Eleanor Of Aquitaine (44 page)

FROM THE TIME OF RICHARD'S ACCESSION and her own release from captivity, and notwithstanding the marriage and crowning of Berengaria in Limassol, the Countess of Poitou styled herself, and was addressed by others, as "Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England."

As the perils grew that threatened the Angevin empire, she rose with a majesty that amazed her contemporaries. The fruit of her early disciplines in Henry's school of feudal statecraft had matured in Salisbury Tower. In her long restraint, with only philosophy for her exercise, she had, it seemed, accumulated wisdom and somehow kept pace with the progress of history. In those years she had gained from her narrow windows a long-range view of Angevin destiny. She had attained Henry's capacity for bold maneuver, but she was more folk-wise than he, more sensitive to popular drifts, and more ingenious in taking advantage of these. Her sagacity, her decisiveness, her adroitness and dispatch, her vigilance, her multifarious activities, her sudden and wearisome journeyings, were the marvel of her age. Her acts in the crises of Angevin history that confronted her reveal a core of sound policy-governed by a prudence and farsighted vision that had not characterized the conduct of her prime. From the time of her release her foremost place among the magnates of the realm was never questioned.

Earlier and more clearly than her associates she divined that the crusade, which had stirred the emotions and engrossed the thoughts of every rank in the feudal world, was not the most critical concern of the Plantagenets. Her memory was long, and she saw looming beyond the horizons of the holy war, dangers that threatened, near the end of her days, to disrupt the proud empire that Henry Plantagenet had built out of the mosaic pieces of western Europe; and unlike her familiars, she saw the chief menace to that structure not in the wars with Saladin, nor in the tangle of affairs in Britain, nor in the turbulence in Poitou, but in the single-eyed design of Louis Capet's heir.

She had had an unexampled opportunity of knowing the quality of the pride that underlay the patience and humility of the pious Louis and the caution and pertinacity of Philip Augustus. She did not, like Richard, underestimate either the capacity or the resolute malice of the younger Capet, dedicated from his birth to the prime object of wiping out the grievances his house had suffered from the Plantagenets in half a century; to the object of redressing that balance of power his dynasty had lost through her own withdrawal from the citadel of the Franks in 1152; of rectifying those gradual encroachments of Henry in Brittany, Normandy, Auvergne, Berry and Toulouse; of avenging the scorching insults flung at the Capets in the disinissal of the young Queen Marguerite and the betrayal of Alais and the withholding of the Capetian dowers.

In the third quarter of the century, when time and destiny were hers, the Angevin empire had seemed strong enough to counter any rancors of the puny and spineless Capets. But within the dozen and more years of her imprisonment the position of the Plantagenets vis-á-vis the Capets had deteriorated, more through the strange fortuity of events than through failure of design. Henry — so many years her junior — had vanished from the scene. Of the five sons with whom she had fortified the empire, only two remained, glorious Richard and graceless John. As long as Richard remained childless, the succession was insecure, and certain, if Richard were to meet an untimely end upon crusade, to provoke an internecine strife and offer the Capets their long-awaited opportunity to divide and conquer. Of the daughters given as hostages for foreign alliances, two remained. Joanna, widowed, and impoverished by Richard's crusade, no longer offered prestige nor support to the royal house; and Eleanor, married in 1170 to the King of Castile, had been rooted in the world beyond the Pyrenees and swallowed up in peninsular affairs. Matilda was dead, and her widowed husband, in perennial conflict with the Holy Roman Emperors, merely complicated the continental problems of the Plantagenets. In the oncoming generation among her grandsons of the houses of Saxony and Brittany, Queen Eleanor recognized another brood of fierce eaglets, like those of the Winchester fresco, tearing at the heart of empire and continuing the fratricidal strife that had divided her own sons.

