Eleanor Of Aquitaine (46 page)

The queen speedily convened councils in Windsor, Oxford, London, and Winchester. It required an energetic dialectic and tears shed in many palaces to bring the slumbering magnates to their senses; but finally the bishops and barons awoke and pinned their faith to Eleanor and not to John. In her representations they at last found courage to threaten the prince with seizure of all his estates in England. Thereupon his foreign campaign collapsed and he retired sullenly to Wallingford.

As if John were not problem enough, nuncios from the exiled chancellor now took the occasion of the London assembly and its embarrassinent with John to announce that Ely, armed with his new legateship, had landed the previous day in Dover and lodged in the castle there.
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These harbingers saluted the queen courteously, but they filled the assembly with alarm. If the magnates were indeed to prevent Ely from return, they desired the concurrence of John in a decision that threatened to embroil them with Rome. Yet John at the moment they held under discipline. When a delegation from the magnates waited on the prince in Wallingford, they found him prepared to make good use of his lucky situation. His words were brief, but they fell like a thunderclap.

"The chancellor," he declared, "fears the threats of none of you, nor of all of you together; nor will he beg your suffrance if only he may succeed to have me for his friend. He has promised to give me £700 of silver within a week, if I shall have interposed between you and him. You see, I am in want of money. To the wise a word is sufficient."

The prince had no mind to labor his case, but promptly withdrew, so that the magnates who had recently cut off his revenues might of their own insight come to their senses. In view of the circumstances, it seemed "expedient" to the magnates to propitiate the prince, and the money was found in the king's exchequer to outbid the bribe of Ely. Anything was better than to complicate affairs in England by restoring the chancellor. At least they had got rid of him. Having bought John's support with a good price, says the chronicler, "the queen writes, the clergy write, the people write: all with one voice admonish the chancellor to bolt, to cross the Channel without delay — unless he has a mind to take his meals under the custody of an armed guard."

All the Plantagenets were quick to learn, and John was by no means the least astute among the brothers. The king's absence provided him with useful lessons in the political chess play of his time, taught him to move the pieces on the board, king and bishop, knight and castle, and the humbler pawns, but not to capture the queen.

For the rest, the year 1192 passed drearily. Philip's incursions in Normandy were for the most part checked not only by the collapse of John's support, but by the refusal of his own barons to violate the Truce of God. The valorous knights of Britain were overseas with the king. In England, castles and great houses were closed or grimly manned for the defense of towns.
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The anxious messages in which the regency besought the king to return from Palestine were long in transit and uncertain of effect upon the champion of Christendom, immersed in bitter warfare with the enemies of Christ. Tidings of disaster, disturbing rumors, but meager good news came from that distant field of conflict. During the winter, life itself was frozen: in the towns a little stir of merchants; the passage of cowled figures in twos and threes; on the manors only the diurnal toil of husbandman and shepherd. From remote clearings rang the forester's ax; in lonely places smoke uprose from the maltster's oast, the charcoal burner's kiln. Interdict lay for a long time on the diocese of Ely. Elsewhere prayers were said daily for the king's return.

Eleanor, by the wrath of God, Queen of England

Letter of Eleanor to Pope Celestme III

AS THE YEAR 1192 DREW TOWARD AUTUMN, it was generally known in Europe that the King of England purposed to celebrate his Christmas court in his own estates. Late in the fall the first companies of pilgrims thronging home from the Holy Land for Advent, and others gathering in Normandy to welcome the king's arrival,
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spread along the thoroughfares, in ports and market towns, their eyewitness accounts of the many chaptered enterprise in Palestine. These palmers recounted, along with the king's imperishable deeds of valor, the occasions in which Coeur-de-Lion had incurred the enmity of the greatest princes in Christendom — the King of the Franks and his high vassals, the Holy Roman Emperor, the powerful house of Montferrat, the Duke of Austria, and the Byzantine Comneni, bound to all the others by ties of blood. New companies of crusaders reaching their homelands just before Christmas were astonished that Richard, who had certainly sailed before them from Acre, had not preceded them home. There had been unwonted gales and many shipwrecks on the Mediterranean, but credible witnesses reported having seen the very galley in which the king had embarked in Palestine nearing the friendly harbor of Brindisi As December came on and the king had not joined even his household in Italy, an alarming suspicion spread — and this on the lips of his enemies was converted to a certainty — that Coeur-de Lion had encountered some calamity and would never reappear. The blithe and arrogant behavior of Philip Augustus in this period, and his good rapport with John, gave weight to dark hints of secret collusion and foul play.

