Richard & John: Kings at War (5 page)

Yet the fourth aspect of Aquitaine was historically by far the most important, and also the most significant in the life of the young Richard, for the land was the centre of the troubadour cult. Whereas the
chansons de geste
celebrated martial exploits and military qualities, the troubadours popularised the notion of romantic love. The idea of courtly love, which drew on sources as various as Plato, the Arabic classics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, placed women on a pedestal and was supposed to embody the ‘completion’ of the code of chivalry; its images, values and ideals were so at variance with the sordid reality of everyday life in the twelfth century that they acted as a kind of other-worldly compensation or escapism. Lyric poetry, written in the honeyed
langue d’oc
vernacular, to the sensuous and often lascivious accompaniment of medieval instruments (pipe, tabor, viol, fidel, rebec), deified women at the expense of the merely martial male sex. The influence of the notions thus inculcated and disseminated - of courtesy, chivalry, honour and courtship - cannot be overstated, and it survived the formal suppression of the troubadours when their malign ‘heresies’ were thought somehow bound up with the quite separate gnosticism of the Cathars and Albigensians of the early thirteenth century. One has only to think of the romantic notion of the beautiful woman once glimpsed and never seen again, which survives in Thomas Hardy and even Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane
, or the Robert Graves view of Woman as superior to Man, to see that the troubadour view is with us still.
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The old view of Eleanor of Aquitaine was that she was a kind of neurotic Emma Bovary of her time, that she tried to turn Aquitaine - and particularly her seat at Tours - into a female Camelot, that she convened ‘courts of love’ to debate such issues as whether sexual partners should make a pretence of wishing for new lovers and fresh embraces so as to measure the passion, loyalty, constancy and commitment of the other. An entire set of biographers of Eleanor interpreted her purely in terms of the
toujours l’amour
formula.
⁴⁷
The modern generation of scholars tends to find that this view of Eleanor is a total fiction, a conceit based on the uncritical reading of Andreas Capallanus (Andrew the Chaplin)’s
On Love
, a kind of updating of Ovid in which Eleanor and her daughter Marie de Champagne figure largely, and that the alleged chronology of 1174-96 when ‘courtly love’ was supposed to be at its apogee is the intrusion of a wholly imaginary space-time. Revisionism in turn breeds counterrevisionism, so that some scholars feel that Eleanor as Queen of Love has some validity, though not necessarily naturalistic. The counterrevisionists are fond of pointing out that sceptical professional historians may simply be incompetent to decipher or interpret vernacular writing of the ‘courtly love’ variety.
⁴⁸
The one thing that can be stated with certainty is that the troubadours as a class were thriving in Aquitaine during Richard’s minority and some of their names are well known: Bernard de Ventadour, Jauffre Rudel, Cercamon, Marcabru.
⁴⁹
After all, Eleanor’s grandfather has some claims to be considered the first troubadour and the so-called ‘second troubadour’, Ebles of Ventadour, came from the Limousin. Duke William IX (1071-1126) was a famously handsome crusader, who transcended the limitations of a purely warrior code by being a jokester in the Abe Lincoln mould; the historian William of Malmesbury said that he took nothing seriously and ‘turned everything into a joke and made his listeners laugh uncontrollably’. But the truth is that William believed that the way not to take life seriously was to take his work seriously and to be the ultimate professional as a poet.
⁵⁰
His influence was considerable, and Aquitaine under Eleanor was a troubadours’ paradise. The story of an affair between Eleanor and Bernard de Ventadour is almost certainly apocryphal, but Bernard did seek her patronage (as well as that of Henry II) and probably addressed her directly in a song as follows:

Can la freid’ aura venta
deves vostre pais,
veyaire m’es qu’eu senta
un ven de paradis
per amor de la genta

