Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (22 page)

Even in the twelfth century Fontevrault was widely recognized as playing an important part in improving the status of women and in defending their rights. Its whole inspiration publicly proclaimed their individuality and their value as human beings. Indeed the abbess or
domina
was probably intended by Robert to provide a religious counterpart to the lady or
domna
of the troubadours. Hitherto even mistresses had been seen as no more than sexual objects. Some literary historians (e.g. Reto Bezzola) credit no less cynical a hedonist than William IX with being converted to a new concept of womanhood by the example of Fontevrault; his early verse is sensual to the point of grossness, but in a later poem he has discovered the fascination of an unattainable Beatrice, too exalted to be possessed.

Understandably, the order of Fontevrault became extremely popular. Ultimately it possessed one hundred dependent priories in France, together with three in England, which owed their foundation to Eleanor’s encouragement. Most of their nuns came from aristocratic families. Even in the eighteenth century Louis XV sent his daughters to Fontevrault to be educated. As Miss Kelly says, the mother abbey was an asylum for ‘ladies of rank whose worldly destinies were at an end, or the turbulent or merely inconvenient relicts of kings and princes and high barons, or the superfluity of princesses that embarrassed noble houses’.

The ideals that inspired Fontevrault must have appealed deeply to Eleanor after her own experience of men. She too had been exploited and cast off. She had many friends and relatives among the nuns and would have known all about the abbey and its concept of a new and independent woman from a very early age. As has been seen, she endowed it as early as 1146, before she went on crusade.

Furthermore, despite the frivolity of her early years and the misgivings of St Bernard and certain chroniclers, Eleanor was undoubtedly a devout Christian. It was not just that she approved of Fontevrault as a haven for her sex. She was plainly impressed by the fervency of its nuns and monks, by the discipline of its two strictly segregated cloisters; a monk could not enter the cloister of the nuns even to give a dying woman the last sacraments, and to be annointed she had to be carried into the abbey church. It is clear that Eleanor placed a high value on the prayers of the community.

In 1168, when her son John was only one year old, she entrusted him to Fontevrault to be brought up by the nuns. It was probably at her instigation that Henry II endowed the abbey so generously. Fontevrault appears to have become one of his own favourite religious houses, and indeed he was to be buried there.

From 1152 onwards Eleanor herself gave Fontevrault some new gift at almost every crisis or important event of her life. In that year, immediately after her marriage to Henry, she declared in a charter: ‘Divine inspiration made me wish to visit the holy convent of the nuns of Fontevrault, and by God’s grace I have been able to do so. God has brought me to Fontevrault. I have crossed the threshold of the sisters and there, with deep emotion, I have approved, conceded and confirmed everything that my father and my forebears have ever given to the church of Fontevrault.’ In 1170, when Richard was consecrated count of Poitiers, she endowed the abbey, and again in 1185 (perhaps to mark her partial reconciliation with Henry). She did so yet again in 1199, on the same day that her son was buried there, asking the nuns to pray for ‘the soul of her very dear lord, king Richard’.

Furthermore, during that unhappy year of 1199, one of her own daughters became a nun at Fontevrault. This was Joanna of Toulouse, who was worn out by the infidelities of count Raymond and by the rebellions of his turbulent subjects. Attempts to dissuade the countess were in vain, although she was pregnant. She was so ill that she could scarcely take her vows, and she soon died. Her child was born posthumously, but it also died. The queen mother buried them in the abbey.

Eleanor herself had entered Fontevrault in 1194, shortly after king Richard’s return from captivity, though not as a nun. Presumably it was able to offer her suitably regal accommodation; most great abbeys of the period were accustomed to entertaining royal guests. Moreover it was ‘an excellent listening post’, being near Chinon, which was the administrative centre of Touraine and Anjou and in the heart of the Angevin empire in France. From here she could easily keep an eye on the political situation and supervise her seneschals, castellans and stewards. Protected from the exhausting demands of public life, she could hold a quiet and intimate female court; by now she probably had little interest in men apart from Richard, who was often at Chinon and could come to see her frequently. The queen mother seems to have been on close terms with all the abbesses. Above all, it was an excellent place for an aged lady to prepare her soul for death. Occasionally she emerged, but she always returned to this last home.

At the Revolution the abbey was sacked, and the bones of the Plantagenets were dug up and scattered, and the building was turned into a prison. In the 1960s, however, the prisoners were removed from Fontevrault so that a thorough restoration could be made. It is a rambling complex of buildings, part of which dates from the sixteenth century or later, and much of it is undistinguished. But even today Eleanor would recognize the church and the kitchen. The first is a glorious Romanesque temple, consecrated in 1119, with a high and truly regal nave flanked by magnificent columns and lit by four great cupolas. The kitchen is one of the strangest edifices to survive from the twelfth century. In shape it is a double octagon, crowned by a vast central chimney surrounded by twenty lesser chimneys. The size gives some idea of how enormous the abbey must have been in its prime: this kitchen provided food not only for the community but for guests and travellers as well, sometimes feeding nearly a thousand people.

16 The Death of Richard

‘A voice was heard in Rama, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children because they were not.’

The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah

‘With the life of a generous, but rash and romantic monarch, perished all the projects which his ambition and generosity had formed.’

Sir Walter Scott,
Ivanhoe

Philip II — sometimes called Augustus because he was born in August — was unquestionably one of France’s most energetic and successful rulers. Like so many of her great kings, he was unattractive. Crafty, avaricious, suspicious, timid to the point of cowardice, he was totally lacking in the chivalry of Richard, and indeed in any ideals at all. He was a poor soldier, and could not even ride a horse properly. He had no time for music or troubadours. He looked like a peasant instead of a king, being short and squat, with a red face and tangled hair, and was unkempt and dirty in his person. No man could have been more different from Richard. Yet King Philip was also a supreme realist, with a true Frenchman’s practicality, who knew just how to play the tortoise to the Plantagenet hare. His sole aim was to increase the Capetian domain, and he concentrated on this with fanatical determination. Even the most desperate reverse could not deter him. He was the most formidable enemy Eleanor ever knew, and in the end the son of the husband who had rejected her would win the battle.