Within the borders of Normandy a tense expectancy prevailed, fraught with conjecture and misgiving By the queen's order the border castles were strongly held, the walls and fortifications of the towns strengthened and repaired. In England, where Eleanor held her Christmas court, an intolerable apprehension quenched all festivity. On the frontiers an armed truce, sustained by papal menace to France, held Philip Augustus in check. Paris too was quick with expectancy, but of a more sprightly quality. However, Advent passed on both sides of the Channel without news or incident. Berengana
and Joanna still abode in Rome.
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The champion of Christendom, signed with the cross, journeying home from crusade, was six weeks overdue and had not been heard from in any port.

On the 28th of December, a year and a day from Philip Augustus' return from the holy war, it suddenly became known in what general region Richard had celebrated Christmas. The ominous dearth of news broke in a flood. On that day Philip received in Paris a marvelous letter from his illustrious friend, the Holy Roman Emperor; and at once the world was filled with rumors that brought every Christian alive stock still in his tracks.

Henry by the grace of God, Emperor of the Romans and ever august, to his beloved and special friend Philip, the illustrious King of the Franks, health and sincere love and affection. Inasinuch as our imperial highness does not doubt that your royal mightiness will be delighted at all things in which the omnipotence of the Creator has honored and exalted ourselves and the Roman Empire, we have thought proper to inform your nobleness by means of these presents that while the enemy of our empire and the disturber of your kingdom, Richard, King of England, was crossing the sea for the purpose of returning to his dominions, it so happened that the winds brought him, the ship being wrecked on board of which he was, to the region of Istna, at a place which lies between Aquileia and Venice, where, by the sanction of God, the king, having suffered shipwreck, escaped, together with a few others A faithful subject of ours, the Count Maynard of Gortze, and the people of that district, hearing that he was in our territory and calling to mind the treason and treachery and accumulated mischief he was guilty of in the Land of Promise, pursued him with the intention of making him prisoner. However, the king taking flight, they captured eight knights of his retinue. Shortly after, the king proceeded to a borough in the archbishopric of Salzburg, which is called Frisi, where Frederic de Botestowe took six of his knights, the king hastening on by night, with only three attendants, in the direction of Austria. The roads however, being watched, and guards being set on every side, our dearly beloved cousin Leopold, Duke of Austria, captured the king so often mentioned, in an humble house in a village in the vicinity of Vienna. Inasmuch as he is now in our power, and has always done his utmost for your annoyance and disturbance, what we have above stated we have thought proper to notify to your nobleness, knowing that the same is well pleasing to your kindly affection for us, and will afford most abundant joy to your own feelings. Given at Creutz, on the fifth day before the calends of January.

The destination of the letter put every advantage of time in the hands of the Franks. But the queen's service of information had been alert. It was not long before Eleanor and the magnates in England received a precise copy of the emperor's ingratiating letter to the King of the Franks, neatly furled in a message from the Archbishop of Rouen, who broke the tidings with as many steadying precepts from Scripture as he could bring to bear upon a situation so anomalous.

