Eleanor Of Aquitaine (33 page)

Inside the Château the waiting through Lent for Henry's attack had consumed the resources of the rebels in spite of the ravaging of the holy soil of the Limousin. The
routiers
, who were paid for fighting, not for waiting, were vexed by the delay. They were practical bargainers and, as excommunicates, without scruple. Under the leadership of two experienced brigands, Sancius and Curburan, they threatened to leave the Château and apply to the elder king for a better wage. At length they became imperious Sancius was a capable executive. "Why lose a righteous cause," he argued, "for want of funds, when the treasure of Saint Martial, fabulously rich from the pilgrim traffic, reposes within the citadel?" The abbé of the monastery, misdoubting some such issue, had withdrawn to the Souterraine, but the rebels found a means of dealing with his deputies. The young king "borrowed" 20,000 sols from the abby treasury, giving warrant with the hitherto worthless seal which he had acquired upon his coronation. When this sum was speedily exhausted, looting began, and monks and burghers and outlying peasants yielded what they had. At last the holiest sanctuary of the abby itself was violated. With Geoffrey of Brittany in the lead, the brigands drove out the monks and weighed up the gold and silver vessels of the altar where countless pilgrims had come to bring tribute and seek the blessing of the apostle martyr of Aquitaine.
²³

In spite of his crusader's vow and his protestations to his father, the young king appeared to feel an obligation to help sustain the clamorous troops in the Château. His double dealing with the king must have grown out of their altercations over the stakes of Richard in the struggle. At any rate, during the siege of the citadel, the prince went far southward with Guillaume le and the Count of Tonnerre (one of the rebel barons) and scaled the sequestered heights of Rocamadour in quest of treasure.
²⁴
Here they took their toll from that holy shrine where pilgrims had long flocked to see the great sword of Roland. Finding there the Abbés of Dalon and Obazme, they exacted tribute also from them. The
Histoire de Longuedoc
reports that this expedition was a blind to cover a juncture with the Duke of Burgundy and Raymond of Toulouse, who were advancing with armed forces to join the rebels.

Returning northward toward Brive from the raid on Rocamadour with Guillaume and the Count of Tonnerre in the burning heat of June, the young king felt himself out of sorts and therefore, before the day was spent, turned in for rest at the dwelling of one Etienne Fabri in the little bourg of Martel.
²⁶
There he fell into a fever. His condition occasioning some alarm, the Abbé of Dalon and the Bishop of Agen went to his bedside. These men of God, while ministering to his needs, obtained from the prince a salutary confession of his sins. They learned that the sick young man desired to see the king his father, to ask his forgiveness, and engage him, if need were, to fulfill his testament. While messengers went to fetch the king, the Count of Tonnerre diverted the townsfolk from alarm by entertaining them with a tournament.

The messengers found Henry encamped upon the Vienne, at no great distance from Limoges. At tidings of the gravity of the young man's illness, the king prepared to go to him at once with every kind of succor. But he was warned against visiting his favorite son's bedside. There might be treachery in the summons. Let the king remember the attacks upon his person before the Château. Let him remember that the prince was desperate and pressed by desperate men; that only his own royal person stood between the mad and fickle prince and the highest seat in Europe. Let him consider what disorders would ensue upon any mischance in the Limousin. No. Let the king send messengers to the prince; physicians; a present of gold; but let him forbear to visit him.
²⁷
Upon these counsels, Henry drew from his finger a ring familiar to the prince, set with a precious sapphire that had belonged to the treasury of Henry Beauclerc,
²⁸
and gave it to the Bishop of Agen, who had come as emissary from Martel. With it he sent assurances of help and comfortable words. When the sick prince should be recovered, the evils that estranged them might be healed. The young king was to give heed to his physicians and command the King of England for his needs.

