Eleanor Of Aquitaine (53 page)

"Why," said the king, "did you wish to injure me?"

"Because," replied the youth, "you slew my father and my brother. Do with me as you will. I do not repent me of the vengeance I have taken."

"Go hence in peace," said Coeur-de-Lion. "I forgive you my death and will exact no revenge. By my bounty behold the light of day."

Thereupon, to the edification of the whole company, the king ordered the young man unshackled and dismissed him, not only with his pardon but with a gift in token of the fullness of his mercy. The chroniclers, however, add a feudal footnote to the incident. They relate that the youth was later flayed alive; by one account, on order of Mercadier; by another, at the command of Joanna Plantagenet.

When all else had been done, Richard made a salutary confession to Milo, his chaplain, in the course of which he avowed that he had indeed betrayed his father in his last days to the King of the Franks, that archenemy of his house, and asked that, as evidence of his belated penitence, he be laid to rest at Henry's feet in the crypt of the nuns at Fontevrault. He admitted that, upon the advice of his spiritual counselors, he had abstained from the sacrament because of his hatred of Philip Augustus; but now he put hate away.
³⁷
He had stormed Châlus in the holy season of Lent, and for this impiety he made atonement. In his final dispositions he bestowed his lion's heart on Rouen, where the body of the young king already lay in the necropolis of the Norman dukes. No relic was bequeathed to England, the land of his nativity; and Poitou won only foul remains in token of its betrayals.
³⁸
In his last hours his thoughts went back to the Rock, whither he sent messengers with his seal to seek out Guillaume le Maréchal and the Archbishop of Canterbury with instructions from himself and the stricken queen. On the 6th of April Abbé Milo gave him absolution and communion, and when his ghost passed in the gathering darkness, the man of God bathed his brow with balm and closed his eyes upon the world, its golden treasures, the advent of spring, and the destiny of the Plantagenets.

Martel, where the young king had breathed his last, lay hardly a hundred miles away in the same deep heart of the Limousin. As she gazed upon the noble figure of Coeur-de-Lion, Queen Eleanor must have recalled the vision of that other fair young man that had visited her in her prison at the time of his passing, wearing his double crown. It must have cut her like a sword thrust that, of all the Winchester eaglets, only John remained — John, the fondling of Henry Fitz-Empress, the fiercest, the most ungovernable of all the brood; that he who had been Lackland now grasped the inheritance of all his elder brothers.

Richard was forty two and he died childless save for one bastard son known as Philippe of Cognac, who was about fifteen at the time of his father's death.
⁴⁰
As for the fatal treasure of Châlus, no more is heard of it. From the court of Ventadour, where for three generations poets had never ceased to sing, Gaucelm Faidit launched his
planh
for Coeur de Lion. But poetic ardor had waned in the Limousin Gaucelm jangles the conventional coins of the troubadour, but fails to give his lament the note of personal grief that runs through Bertran de Bern's elegy for the young king.

"Ah God," exclaims Faidit, "the valiant King of the English is no more… Of all
preux chevaliers
he was the first… A thousand years shall never see his peer, so openhanded, noble, brave, and generous. . Men that love truth will say not Charlemagne nor Arthur outmatched his valorous deeds."

While Richard was in captivity, Eleanor, writing to the Pope in his behalf, reminded Celestine of her previous losses "My posterity," she wrote, "has been snatched from me; The young king and the Count of Brittany sleep in the dust. Their unhappy mother is forced to live on, ceaselessly tormented by their memory.Of Richard in duress" she moaned, "I have lost the staff of my age, the light of my eyes."

These words, recalled in her final loss, go nearer to the heart than the cliches of the poet.