She could see the Capets and the Plantagenets, whose names both she had borne, coming to grips for the possession of her world, the whole Continent of Europe from the lower Alps to the western sea, from the Channel to the Pyrenees. It was to be a conflict stripped of all pretense of feudal loyalties. No longer could crusaders' vows or oaths of feudal allegiance in a common cause conceal, nor could papal anathema prevent, the fateful and inextinguishable enmity between the two royal houses. In the struggle that mounted she saw the insecurity of the Plantagenet succession her matter of first concern.

Until Richard should have secured his own succession, John loomed as the second defense of empire; but the youngest Plantagenet was by no means ideal as a pretender to the Angevin domains, and no one knew this more certainly than the queen. Eleanor during her captivity had not been bemused by the resort of her three elder sons to the court of the Capets, each one in turn there to be transformed into an enemy of his own house, an agent for its ruin. She remembered the young king provided in Paris with an army and a seal of state to usurp Henry's empire; Richard in company with Philip Augustus hounding the elder king through his estates to his death in Chinon; Geoffrey of Brittany, Philip's trencher-mate in Paris, cut off in the midst of intrigue against his own race and entombed in Notre Dame. These events, in which she had certainly borne a share, now composed themselves with stark clarity into a preview of disaster. John too had learned the way to Paris. The youngest eaglet gave Eleanor a terrible anxiety. Should he be appeased or be driven by rebuffs to follow his elder brothers into the camp of the archenemy?

The prince who had been born too late for his proper share in the splendid inheritance of the Angevins had been called John Lackland in his infancy. As a child he had seen himself the object of a tender solicitude to the king his father, who had tried to endow him with a realm in Ireland; to carve him a little estate by abridging his brothers' domains where they converged at the heart of the Angevin inheritance; to gain for him by marriage the Province of Maurienne; and at last to deprive Richard in his favor by giving him Poitou and transfering to him the alliance with Alais of France. But nothing materialized; everywhere the finer luster of his brothers' lots made his portion paltry. And when the death of two elder brothers gave room in the empire, he still had no solid domain, while one sole brother inherited the whole. Yet was not he a Plantagenet, born of the same root, with the blood of the Conqueror purple in his veins, and of the Angevins, and of the Poitevins?

Given his character, the youngest of the Plantagenets was just near enough the throne to be tempted to override the obstacles and suppress the scruples that separated him from it. Giraldus Cambrensis had measured John's abilities with those of his brother Geoffrey, with no disparagement of John. In wit he was the nimblest of all the brothers and of a lightning suddenness of action, unrestrained by disturbing afterthoughts or any twinge of conscience. His perfidy had already been fully displayed in his heartless desertion of his father in his last days, and it now shone forth in his shameless bargaining with the regency to keep him loyal to his absent brother. The cynical impudence of John, his slick agility in changing front, were preternatural, as if he were indeed the posterity of that celebrated demon ancestress of the Plantagenets, who was seen at one moment kneeling piously at mass as Countess of Anjou and, at the next, when the host was elevated, vaulting out of the window in the guise of a witch.

Richard's handsome grants to John before his departure for Syria were designed to satisfy Lackland's ambitions in Britain and to keep him out of the preferred continental domains and out of the best opportunities of collusion with the Capets; but they gave him a position of great wealth and power and contributed to the presumption that he would be Richard's heir at least in England, a presumption strengthened during the crusade by the popular belief that Coeur-de-Lion was destined not to return to his island kingdom. So great was the dread of John's maneuvers among those who had Richard's interests at heart, that the prince was put under oath to forego the occupation of his English castles and remain abroad for a period of three years while Richard was overseas.

Queen Eleanor, having in project her journey to Sicily, had not dared to leave John foot-loose upon the Continent, free to range with Richard's malcontent vassals, to come at the tower of Rouen, or to proceed to the court of France. She therefore, as the lesser of two evils, procured his release from his oath of exile and sped him to Britain, where the magnates were expected to keep him in check.

