Richard & John: Kings at War (4 page)

At first the union of Henry and Eleanor, and the ‘empire’ of England and western France thus formed, seemed like a fairy-tale arrangement. Both partners were dynamic, energetic, intelligent, cultured; both were strong personalities and highly-sexed; both were ambitious, proud, stubborn and worshippers of power. The cross for Eleanor to bear was that she was obliged to condone her husband’s habitual infidelities while remaining faithful herself. And it cannot have escaped her, though it may have done in the first flush of euphoria when freeing herself from Louis, that the time would come when she was past childbearing age and Henry would still be a lusty priapist in his thirties.
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Henry showed no restraint and virtually flaunted his womanising, spawning a raft of bastards as he ploughed his way through the females of England. In compensation Eleanor meddled in statecraft and was an accomplished politician, winning the disapproval of contemporary chroniclers who regarded her as a ‘power devil’. Additionally, they felt that many of her political decisions, some of momentous import, were taken purely out of pique and sexual jealousy at Henry’s mistresses. Eleanor of Aquitaine is a controversial figure, in her private life, her cultural influence and her political status. Some say she affronted contemporaries by her lust for power, others that she did merely what was expected in the Middle Ages of a woman with power, and that we have underrated both how many resources a medieval female oligarch had and the degree of tolerance given them; on this view the hostile chroniclers were merely weaving black propaganda. Certainly there was something about Eleanor that could provoke people to hatred. Some described her as a latter-day Messalina while others said that the legend of Melusine was actually a foretelling of her reign and that a shrieking flight through church windows could be expected.
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If Eleanor was, as her champions allege, a woman who lived primarily for love, she must have been disappointed from an early stage with the marriage to Henry. The king, it seemed, was at her side just long enough to make her pregnant before departing on some other hunting escapade or ‘urgent’ business of state; some sceptics, indeed, have even described him as a ‘burnt out case’ dissipating his energies on the chase and neglecting politics until some sudden crisis forced him to rush off to a new theatre of war.
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Others defend his restlessness on the grounds that medieval monarchs had perforce always to be on the move, since, given the knife edge on which medieval economies operated, the pressure on food resources and even sanitation would become intolerable if, with their huge households and retinues, they stayed in any one place for very long. Certainly one can trace the later wanderlust in Richard - what Sellars and Yeatman famously described as ‘Richard Gare de Lyon’ - to his father’s example. Henry’s womanising did not cease as he roamed about his empire, and the very year after his coronation he acknowledged a bastard son, Geoffrey, as a true prince. How Eleanor reacted to the philandering is uncertain. Some of her biographers claim that she was insanely jealous and even that she hit back with an affair with the troubadour Bernard de Ventadour in 1153-54 while Henry was in England. But this seems implausible, not only because Eleanor was almost permanently pregnant at this time but because of the ‘treasonable’ quality of extramarital intercourse by a queen. Most probably Eleanor allowed herself flirtations, even of the heavy kind. More solidly based is the idea that because of her preoccupation with political intrigue and meddling in affairs of state Eleanor neglected her maternal role and inflicted psychological damage on her children, not only through obvious failure to be a ‘hands on’ parent but by the anxiety she may have transmitted because of her power-seeking.
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It is a nice question whether Henry’s infidelities or his cavalier way with his wife’s possessions were more upsetting to the queen. Eleanor regarded Aquitaine as a power in its own right and was obsessed with its rights and privileges. As one of her most perceptive critics has remarked, ‘the needs of the territories which she had inherited south of the Loire were always uppermost in her thoughts’.
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What particularly seems to have nettled her was the settlement Henry made with Louis of France in 1156. The Capetian king soon allowed himself to be convinced by Abbot Suger - one of the first in the long line of clerical ‘powers behind the throne’ in French history - that his initial hostility towards Henry II had been an impulsive mistake, that the long-term interests of the French crown were best served by accepting the nominal submission of vassals he could not force into submission - such as the militarily superior Henry of England. Henry for his part saw the virtues of diplomacy at a difficult stage in his reign and made secret overtures to Louis. On 5 February 1156 he met the French king on the borders of Normandy and formally did homage to him for Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine. It seems clear that this obeisance particularly angered Eleanor, who felt that the interests of Aquitaine were being swept aside and that her beloved South was being ruthlessly absorbed into the larger Angevin empire; the fact that her ex-husband was the titular beneficiary can scarcely have helped.