Now the clamor of war resounds not only in the high places, but in the remote corners of the realm. The people are filled with dismay. Fear creeps into the towns and villages. No place is safe, neither the bourg as refuge nor the open country as a way of escape. Men know not whether it is safer to flee or to stay.*

Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, 282

NEAR THE END OF LENT IN 1199, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, was in the neighborhood of Le Mans on episcopal business. Incidentally he was bending his way to Angers to replace the absent bishop of that city in the services of Palm Sunday. Hugh was traveling with his wonted simplicity, mounted on a horse bare of housings, with his baggage, which was trussed up in hides and coarse blankets, tied behind his saddle, his outfit an unspoken sermon of rebuke to the clerks who rode with him on well trapped hackneys, their more abundant goods laden on sumpter beasts that followed after.
²
As he jogged along he was surprised to fall in with the little retinue of the ss Matilda of Fontevrault, still abroad on her mission from Queen Eleanor to Berengana, and she put into his ear the dreadful secret tidings that had been entrusted to her.

Hugh, like Saint Bernard, whose disciple he was, had been a mentor of kings, and he was near to the Plantagenets. Henry Fitz Empress had loved him like a brother for his disarming guilelessness, and it was known that he could disenthrall Coeur-de-Lion from his passions by his fearless refusal to be cowed by anger; so Hugh had long been a boon to harassed liege men of the Angevins. Revolving the purport of Matilda's tidings with anxious mind, the bishop resumed his journey with his clerks. Two or three days later he was accosted by Gilbert de Laci, a citizen of Saumur, with news of Richard's death and the plans for his burial next day at Fontevrault.

By this time, in spite of efforts to keep the matter secret, the king's cortege from Châlus had published the calamity, and rumors flying their mysterious course faster than horses' hoofs could carry them spread consternation far and wide. In market and tavern, churchyard and hall, men huddled together whispering their dread. Who would now be strong enough to hold the heartland of the Angevin empire, divided as it was among the adherents of Arthur of Brittany and Philip Augustus and the brothers Plantagenet? Few doubted the authority of Eleanor, but the queen was old.

How could she, who had just lost the staff of her age, meet her adversaries? Many castellans drew into their strongholds and victualed them for siege. There was a sudden holiday for brigands, and little men lay low in their burrows waiting to see.

The clerks of Hugh of Lincoln urged him to take shelter from the dangers of the highway; but instead the bishop, forsaking the duties awaiting him in Angers, took a by-route through a dark forest to visit Berengana, who, he learned, was lodged in the castle of Beaufort, possibly on her way to Châlus or Fontevrault.
⁵
He found the young queen mourning her loss inconsolably. Hugh celebrated mass at Beaufort and then, having sustained Berengana with words of wisdom and devotion, he traveled on the same day to Saumur, where he passed the night in Gilbert de Laci's house.

The next day, Palm Sunday, he reached Fontevrault just in time to meet the cortege of Coeur-de-Lion as it arrived from Châlus in the precincts of the y. Here crowds were already swarming from a wide radius — Cardinal Peter of Capua whom Richard had charged never to cross his path again, seneschals of neighboring provinces, clergy, relatives, suppliants made anxious by a change of regime.
⁶
Berengana and Matilda of Perche, the daughter of Matilda Plantagenet, had joined Queen Eleanor. It was the most cherished privliege of Bishop Hugh to perform offices for the dead. With the Bishops of Agen, Poitiers, and Angers, Milo the Chaplain, the Abbé of Turpenay, and other prelates who had gathered, Hugh assisted with the rites. Because of his ancient ties with the Plantagenets, he remained to console the bereaved for three more days during which, with mass and psalmody, he commended to eternal felicity not only the two Angevin kings entombed together in the crypt, but all the faithful souls asleep in Christ in the shelter of the y.

John Plantagenet did not arrive in time for the obsequies. He had latterly been at odds with Richard, who, lacking funds himself, had shortened his cadet's allowances. The news of Richard's calamity found John in Brittany, conniving, as some believed, to draw his nephew Arthur of Brittany into some new design with himself and Philip Augustus against Coeur-de-Lion. But when the sudden disaster in Châlus cut across his plans, he dropped his affair with Arthur, whatever it may have been, and "incautiously," as the
Magna Vita
states, "let his nephew slip from his grasp," while he himself made haste to secure the Angevin treasure and stronghold in Chinon.