Instantly, as though animated by a single nerve, the subjects of the king converged from far and near upon the crisis. The first matters were to find out where Richard was held captive and to reach the ear and conscience of Henry Hohenstaufen. Savary, Bishop of Bath, a kinsinan of the emperor, went straight from England to the imperial high place;
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William of Ely, the exiled chancellor, made his way from the court of France, where he had taken refuge; Hubert, Bishop of Salisbury, who met the news in Italy on his way home from crusade, changed his course: all these pressed into Germany by various routes, following rumor from town to town.
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The queen's emissaries, the Abbots of Boxley and Pontrobert, explored Swabia and Bavaria.
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It was perhaps at this time that the tale of Blondel, impenshably a part of the saga of Coeur de-Lion, first took shape upon some German highway: the story that the trouvere Blondel, himself in quest of his lord, lodged below the craggy tower of Durrenstein, there heard Richard singing from his prison one of the poet's two part songs, capped the couplet, and so, engaging the king in bandying stave for stave, made certain of his whereabouts and established communication between him and his rescuers.

As for Queen Eleanor, whose responsibihtes held her to her post, she set herself to correspondence in her son's behalf with the Pope and with prelates everywhere, reminding them with abundant scriptural citation of the pious mission of Coeur-de-Lion, and admonishing them in the most vigorous language to employ all the resources of Rome against the impious captors of the king.
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But her principal travail in the first weeks of her calamity was the circumvention of Philip Augustus and that incorrigible renegade, her youngest son.

These two colleagues, with their heads together, acted on the cold presumption that, so far as their plans were concerned, Richard was as good as dead. No sooner had the news of the king's capture spread than John, as if playing a role he had rehearsed, fled to Normandy, declared himself the king's heir, and boldly demanded the adherence of the Norman barons. Knowing how well guarded was the fortress of Rouen where Alais was still the queen's prisoner, he convened as many barons as he could in Alenjon
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But gaining nothing substantial from these hardheaded feudal lords, he proceeded to Paris. Warmed by the counsels of Philip Augustus, the youngest Plantagenet assumed his brother's role in the French court, proffered his homage as Duke of Normandy to Philip,
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engaged to set aside the Countess Isabelle of Gloucester, whom he had married three years before, and take to wife the Princess Alais. He further agreed to confirm to Philip the Norman Vexm and all the other fruits of the French king's aggressions, since his return from crusade, upon the lands of Richard.

Having justified himself by these negotiations with the Plantagenet "king," Philip seized time by the forelock, threw papal menace to the winds, and fell upon the Vexm, that gateway to Rouen and the sea. Gisors, the chief castle of the Capetian princesses' dower land, for whose possession Henry Fitz-Empress had fought and plotted through all his reign, yielded, through the treachery of its keeper, to the King of the Franks. From Gisors Philip moved without hindrance upon the capital of Normandy. He addressed himself to the seneschal of that fortress as lord of the province by virtue of the homage of John, demanded the instant delivery of his sister Alais and immediate possession of the city.
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The Earl of Leicester, who commanded the garrison, was however less impressed by the tales that were afloat than the custodian of Gisors had been. He declared that he had received no official notification of a change in the succession, nor any order from King Richard to deliver up the prisoner; and he stood stoutly upon his words. Nevertheless, he offered Philip the hospitality of the castle, to which his claims as overlord entitled him, if he cared to cross the drawbridge. A sharp suspicion crossed the king's mind that he might find himself a counter valent for the precious prisoner in Austria. Having been overconfident, Philip had not come with force enough to take the fortress. In a rage he withdrew his troops, smashing his own siege engines and voiding his wine casks in the Seine. He would, he swore, revisit the city with a rod of iron.

While these matters were proceeding in Normandy, John returned to England in a mood of elation. With the aid of Philip he had recruited a troop of mercenaries with which, as soon as Lent should be over, to man his castles and put down resistance. He swaggered in his role as king-elect. He went to London and filled the ears of the queen with all the rumors current in Paris concerning the dire fate of Coeur-de-Lion, laboring to persuade her that Richard would be seen no more. He made ready to receive the allegiance of the magnates and to take over the royal castles.