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But as yet she was but a woman in a man’s world. If she was to make inroads on Henry’s arrogance, it would have to be through her sons. It must have been with particular joy that she gave birth to her third son, Richard on 8 September 1157, little more than a year after the birth of Matilda. Richard was the fourth child she had borne Henry in five years (though the first-born, William had died aged three in 1156).

Eleanor’s unusually long sojourn in France from August 1156 to February 1157, during which period she spent months at Saumur, Aquitaine, Limoges and Bordeaux, was probably the longest single sustained time she spent with her husband and it was then that the future Lionheart was conceived. Eleanor crossed the Channel in February 1157 (Henry did not join her until April) but had to remain in London when the restless Henry headed west for a campaign against the Prince of North Wales. Unsuccessful in this, he summoned his nobles to meet him in Chester, but was back in Oxford in early September just in time for the birth of his third son. Eleanor’s confinement, which, in the meticulous way of Henry’s administration, had to have the sum of twenty shillings recorded in the Pipe Rolls by way of expenses, was in Beaumont Palace and there, in what was then the appropriately named King’s House, the future mighty warrior first saw the light of day. But his mother would not have suckled him, as noblewomen avoided breast-feeding. Following the custom of the day, the infant Richard was placed in the care of a wet nurse named Hodierna, who became the salient immediate influence on his young life. A native of St Albans, she gave birth to a famous man in her own right, for her son (the same age as Richard and, according to legend, born the same night) was the eminent schoolman Alexander of Nequam, later scientist, theologian and alchemist. Richard was hugely attached to Hodierna, and, when he became king, showered her with largesse; soon a wealthy woman, Hodierna won fame as probably the only wet nurse in history to have a village named after her - for the old name for West Knoyle in Wiltshire was Knoyle Hodierne.
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How much day-to-day interest Eleanor took in her son is not recorded, but she is alleged to have been influenced by a traditional prophecy of Merlin, which in turn was alleged to refer to the reign of Henry II: ‘The eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in the third nesting.’ This typically obscure and sibylline utterance was interpreted as follows: Eleanor was the eagle, the broken covenant was the failed marriage with Louis VII, and the third nesting was the birth of the third son, Richard.
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The fact that, strictly speaking, Richard was not Eleanor’s third nesting, for she had also given birth to daughters, presumably worried no one, for once one accepts the premise of Nostradamus-style prophecies, almost any meaning can always be extracted from them. What is factual is that Henry took no interest in any of his children, for in 1160, when Richard was three, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury explicitly asked the king to return to England from France, on the grounds (among others) that he was neglecting his children.
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Needless to say, Henry ignored the request. According to his own lights he had no option but to pursue the itinerant life. To a lesser extent this was also true of Queen Eleanor. Travelling either on horseback or in unsprung cylindrical wagons, gaudily painted and with leather roofs so that the royal procession sometimes looked like a mountebank’s parade or a meretricious procession of strolling players housed in coloured pumpkins, Eleanor and her ladies carted documents, money, clothes and jewellery around much of western France and England. More than two hundred members of the king’s household - stewards, chamberlains, treasurers, keepers of seals, bodyguards - made up the royal entourage, and this vast number would be supplemented whenever Eleanor accompanied Henry, for she too brought a bevy of officials, servants and functionaries, all with clothes and impedimenta. It sometimes almost passes belief that a relatively primitive society like that of twelfth-century England could have boasted so many occupations: secretaries, accountants, constables, archers, attorneys, clerks, bailiffs, knights, esquires, chamberlains, chaplains, painters, ushers, huntsmen, heralds, dog-handlers, laundresses - even barbers, gamblers, jesters, fortune-tellers, whores and pimps. Some contemporaries likened the itinerant court to a travelling brothel, and some reprobates even excused their sexual excesses as being a form of ‘compensation’ for the poor food and wine they had to consume on the road. Winchester, Westminster, Windsor, Woodstock, Nottingham, Gloucester, Marlborough, Oxford and Clarendon (near Salisbury) were just some of Henry’s favourite haunts, and here we speak of his English travels alone. The ordeal of travel was not helped by Henry’s unpredictability, his frequent and rapid changes of mind, his refusal to be tied down to a rational schedule, his restlessness and impulsiveness, and his indifference to food and luxury. Even though young Richard was Eleanor’s favourite son and she was far more directly influential on him than Henry was, the child saw little enough of his mother.