In the meantime Hugh of Lincoln, on his way home from Fontevrault after the three days' mourning, passed by Chinon. John, aware of the advantage of being seen in the company of that man of good repute, besought the bishop to join his household and retinue and continue the good offices he had rendered to the Plantagenets who were no more.

The bishop was by no means happy over the prospect of the new regime For one thing, as a good Cistercian, Hugh clung to the idea that Eleanor's marriage to Henry had been adulterous and that nothing excellent could be expected from any of the "spurious" Angevin brood. John was now thirty-two and Hugh had known him from childhood, the cleverest, the most intractable, and certainly the slipperiest of the Plantagenet eaglets; the deserter of his father in his last days, betrayer of his brother in his captivity, ruthless, sudden, guided by no steady purpose, a shameless troth breacher. He turned back with the prince in no very optimistic hope, even in this moment of solemnity, of subduing John's levity, his irreverence, his vainglory, of imbuing him with a sense of royal obligation. Without consenting to join the prince's household, he retraced his steps with him to Fontevrault for a conference with Queen Eleanor. In the days of this sojourn John gave the mourners a preview of his sovereign role.

The heir of the Plantagenets arrived out of season at the portals of the y. However, being now master of events and impatient, he beat upon the gates importunately. The clamor brought two nuns to the grill. In response to his imperious demands, they replied, with voices decently subdued, that it was permitted to no mortal to visit the crypt or the enclosures of the abby out of hours while the ss was away. "Having thus spoken," says the chronicler, "these prudent virgins restrained the knocking prince outside, and having carefully locked the door, returned to their cloister."

In the few days that John and the bishop spent together at Fontevrault, Hugh labored to awaken in the heir some traces of Angevin greatness. His precepts were monitory. He exposed the vices that beset men in high place — hypocrisy, vainglory, superstition, arrogance, impiety. For a time John, aware of a want of cordiality among those over whom he had been called to rule, sought to ingratiate himself. He took Hugh's lectures with a show of meekness; he listened to advice, promised good works, and proffered an alms from the newly found resources of Chinon. To all these protestations the bishop replied that he would let good works, if they were accomplished, speak for themselves.

The bishop and the prince were together one morning in the narthex of the chapel, and there Hugh drew John's attention to sculptures depicting the Last Judgment, where the wicked kings of earth were being consigned by fiends to eternal fire; but John, no whit appalled, turned to the opposite wall, where righteous kings were being led by joyful angels to everlasting felicity.

"You ought," said John, "to have shown me this scene, for it is the example of these kings that I intend to follow, and it is the fellowship of these that I expect to attain."

Since Easter was upon them, Hugh stayed over to celebrate for the considerable congregation still assembled about the y. The bishop got his paschal theme from the incident in the narthex. With the heir of the Plantagenets compelled to sit before him under the eyes of the assembly, he preached an exhaustive sermon, thoroughly documented with scriptural citation, on the character of good and evil kings, a sermon that drew tears of unction from those on whose ears it fell. The congregation, well pleased with the timeliness of Hugh's discourse, listened with patient approbation long past the time for benediction. But John's temper, worn thin by the week's constraints, showed itself in new exhibitions of levity.

Three times during the sermon, he sent messages to the pulpit calling upon Hugh to put a term to his observations, and reminding him that it was high time to break the Lenten fast. When his suggestions were ignored, he scandalized the worshipers by jangling the coins he had brought for the offering. At this wanton disturbance, Hugh addressed the prince directly.

"What are you doing there?" he asked. And John, as if he intended to provoke that very question, replied,

"I am considering these gold pieces and thinking that, if I had had them a few days ago, I should not have given them to you, but swept them into my own wallet."

Hugh, says the chronicler, "blushed for the impiety."

