seal then came into use to testify to young Henry's matchless liberality. In return for their homage, Philip of Flanders received Kent and the castle of Dover; his brother, the Count of Boulogne, the County of Mortaine and other appurtenances; William of Scotland, who had already begun incursions in the north of England, received Northumbria to the Tyne; and his brother David the Counties of Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire. Others shared handsomely in the possessions of the elder king. The new seal made in Paris impressed a vast quantity of wax that day, signifying that "he who had formerly been King of the English was king no more."
11
Except for concessions to the Count of Blois in Touraine, where Henry had dispossessed him, and the County of Mortaine, England offered the grand prizes for revolt. For himself the young king preferred to keep the continental domains, those rich and ancient seats of his forebears in Rouen, Le Mans, Tours, Angers.

Both weather and the church calendar made midsummer the most agreeable time for military operations on the Continent.
¹²
The barons of France, who detested the cold, went to war by the almanac, awaiting, as Rigord explains, that season "when the grain began to head and the fields were fair with flowers." On June 29, 1173, Philip of Flanders laid siege to Aumale north of Rouen; and only a little later Louis and the young king attacked Verneuil to the south; later still the barons of Brittany seized and held the strong fortress of Dol on their frontier. From England came news of rapine on the Scottish border, of castles far and wide falling into the hands of traitors. The English dispatched everything, says Diceto, except the Tower of London to implore Henry to come to the rescue of his kingdom.

The correctly scheduled maneuvers of the Franks gave the Angevin a brief respite to organize defense. The defection of his sons and the dread of treachery among his barons deprived him of his normal levies. He dipped deeply into his treasure and put his jeweled coronation sword in gage to hire twenty thousand mercenaries. Employing these with the energy, dispatch, and that Angevin good luck that seemed to his enemies to prosper all his enterprise, he put out one by one the fires of sedition that had broken out on all the borders of his domains. By accident the Count of Boulogne met his death before the castle of Drincourt in Normandy,
¹⁵
whereupon Philip of Flanders withdrew from the campaign directed against Rouen. At the collapse of these allies, Louis prudently withdrew from Verneuil. The forty days' military service owed by his vassals was expiring, and he had no idea of going so far as to invest his royal treasure to buttress the young Plantagenets. Some of Henry's mercenaries, having reduced ancillary castles, presently captured Dol. Arriving with incredible speed hard upon that event, the king took a host of captives, including some of the banished remnants of the young king's household.

By September the leaders of the revolt were sufficiently depressed to seek a truce with Henry. The conspirators fronted the king at the ancient trysting place under the Gisors elm.
¹⁷
But Henry's victories were not yet decisive enough to bring them to complete surrender. The revolt was gaining headway in England and they hoped to haggle for handsome gains. Though Henry tried to buy his sons out of the rebellion with unexpectedly generous terms, the brothers and their adherents withdrew to await further decisions in the field.

*

While the confederates in Paris through the unseasonable months gathered resources for new campaigns, Henry, resisting the appeals from Britain, turned his own operations southward toward the queen's provinces. There, he made sure, was the cradle of conspiracy, the wellspring of all his miseries.
¹⁸
Through the Archbishop of Rouen he made an appeal to Eleanor to end the suicidal strife by restoring her sons to amity with him, and warned her that she would be the author of a general ruin if she persisted in inciting them. The archbishop, addressing her as "pious Queen, most illustrious Queen," wrote that Henry was prepared to forget his past wrongs and receive her again into the plenitude of his grace; but that if she disowned her wifely duty and continued to embitter her sons against their father, he himself would, "albeit with grief and tears," feel obliged, as her ghostly father, to visit her with extreme penalties. The archbishop buttressed his exhortation elaborately with scriptural references.
¹⁹
Since this warning had produced no visible effect, Henry proceeded in another way. He began by clearing a wide swath north of her capital. He stormed and took the castles of rebel vassals between Tours and Poitiers, razing their walls and burning their ruins, uprooting orchards and vineyards, leaving terror in his wake, and filling the dungeons of Normandy with the captives that he seized. Where, if not with that archconspirator, Raoul de Faye, her kinsinan, her confidant, the keeper of her soldiers and her revenues, would the queen be found? He stormed and took Faye-la-Vineuse, but found there neither Raoul nor the queen.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the smoking wilderness north of Poitiers, Henry's reconnoiterers descried a small band of Poitevin knights fleeing over the map of desolation he had made, toward the frontiers of the French domain. Overhauling this remnant, they found not Raoul de Faye, for he had crossed the boundary of the Chartrain on his way to Paris, but Eleanor the queen, disguised in man's attire, astride her mount.
²⁰
Had she also decided at the last moment, but too late, to betake herself to the refuge of her overlord in Paris? With her rode a fear-stricken and bedraggled remnant of her noble household, jousters and troubadours forsooth. Among her captors she faced some who had lately been of her household: Poitevin barons rich with her bounty, chevaliers who had paced the terrace of her palace under the recent Easter moon, which had hardly waned.
²¹
The time and place of her betrayal are obscure. The torch of the rebellion was extinguished in silence. It was perhaps the portcullis of Chinon that rasped down on the queen's little train. The chroniclers say not a word.

Subsequently, at Pentecost in 1174, Henry arrived in Poitiers on the threshold of that elegant hall which had lately been the scene of such glittering spectacles. Since the Countess of Champagne's last recorded judgment in the courts of love dates from this spring, it may perhaps be assumed that she stood by her mother's citadel until the last moment. Certain it is that Henry swept out that hall and extinguished the fires that had flared up briefly on the hearthstones of Guillaume le Grand and Guillaume le Troubadour, in their ancient high place of Poitiers. Later we find Marie carrying on in Champagne, patroness of Chrétien and André and others who may perhaps have wrought together in the queen's court. It seems also that the Countess of Flanders reached her goodly city of Arras, for one of the chroniclers reports that her husband Philip in the next year had one of his vassals beaten half dead and then suspended head downward in a sewer for sighing Poitiers-fashion in the presence of his countess.