Yet by the middle of the 1190s Richard appeared to have everything on his side. His alliances, with the counts of Flanders, Boulogne, Hainault and Toulouse and even with the emperor, hemmed in Philip. Moreover Normandy and Aquitaine, now at peace, provided rich revenues to pay for war. The symbol of Richard’s military might was the impressive castle of Château-Gaillard, on a high cliff above the right bank of the river Seine — the ‘rock of Andelys’ — which he built during 1196, perhaps inspired by the mountain-top stronghold in which he had been incarcerated in Germany, or by the great castles of the Holy Land. Its name meant ‘saucy castle’ and its very existence was an affront, as well as an obstacle, to the French King and his ambitions. It blocked the approaches to Rouen, fairly and squarely. Philip was appalled when he first saw it, but joked bravely, ‘If its walls were made of iron, I would still storm them’. Richard’s reply, very much in character, was ‘By God’s throat, if its walls were built of butter, I would still hold them’. It became his administrative as well as his strategic centre, the emblem of the Angevin empire in France.

War between the two kings began once more in 1197. Philip managed to take Aumâle, but Richard made substantial gains. He was employing mercenaries and paid professionals, who more or less constituted a standing army. They included such technical experts as Ivo the Crossbowman (
Balestarius
) — the crossbow was the new weapon of the moment — and men he had brought back from the Holy Land who knew how to use Greek Fire (naptha) in primitive flamethrowers. Nor were his other mercenary troops to be despised, even if they were recruited from outlaws, bandits and renegade monks. Many came from Flanders and Brabant, and the popular nickname for them was ‘Brabançons’. They had some excellent commanders, such as the ferocious Mercadier from Périgord.

In May count John captured king Philip’s cousin, Philip of Dreux, the fighting bishop of Beauvais, and Richard advanced steadily in the Auvergne. In August Philip had to retreat ignominiously after trying to relieve Arras, which was beseiged by the count of Flanders. Indeed, far from coming to the French king’s help, the great French feudatories had either begun to ally with Richard or else stood aside. Philip hastily made peace. His domains had suffered fearfully from the ravages of Mercadier, whose terrible mercenaries had burnt, murdered and plundered far and wide, sparing neither churches nor priests.

War broke out yet again in 1198, on the Norman frontier. Near Gisors Richard inflicted an all-but-decisive defeat on Philip, in the course of which he personally unhorsed three French knights with one lance. Philip fled panic-stricken over the river Epte on an aged horse called Morel, which he had chosen because it was easy to ride, but the bridge gave way and he, Morel and his knights were thrown into the water. Twenty of them were drowned and Philip himself escaped with difficulty. Richard boasted in a letter to the bishop of Durham how ‘the king of the French drank river water on that day’. One hundred French knights were captured — Philip’s heaviest loss so far — and the English king reconquered the entire Vexin.

From her retirement at Fontevrault Eleanor made one of her rare interventions in these days. Philip of Dreux, the bishop of Beauvais, was still immured in a dungeon at Château-Gaillard. The papal legate, cardinal Peter of Capua, asked Richard to release him, arguing that it was contrary to Christian law to imprison a bishop. The king answered the cardinal with furious abuse, shouting that the pope had never done anything to help him when he was a prisoner, that the bishop was no better than a brigand, and that the cardinal was himself a traitor, a liar, a simoniac and a suborner. He ended by telling Peter to get out and never cross his path again. But the queen mother had obviously taken the measure of the new pope, Innocent III, who was to prove the most formidable pontiff of the Middle Ages. She arranged for the bishop of Beauvais to escape, even offering him a refuge. She was much too clever to let her son add pope Innocent to his enemies, and was quite prepared to brave the royal anger.

Eleanor’s interference appears all the more shrewd in the light of Philip II’s marital situation. A widower, he decided to remarry and his choice was the king of Denmark’s sister, the fifteen-year-old princess Ingeborg. However, although she was a girl of great beauty, during the marriage service Philip was suddenly seized by a physical aversion to her that he found impossible to overcome. Almost at once he began to look openly for a fresh consort. Poor Ingeborg remained in France and appealed to Rome, which promptly excommunicated the king of the French. Nevertheless, in 1199 Philip defiantly married a Tyrolese lady, Agnes of Meran, who presented him with several children while Ingeborg continued to languish in a convent at Soissons. Innocent III was hardly the person to tolerate such flagrant sinfulness in an anointed king.

Philip already had enough trouble with secular matters. In 1197 the emperor Henry VI had died before his time, although he had managed to conquer Sicily. Henry’s heir was his son, the infant king of Sicily who — as the emperor Frederick II and the ‘Wonder of the World’,
Stupor mundi
— would one day astonish and alarm all Christendom. But Frederick was still a baby and the German princes had grown weary of the terrible house of Hohenstaufen. In 1198 Richard personally attended the imperial election of Cologne and made sure that the new emperor was his nephew, Otto of Brunswick; all those friendships with German magnates during the final months of the king’s captivity were turned to good account. Yet another of Eleanor’s grandchildren had found a crown, although he had to relinquish Aquitaine and could no longer inherit the Angevin empire. Furthermore, Otto IV was married to the daughter of the duke of Lorraine and therefore constituted a potential threat to king Philip’s northern borders.