"Cast them into the dish," said the bishop, "and leave the sanctuary." The congregation dispersed with dismayed commentary. It was remembered that it had been John's custom, since "the age of reason," to refuse communion.

*

In Normandy, too, the advent of John was received with a temperate enthusiasin, even by the liege men of the Plantagenets. Guillaume le Maréchal, to whom Richard had sent his seal a few days before his death, was in his lodgings not far from Rouen when the fatal tidings came. He had taken off his shoes for bed when the messenger from Châlus arrived at his door. Filled with foreboding, Guillaume dressed again and hastened to the hospice of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"Ah," groaned Hubert Walter, "the king is dead
¹
What hope is left to us? There is no one in sight that can defend the kingdom. I foresee the French will overrun us."

"We must," said Guillaume, "make all haste to choose his successor."

"In my opinion," declared the archbishop, "we ought to choose Arthur."

"Ah Sire," rejoined the marshal, "that would not do. Arthur is in the hands of evil counselors, and he is stormy and stiff necked. He hates the English, and if we put him at our head, we shall suffer for it… John as the heir stands nearer to the king his father than this boy."

"Maréchal," replied the archbishop, "it shall be as you say, but I warn you that you will regret this more than any decision you ever made."

"Perhaps," groaned Guillaume, "but still I believe it best."
¹⁰
Thereupon messengers were sent to England to prepare the islanders to receive their king. No one in England wanted Arthur, a youth and an alien in the custody of counselors whose stakes were on the Continent; but it took the best arts of faithful Guillaume and other justiciars who had sustained the regency to pave the way for John. A council of magnates met in protest in Nottingham to review John's perfidies and his banishment from Britain during the captivity. However, for want of a more acceptable heir, they consented in the end to accept the youngest Plantagenet upon condition of solemn commitments at the time of coronation.

*

At the end of Richard's reign Queen Eleanor, who had survived so many kings, was seventy-seven. How could she, burdened with years, prevail against the avalanche of calamity that now threatened her from every side? Again, as during the crusade and the captivity, the inexorable movement for the dismemberment of the Angevin empire took on momentum. The advance had seemed to be checked by Plantagenet valor and contrivance after the return of Coeur-de-Lion; but now once more the ground trembled under her feet and she saw the fateful oncoming advanced by a score of years and threatening to come within the compass of her "life-days in the world."

She had supported many crises with the Angevins, but none so desperate as this. On the accession of Coeur de-Lion she had been obliged to ingratiate a son scarcely known to his subjects, but nevertheless the unquestioned heir and a resplendent figure for exploitation. Now she was summoned to support one whose claim to the empire was in question and whose infamy was notorious, and known to no one more certainly than to herself. Yet John, of all that royal brood of eaglets she had brought to the dynasty, was the only one of her posterity whose interests would lead him to oppose the partition of the empire she had helped to build. Berengana had failed; Otto's destiny was cast in the Holy Roman Empire; Arthur of Brittany could only be Philip's instrument for the dismemberment. And nothing was more certain than that Philip would seize his moment. Indeed, he had already seized it.

On Easter, while Hugh of Lincoln was detaining his congregation to hear the fate of evil kings, the Bretons, under their Countess Constance, and many barons of Maine and Anjou under the leadership of a powerful Angevin baron, Guillaume des Roches, took possession, in the name of Arthur of Brittany, of Angers,
¹²
hardly ten leagues from Fontevrault; and thereupon Le Mans yielded to the same coalition,
¹³
which proclaimed the boy Arthur, on grounds of primogeniture, the rightful heir not only of Brittany, but of the Angevin domains. Moreover, while this confederation occupied the capital cities of Maine and Anjou, the barons of the Limousin, roused by Richard's recent campaign against the Count of Limoges, were spreading sedition in the south. And the heart of the general revolt was seen to be Philip Augustus, who, on learning of Richard's death, hastened down the Loire valley to Tours, whence, as from the center of a spider's web, he could find commerce with the "traitors" and direct all movements toward the realization of his Carolingian dream.