Returning to the house in Martel, the bishop and his escort found the young king laboring in a fever with a presentiment of death. He seized and kissed the token of the elder king's forgiveness. Bidding his attendants to bear witness, he called upon the mercy of God and the help of the Virgin and the saints, and especially of Saint Martial. He then adjured them to bear his last petitions to the king- that, first of all, he should show grace and mercy to the queen, his mother, held now so long in captivity; that he should provide for the needs of the young Queen Marguerite, a pensioner in exile in the French court; that he should requite those of his
mesnie
whom, by reason of his calamity, he could not repay for their loyalty.
²⁹
Then he asked that they lay his crusader's cloak upon his breast and permit him to die with his cross upon his shoulder. Turning to Guillaume, who stood by, he said,"you have always been true and loyal to me. I bequeath to you my cross and beg you to bear it for me to the Holy Sepulcher. You shall redeem my pledge to God."

When his spiritual counselors had again heard his confession, the young king ordered a halter to be brought and put upon his neck. Dragged thus naked from his bed, he prostrated himself before them on a bed of ashes and had bare stones laid under his head and feet. Lying there, he supplicated all the saints whose shrines the rebels had despoiled to have regard for his salvation. He then gave directions for his burial, which, after the practice of the times, distributed his relics: his eyes, brain, and entrails should rest beside the grave site of the elder king in the ravaged monastery of Grammont; his body should rest with those of the Dukes of Normandy in Notre Dame of Rouen. In accordance with custom, his clothes and trappings were brought, and these he renounced and ordered laid aside for charity — all but the token ring. The monks standing by to sustain him with wholesome admonitions, noted the sapphire on his finger. Said one of them,

"You ought to renounce all earthly impediments, so that you may go unencumbered from the sorry shipwreck of this world as naked as you came."

The prince, says the chronicler, replied courteously that he no longer felt desire for any earthly thing. The monk called attention to the ring.

"You ought to put it off," he said, "to be free from insidious snares."

"I do not keep the ring," replied the prince, "by reason of desire to possess it for itself, nor by reason of levity; but only so that, before the tribunal of the Supreme Judge, it may be an open proof that my father has restored me to the fullness of his grace."

However, he consented to give it up, if so advised. But when the monk bent to remove it, to the astonishment of all, it refused to come. This the bystanders judged an awesome token of Henry's forgiveness and of divine clemency.

The hot June day drew to the ninth hour. The Bishop of Agen administered extreme unction. Thereupon the young king sank to unconsciousness, but rallied briefly to reiterate his requests and commend his soul to God. In the obscure little town of Martel in the Limousin, in the heart of the queen's domains, the scion of the Plantagenets yielded up the ghost. Henry was but twenty-eight, young in years, as Newburgh says, but full of time when measured by the experiences of his life.

The following day the Prior of Vigeois, who relates most of these details, climbed with a few awe-struck villagers to a little eminence above his town to see the cortege of the young king pass by on its way northward from Limoges. The day, he says, was clear and serene. The king's bier was followed by a forlorn and tattered remnant of his valiants, Aymar of Limoges, Geoffrey of Lusignan, inveterate haters of the house of Poitou, by Guillaume le Maréchal , and others. All were destitute. At Uzerche they paused at daybreak for a mass for the repose of the young king's soul. The abbé himself supplied the wax lights for the requiem. The prince's horse had gone for the expenses in Martel. A throng of peasants and villagers, starting from their burrows upon rumor of this august matter in their midst, crowded the streets in expectation of wonder and largess. But when an alms was taken among the young king's followers, only a dozen deniers were found, and these the chaplain swept into his wallet to buy bread for the cortege. One of the pallbearers sold his shoes for breakfast, and the others were glad to appease their hunger with the simple charity of the monks.

On the same day the procession reached the first burial site in Grammont. The Bishop of Limoges, pointing to the despoiled sanctuary, declared the young king excommunicate and threatened to hold his body for ransom. But softer counsels prevailed on intimation that the elder king had guaranteed to make good the spoliation. The requiem was sung by the ravaged monks, and the funeral relics were deposited where the elder king had planned to lie. At Grammont many of the escort fell away, not daring to approach more nearly to the King of England.