While the queen was making her momentous journey to Sicily, John made good use of his time in Britain. "He perambulated the kingdom," says Devizes,
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and made himself known, as Richard never was known, to the people of the island, people of every rank. He showed himself, like the young king, liberal and affable, magnificent and generous in hospitality. By pressure and by intrigue he possessed himself of several of his forbidden castles, took up his residence now in one, now in another, set up a quasi-royal court with its officers and household, maintained his own justice, and enjoyed large revenues. Wherever he went, and upon all occasions, he stimulated the belief that Richard would not return and that he was the certain heir of England. Says the chronicler, "It lacked nothing but that he should be hailed as king."

The magnates of the regency were cautiously reluctant to withstand John's aggressions and his arrant exploitation of himself.
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Doubt about the ultimate plans of Coeur-de-Lion clouded their counsels. So far the king had held no steady course. At Henry's death he had swept out most of the old servants of government. Then he had altered his purposes in Sicily and might do so again. Moreover, under the influence of rumors spread by John, many of them believed that the latter might soon be king,
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and they were wary of opposing a prospective monarch who would certainly know how to wreak his vengeance. The situation commended a policy of temporizing with the youngest Plantagenet. Prudence suggested easing the prince's tether, but without giving him irrecoverable rope. Only Ely the Chancellor in the interest of Richard ventured to resist him publicly; but Ely's unpopular operations in other fields had so far isolated him from his fellow magnates that he became a target for John rather than a bulwark against him.

Since Henry's death, John, in considering his interests under the new regime, had kept an open mind as to whether those interests would be more profitably served by maintaining good relations with Richard, or by collusion with Philip Augustus; and he was not long in discovering that this judicial attitude put him in a good position to bargain with either party. But the news of Richard's compact with Tancred, designating Arthur of Brittany as the king's heir, precipitated John's decision about where his interests lay. When by secret means he learned that Ely was engaged in Richard's behalf in confirming that compact in Scotland, his course was no longer dark to him.
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He indulged in a livid Angevin rage and then set himself to procure the downfall of the presumptuous chancellor. In this project of injuring Ely, the prince made good use of the chancellor's unpopularity to insure his own prestige.

There seems no doubt of Ely's loyalty to the king. But his arrogant assumption of authority over his colleagues, his exactions of tax and tithe, his pompous exploitation of his dignity as legate and chancellor, had won him a cordial detestation in every quarter. Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had recently died on crusade, and the prelates of Britain were fearful that Ely might make his mastery complete by slipping adroitly into the primacy.

The church was further outraged at the moment by a fortuitous incident in which Ely's excess of zeal undid him. Geoffrey, elect of York, like John, had been under oath to remain abroad for three years during Richard's absence. But he had recently, in consequence of Eleanor's negotiations in Rome, received his pallium, and he was ambitious to assume the administration of his diocese, the revenues of which during the vacancy were flowing into the coffers of the chancellor. Making John's release from his oath a warrant for disregarding his own, Geoffiey landed in Dover against Ely's injunctions, to take possession of his see. Thereupon Ely ordered his arrest, and his overzealous minions subjected Geoffrey, newly invested with his holy orders, to gross indignities.

The anxiety of bishops and barons alike to do nothing compromising in uncertain times had heretofore condemned the regency to impotency in dealing with the chancellor. But the case of Geoffrey, which aroused widespread popular indignation, offered an actionable cause. In this they were glad, however, to employ John as their figurehead and as a potential scapegoat in the event that Richard should support his insufferable chancellor. In these commotions, John, fearing neither chancellor nor legate overmuch, nor his brother either, appeared before the people as the righteous instrument of the bishops and the champion of the popular discontent, and in this role he presently found admirable ways of advancing his own interests.

The prince, the bishops, and the justiciars met in Reading, where they took council together and found due warrant for acting against Ely.
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Here was produced that super-mandate obtained by the queen and the Archbishop of Rouen in Rome, a manifesto authorizing the regency to check the chancellor if matters came to extremity and to accept Rouen's counsel as supreme. They summoned the chancellor, who was at Windsor, to hear their complaints, and this he promised to do. But when his outriders discovered that the bishops and barons were headed by John and accompanied by some armed knights and a force of Welsh soldiery, Ely made excuse that he was sick and retired to the security of the Tower of London.