Eleanor, in painful quandary over the destinies of her two sons, acted with the strictest caution and moderation. She did not drive the scapegrace into open defiance of her authority. She forbore to provoke open strife by arresting him as a traitor or dispossessing him of all resource. Her measures were defensive, but so punctual that they anticipated John's treasonous plots. Through the vigilance of the magnates, the precursors of the prince's Flemish mercenaries were arrested in England during Lent, and the queen had time, between Good Friday and Easter, to close the Channel ports and man the coasts toward Flanders with a hastily mustered home guard armed with anything they could find to fend off invasion, even the tools of their yeomans' labor on the land. The coast so bristled with burghers and plowmen that the seafaring
routters
, when they had surveyed the situation, gave up the expedition.
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All the while Eleanor maintained a sharp oversight of the royal castles and their keepers, and from time to time she exacted new oaths of allegiance from the bishops and barons of the realm. Through Lent, in an anguish of uncertainty, she played for time.

*

About the middle of March the Abbots of Boxley and Pontrobert made contact with the captive king near Ochsenfurt in Bavaria,
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as he was en route with an imperial escort from Wurzburg to strongholds on the Rhine. With him, and high in his graces, rode Ely, the exiled chancellor, who had been the first to reach him, and by whose agency, it was said, Coeur-de-Lion was being transferred from remote to more accessible fortresses.

After his capture near Vienna, Richard had been imprisoned incommunicado under the closest guard by day and night in the castle of Durrenstem on its lofty crag above the Danube.
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Early in January, at the emperor's behest, he had been brought up the river to Ratisbon and then moved again to Wurzburg. In these places, in a series of debates, Henry of Hohenstaufen and Leopold of Austria had concluded agreements upon the conditions of his custody. As suzerain, the emperor laid claim to the royal captive; but Leopold, who had taken him, and who had scores of his own to settle, held him for a price; and it required some fierce haggling to adjudicate these claims.

For Henry Hohenstaufen, Richard was a prize without peer in all the world. He was not merely the author of all the "accumulated mischiefs" alluded to in the Christmas letter to the King of the Franks, but he was the very hostage of hostages to secure the emperor against a flood of present troubles in which he was involved with Rome and his own feudatories. For Henry was engaged, somewhat as Henry Fitz Empress had been in the case of Becket, in a complicated struggle over that question, irresolvable by dialetic, of the limits of ghostly and temporal authority. He was also, like Philip Augustus, consumed by a Carolingian dream of expanding empire Richard, the figurehead of Christian warfare in Palestine, the protege of Rome, was an inestimable pawn in these circumstances. Furthermore, the Hohenstaufen's inconclusive struggles with Rome had brought him into dangerous collision with many of his own bishops, whose enormous land tenures and strong armies in Germany made their opposition formidable. And his most powerful secular vassal, Henry the Lion of Saxony, who was Richard's brother in law, out of ancient rancor toward the imperial house, had failed to support his campaigns in Italy and taken every opportunity to foment revolt among the magnates of the Empire. Now "by divine grace" — as the Christmas letter explained — Henry had in hand the most useful instrument in the world to wrest justice from his enemies.

In Wurzburg in the middle of February, Henry of Hohenstaufen and Count Leopold concluded their previous debates over the disposition of their prize and imposed their terms upon their captive Richard was to be the emperor's prisoner, as was meet.
¹⁸
To put the champion of the warfare in Palestine to death would have been to unite the enemies of the emperor all over Christendom, and to waste the real worth of the hostage. The King of England, they concluded, should be redeemable, but at a price that would bring Plantagenet arrogance to the dust: 100,000 marks of silver with two hundred hostages as surety for the payment, these to be chosen from among the first magnates of England and Normandy or their heirs;
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the Emperor of Cyprus to be released from the silver chains in which Richard had left him languishing, and the handmaid of Berengana restored to the emperor her father; Eleanor, "the pearl of Brittany" (child sister of Arthur of Brittany), who had recently been offered to Saphadin as a substitute for Joanna, to be affianced to the son of Leopold. The redemption would be heavy, but let it not be thought the price was mere "ransom"; it was, in the case of the emperor, indemnification for injuries suffered; in Leopold's case, dower for the marriage of his son.