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The only truly omnipresent and pervasive influence on the young Richard was Aquitaine itself, and its culture and ethos. Formerly a Roman province of Gaul, an independent duchy under the Merovingian kings of France and even, for about a hundred years in the ninth century an autonomous kingdom, it was by Henry II’s time once more a duchy with complex feudal allegiances. It was always more Roman than the lands to the north, having been conquered from Rome by the Visigoths, not the Franks. Aquitaine, literally ‘the land of waters’ from the rivers that striated it (the Garonne, Charente, Creuse, Vienne, Dordogne and Vézère), stretched from Poitou in central France to Gascony in the south, taking in the counties of Saintonge, Angoulême and Limousin. Eleanor of Aquitaine, the richest heiress in the world, possessed Poitou and Gascony as well as Aquitaine, but it was the Romano-Basque people of Aquitaine who were closest to the queen’s heart. Her mother tongue was the
langue d’oc
, a Provençal dialect of French, whereas in Poitou it was the
langue d’oeil
that was spoken.
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Cynics said that Aquitaine combined all the vices of Poitou to the north (warlike, turbulent, quarrelsome, moneyminded) with all the faults of the Gascons to the south (cynical, promiscuous, braggart and hedonistic), but the Aquitanians regarded themselves as a cut above everyone else, elegant, chic, stylish and cultured, neither frivolous like the Gascons nor humourless like the Poitevins. They despised northerners and had a favourite saying: ‘No good ever came from a king who lives north of the Loire.’ Ralph of Diceto conceded that it was as close to earthly paradise as the medieval world could get: ‘Aquitaine overflows with riches of many kinds, excelling other parts of the western world to such an extent that historians consider it to be one of the most fortunate and flourishing of the provinces of Gaul. Its fields are fertile, its vineyards productive and its forests teem with wild life. From the Pyrenees northwards the entire country is irrigated by the River Garonne and other streams; indeed it is from these life-giving waters (
aquae
) that the province takes its name.’
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Four aspects of Aquitaine were especially salient. First, its thriving economy rested on salt and wine. Salt was produced along the entire Atlantic coast, but especially at Bayonne, the bay of Bourgneuf, and at Brouage (between the isles of Oléron and Rhe). The wines of Aunis, Saintonge and Bordeaux were especially famous, but vinous connoisseurs had a penchant for the fine white wine of La Rochelle, famous enough to be exported and a key element in the twelfth-century prosperity of that Atlantic port. La Rochelle’s success is said to have killed off wine-growing in England - not such a difficult task as English wine was widely held to be no better than vinegar. But La Rochelle’s flourishing export trade, and the customs and duties the duke of Aquitaine could levy on it, made it the key to the duchy’s wealth. The surplus thus extracted enabled the ruling classes of Aquitaine to indulge in conspicuous consumption of a distinguished, artistic kind. This was the second feature of Aquitaine that contemporaries noted. The new polyphonic music of the abbey of St Martial in Limoges was famous throughout Europe. Limoges was noted for the visual arts, especially enamelling. The cathedral at Angoulême and the Church of Notre Dame la Grande in Poitiers displayed high-class sculpture, but some thought that the carving in the Romanesque churches of the Saintonge area were even more magnificent.
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Thirdly, Aquitaine lay on the pilgrim road to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela, a destination rapidly growing in popularity for pilgrims from England and the north. The cult of St James, slayer of Moors, was something of a medieval fetish, and a journey to Spain also enabled the pious traveller to check out the scenes where Roland, hero of the most famous
chanson de geste
, died while fighting the Muslim invaders (actually the historical Roland was killed in an ambush by Basques). A popular twelfth-century guide to pilgrims played up all the regional stereotypes already mentioned and worked on a fairly crude north-south, civilisation-barbarism typology. Thus the Poitevins are tough, warlike, brave, handsome, cultured, generous, hospitable but in Aquitaine people grow their hair long and shave their faces - clearly an obvious sign of effeminacy - and the people are soft, idle and do not keep their women on a tight enough leash. By the time one reaches Gascony, one is truly beyond the pale, for the locals are licentious drunkards who take no trouble about their appearance. Gascons, says the guide, live promiscuously like animals, with everyone sleeping under the same roof regardless of sex or class, gorging their ravening appetites from a communal cooking pot, disdaining to sit at table and then fornicating at will like animals.
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