(When the cold wind blows from the direction of your country, it seems to me that I felt a breeze from paradise for love of the lady)
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We know for certain that the young Richard was deeply influenced by troubadour culture, and he was always generous to poets. It is known that he was profoundly interested in music and probably aspired to the skill attributed to the perfect prince in the Anglo-Norman
Romance of Horn
. This prince, unlike Machiavelli’s later version, is a master not of statecraft and double-dealing but of musical instruments - ‘there was no musical instrument known to mortal man in which the princely Horn did not surpass everyone’. His talent was especially marked when he plucked the harp: ‘anyone who watched how he touched the strings and made them vibrate, sometimes causing them to sing and at other times to join in harmonies, would have been reminded of the harmony of heaven’.
⁵²
Richard may not have been the virtuoso performer thus alluded to, but his popularity among the troubadours attests to his skill as a songwriter and his mastery of the art of political satire in song and vernacular form; there is a well-authenticated story that the adult Richard capped a political
chanson
from the duke of Burgundy with one of his own, full of sardonic humour. The jongleur Ambroise thought Richard a highly talented songwriter and librettist. The Cistercian monk Ralph of Coggleshall was an eyewitness when Richard ‘conducted’ the clerks of his royal chapel when singing in the choir, urging them with hand gestures, facial expressions and body language to greater polyphonic efforts, much as a modern maestro might do.
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Richard saw almost nothing of his father during the first ten years of his life. When he was two years old, in 1159, he may have glimpsed him when Henry came south for an ill-fated campaign against Toulouse. Henry considered that Toulouse was rightfully part of the duchy of Aquitaine, as it had once been a major city in the Carolingian kingdom of Aquitania. But in the eleventh century the counts of Poitiers had established themselves as dukes of Gascony and, as part of the knock-on effect, the counts of Toulouse had tried to reconstruct the old Roman province of Septimana by building political alliances with Narbonne and Carcassonne, extending their links with Provence (then part of the German empire) and even with Barcelona and Spain. The city of Toulouse lay at the nodal point of communications and trade routes west-east between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and north-south between the Massif Central and the Pyrenees. Without control of Toulouse, the Poitevin control of Aquitaine was both weakened and incomplete. In 1159 Henry asserted his right to the city as part of the ‘dowry’ consequent on his marriage to Eleanor. King Louis of France also coveted Toulouse, and had even campaigned to acquire it while still married to Eleanor, so he could not allow his great rival to gain possession of so important a prize. He began by diplomatic stalling, hoping to bog Henry down, but the restless English king soon decided to force the issue by arms. He assembled a huge army and marched south. Louis then hoodwinked him by going to Toulouse and offering it his protection. Henry next faced the ticklish problem of having to press the siege and take his nominal feudal overlord (Louis) prisoner. While he procrastinated, autumn came on and his army began to be ravaged by sickness. Diversionary attacks by Louis on Normandy soon had Henry marching north again, leaving his Toulouse campaign as an embarrassing failure. Many historians feel that the debacle outside Toulouse marked the end of Thomas Becket’s influence on Henry. Becket had been a ‘hawk’ over the campaign and had raised 700 knights himself. His advice was that Henry should not hesitate to assault Toulouse and take Louis prisoner, for the French king had forfeited his status as feudal overlord by fighting against Henry in breach of existing treaties. Henry was persuaded by other courtiers that Becket’s advice was unsound and, in the aftermath of the fiasco, began to reinterpret his old friend as a man of seriously flawed judgement. Becket, for his part, may have seethed inwardly that he was no longer the king’s right-hand man and, consciously or unconsciously, may have decided to assert himself against Henry once he became archbishop of Canterbury.
⁵⁴