*

I charge you not with grief, but with excess of grief.

Peter of Blois, letter to Henry

Bernard Rossot, a monk of Grammont, was dispatched from Limoges to inform Henry of the calamity that had befallen his house. He found the king retired from the heat of the midafternoon in a villager's house at Mas, and accosted him alone. Recognizing the monk, the king greeted him and was greeted again.

"What news?" the king asked quietly.

With lowered countenance Bernard replied, "It is not good."

No other words were necessary. The king dismissed those who had gathered for the tidings, and, alone with the monk in the little village room, he heard the story of the sordid tragedy, the lively compunction of the young man dying, his supplications, his plea for forgiveness, his testament, his want and desolation, the meanness of his obsequies. Alone the king mourned like David for Absalom.

Presently Guillaume arrived from the requiem in Grammont, the only one of the young king's
mesnie
who dared to face the king. Before receiving him, Henry had so possessed himself that no one could guess from his countenance with what sentiments he remembered the young king.
³⁴
He listened to Guillaume's story, his son's dying request, the bestowal of his crusader's cross and cloak, the absolution of his sins, and when it was ended he said only,

"God grant him salvation."

At length Guillaume broke the silence, "Sire, what would you have me do?"

"Conduct your lord's body to Rouen," replied the king.

"Alas, Sire, that I may not do," replied Guillaume, "for I am hostage to one Sancius, the
routier
, for a debt of 100 marks Angevin owed by my lord the young king."

At sight of his son's royal seal upon the warrant, the king was for a long moment silent. It was a very large sum. He thought of the treasure he had poured out to suppress the young king's rebellion — even his jeweled coronation sword — of the fortunes he had expended on the prince's households, his coronation, his tournaments. When Sancius came to redeem his claim, he half sighed, half groaned,

"So be it. I agree. My son has cost me many a heavy sum. Would God that he could ever cost me
more."
³⁵

Thereupon he would have committed the young king's body to the marshal. It was true he had been estranged from Guillaume and had gladly sped him from the prince's household at Christmas time. But it was nevertheless to the marshal that he had committed the keeping of his son in the days of his tutelage, and among all the gallants of his train, honest Guillaume alone had been loyal to his young lord through thick and thin, and brave enough to stand up to the consequences of his loyalty. It would have been fitting that the young king should pass through Normandy with his master-at-arms, who had bred him to all chivalric arts and given him the accolade; with the friend who in place of kindred had assisted the last flutterings of his spirit in the flesh; but this boon was denied by Guillaume's obligation to the remnant of the young king's following. Before dismissing the marshal, Henry bestowed upon him horses and livery and the wherewithal to accomplish his pilgrimage with the young king's cross to the Holy Sepulcher.

*

At the same time Henry dispatched the Archdeacon of Wells to England to report to the queen the death of her eldest son. When this clerk came into her presence, he found her in strict confinement, dragging out her years in bitterness of heart, but he was surprised to learn that she had not been cut off by the stones of her prison nor by her remoteness from the scene from the tragedy that had overtaken the Plantagenets. She explained that she had been apprised of the calamity in a dream before any vulgar rumor reached her. She had not even needed an interpreter of her vision, for she was, as the archdeacon says, not only clairvoyant, but a woman of acute understanding. She told him that the young king had appeared to her in her sleep with more than mortal joy and serenity of countenance, wearing two crowns, one superimposed upon the other. The nether one shone with an incomparable brightness; the other by contrast seemed dimly effulgent. What, she asked, could be signified by a crown, which has neither end nor beginning, but eternity; and what by the ineffable glow save eternal felicity? The duller crown, it seemed to her, signified the young king's earthly sovereignty, now dimmed and eclipsed by the glory of his immortal state. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," she reminded herself and the archdeacon, "neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him."