Between 1159 and 1167 Henry visited Aquitaine just once, in 1161 when he laid siege to, and captured, the castle of Castillon-sur-Agen on a flying visit.
⁵⁵
For the most part, Henry’s overriding interests lay in the north. Aquitaine was notorious as a province where the local lords guarded their autonomy fiercely and resented encroachments from feudal overlords. Henry aimed at the typical Anglo-Norman centralism and chafed at the ‘anarchy’ of Aquitaine. Eleanor was quite happy with the old system and with the military guardianship of her maternal uncle Ralph de Faye, seneschal of Poitou, whom she regarded as her strong right arm. Henry, though, mistrusted de Faye and appointed his own men to many important military and ecclesiastical posts.
⁵⁶
The extent of disaffection, feuding and anarchy in Poitou has been much debated by academic specialists, but Henry himself was in no doubt that it constituted a threat to his authority and that Eleanor was too soft on recreant local lords. The barons of Aquitaine responded to his cracking of the whip by withdrawing their collaboration from Henry and speaking openly of his ‘tyranny’. In 1167 Henry decided that he would have to make another visit to Aquitaine. His particular aim was to curb the power of two aristocratic families, the Lusignans and the Taillefers, counts of Angoulême, whose castles controlled all the land routes between Poitiers, Saintes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux. Unable to make common cause, the Taillefers and Lusignans took a terrible mauling from Henry, with estates laid waste and the great castle of Lusignan razed to the ground. It was only the fact that Henry was once again called north by the threat from King Louis of France that saved the Lusignans and Taillefers from utter destruction and enabled them to rebuild their fortunes.
⁵⁷
Leaving Earl Patrick of Salisbury as his military satrap in Aquitaine, Henry sped north. Heartened by his departure, the Lusignans returned to the ruins of their castle and set about rebuilding it. When he heard this, Henry turned in his tracks, putting off a summit conference with the French king. Unfortunately, Louis construed the postponement as an insult and was soon intriguing with the Lusignan and Taillefer rebels. The next important development was the death of Earl Patrick after an ambush by the Lusignans. The unsavoury episode left Henry with the feeling that the Poitevins were unregenerate traitors.
⁵⁸

Whether Richard actually met his father on these occasions we have no means of knowing, but both the major campaigns in the south were relevant to Richard quite apart from the paternal incursion into the maternal domains. On the 1159 campaign Henry met Count Raymond Berengar of Barcelona, an important ally in the war against Toulouse, made a treaty of alliance and sealed it with the betrothal of the two-year-old Richard to one of the count’s daughters. But, as with so many of the slippery Henry’s solemn promises, this ‘betrothal’ simply answered his political requirements of the moment. Nothing came of it, and the shadowy daughter of the count of Barcelona vanished into the historical obscurity that is ever the lot of most of mankind (some say she died in infancy).
⁵⁹
By the time Louis’s pressure on Normandy forced him north from Aquitaine in 1168, Henry was once more ready to use Richard as a political bargaining counter. At a peace conference in Montmirail in January 1169, called when both sides had wearied of the interminable war between them, Henry stated that it was his intention to take the Cross and crusade in the Holy Land. Since he wanted the future of his domains settled, he proposed making his son Henry his clearly nominated heir in Normandy, Anjou and Maine, with Richard as the plainly accredited future duke of Aquitaine. Both sons would do formal homage to Louis for their domains and, to seal the compact, Richard would be betrothed to Louis’s daughter Alice (Alys).
⁶⁰
Much of the conference at Montmirail was taken up with Louis’s attempts to mediate between Henry and his erstwhile friend and now exiled Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. The archbishop managed the rare feat of alienating both sides by his intransigence but he proved a shrewd prophet. He told Louis the reason he would not give the categorical assurances of submission Henry required was because Henry was not to be trusted; he was an inveterate oath-breaker and perjurer.
⁶¹
Louis soon learned to his cost that Becket was right. Henry took the peace treaty hammered out at Montmirail as a green light enabling him to deal mercilessly with the rebels of Aquitaine, who were even then rebuilding the castles he had destroyed. So far from going on crusade, Henry made it clear that his concerns would always centre on the extended Angevin ‘empire’. In a further campaign in the spring and early summer of 1169 he dealt harshly with the unruly barons of Poitou: the count of Angoulême was forced to submit and a well-known local resistance leader Robert de Seilhac died in unsavoury circumstances in one of Henry’s prisons.
⁶²
But Henry could never devote all his energies to Aquitaine. Not only was he at war with the kings of France for most of his reign, but he also had military operations in Britanny, Normandy, Wales, Scotland and even Ireland to dissipate his attention and resources. And 1170 was a critical year for Henry for other reasons. In August that year he was seriously ill and for a while thought likely to die. But throughout the year he had a renewed confrontation with the rambunctious Thomas Becket to deal with - a crisis that ended only when four of his knights took literally an ‘if only’ angry aside from the king (‘will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ were the alleged words, though scholars claim there is no evidence he ever spoke so explicitly) and murdered him in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December.
⁶³