The Magnificent Century (21 page)

About the time that Henry’s proposal of marriage was sent to Joanna of Ponthieu, the nimble mind of the machiavellian Romeo was considering means of attracting his attention to Eleanor La Belle, who was now fourteen and ready for marriage. The scheme he evolved was roundabout but sufficiently ingenious to accomplish its purpose. Eleanor had begun already to dabble in versification and had completed a long and romantic poem about one Blandin of
Cornwall who had fallen in love with Princess Briende and underwent all manner of adventures and tests for her sake. Romeo saw to it that a copy was sent to Richard of Cornwall (who might be expected to see a compliment in it to himself), written in Eleanor’s own fair hand and with a note from her as well. Richard, who was passing through the South of France on his way back from the Crusades, was as charmed and flattered by this attention as the wily majordomo had conceived he would be. If he had not been married happily to Isabella of Pembroke, he might have sought the hand of the royal poetess himself, having heard glowing reports of her beauty and refinement. He did the next best thing; he sent the poem (it is still in existence and a perfect sample of adolescent fervor) to Henry and hinted that here, perhaps, was the very best consort for him. Henry was as much dazzled by the genius of the fair Eleanor as his brother had been, and his imagination became inflamed with the reports he heard of the court of Provence and the charms of Eleanor La Belle. He decided to jilt the Ponthieu heiress and propose himself instead as a husband for the second of the daughters of Provence. Fortunately his Council agreed that there would be an advantage in having Louis of France as a brother-in-law, and negotiations were started at once. Procurators were hurried off to Provence to act for the King, the bishops of Ely and Lincoln and the abbot of Hurlé.

Henry proposed to give his bride the reversion of his mother’s dower, but Raimund Berenger objected to this on the score that his daughter would have to wait for the Queen Mother’s death before having any adequate provision. Henry had become so enraptured by this time over the prospect of getting the belle of Provence as his bride that word of the count’s objections threw him into a panic, as no doubt the shrewd Romeo (whose hand is seen at every stage of the negotiations) had intended it should. He decided at once to lower his own demands in the matter of the bride’s dowry, having set his figure at twenty thousand marks. Without a moment’s delay he wrote to his representatives and instructed them to reduce their demands, even specifying the steps by which they were to come down; first to fifteen thousand marks, then to ten thousand, to seven thousand, to five thousand, to three thousand. They were not told that if the count demurred at the lowest figure (he was certain to do that, not having anything like that amount in his bare cupboard of a treasury) they were to accept the lady empty-handed, but such was
Henry’s intent. After sending off his bargaining instructions the King fell into a still greater panic, thinking that he had perhaps compromised his chances, that in Provence they would scorn him as a pinchpenny and niggler. He then sat down in a very great hurry and wrote to his procurators that “they were to conclude the marriage forthwith.” They were to do so with money or without, so long as they procured Eleanor for him and conducted her safely to England. When the question of the bride’s dowry was thus dismissed, Count Raimund promptly agreed to accept the reversion of the Queen Mother’s dower rights for his daughter and the marriage contracts were signed, the major-domo rubbing his hands with satisfaction, no doubt, as he watched the proceedings.

The boy who had been crowned with a circlet of plain gold belonging to his mother and in makeshift clothes, and had then sat himself down to a chine of beef with a few noblemen instead of the usual elaborate coronation banquet, decided that his wedding would make up for all this, that it would be the most dazzling ceremony in the memory of man. He spent the time before his bride’s arrival in feverish activities. The royal tailors made wedding clothes for him of gold-threaded baudekin and a whole wardrobe for Eleanor on the same scale. It was his intention to have her crowned immediately after the marriage, and a splendid diadem was designed, studded with precious stones and costing fifteen hundred pounds, an enormous sum in those days. Chaplets of gold filigree, rings of beautiful design, and jewel-encrusted girdles were among the many articles he ordered for her.

Fearing that she would find the royal quarters at Westminster dingy after the glories (
sic!
) of Provence, he decided to have the palace redecorated. The Queen’s chamber was provided with handsome new furnishings, and the walls were covered with historical paintings. He gave instructions for the Great Chamber to be painted a good green color and that a French inscription was to be lettered in the great gable. He had no money for all this—in fact, he was in debt for the dowry of his sister Isabella who had married the Emperor of Germany—but this did not concern him. He went on spending, freely and lavishly, with both hands.

He was not the only one who was busy in England. All the nobility were getting ready for the event, and the citizens of London were going to unheard-of lengths by way of preparation. They were cleaning up the streets and setting up cressets of oil at corners to provide illumination. They were planning pageants and spectacles on a most elaborate scale. Moreover, they were going to have a conspicuous part in the ceremony of crowning the young Queen, figuring, perhaps, that they were entitled to that much after the way Henry had been gouging them by forced loans over the years and suspecting, furthermore, that the cost of the wedding would fall on their shoulders finally. They were placing orders for riding equipment in such a rush that the saddlers around St. Vedast’s were busier than ever before, and horse clawers were at a premium.

The bridal train, with an impressive retinue of relatives, knights, ladies-in-waiting, troubadours, and jugglers, traveled slowly. From Navarre they rode down through the vineyard country of Gascony and on to the fair district of the Loire, where Queen Marguerite met her sister, accompanied by a great train of knights and servants, the knights with red noses and blankets under their armor and gloves instead of gauntlets because the weather was freezingly cold. Marguerite was delighted to see her sister but was perhaps just a shade condescending. Was not Louis considered a much more powerful and important king than Henry?

The party landed at Dover on January 4, 1236, after a pleasant enough crossing. Eleanor was in the best of health and spirits when Henry met her, and they seemed to like each other at once. There could be no doubt of Henry’s feelings, certainly. He paid her extravagant compliments and handed out gold and presents to her attendants as though he were another King Midas. They went at once to Canterbury, where the archbishop married them; and when Henry saw his bride in a gown of material which shimmered like the hot sunlight of Provence, tight-fitting to the waist and then flaring out in generous pleats to her feet, the sleeves long and lined with ermine, he became her captive and never did recover his freedom thereafter.

The bridal party then rode to London for the Queen’s crowning, and here a procession of citizens greeted them, three hundred and sixty of them on horseback, the men in tunics of cloth of gold, their wives with fur-trimmed cloaks, each carrying a cup of gold or silver
to be presented to the royal couple. The new Lord Mayor, Andrew Buckerel, a pepperer (as grocers were called), cavorted in the lead. The ride from the Tower to Westminster was through clean streets hung with silk banners and trumpeters at each corner blowing furious fanfares for the lovely young Queen. There could be no doubt that Eleanor La Belle had made a most favorable impression, and no one who saw her on this cold but sunny day, without a hint of fog or cloud or smoke in the sky, would have believed that on a raw and gloomy day much later the citizens of London would pelt her barge on the Thames with stones to drive her back to the Tower, calling her a harridan and a witch.

The crowning was followed by a banquet which perhaps blotted finally from Henry’s mind the painful memory of his humble start as King. Never before in the history of merrie England had there been such feasting. The nobility were out in full force, performing their hereditary parts in the ritual. The Lord Mayor served wine to those who sat at the head table, the finest wine that Gascony could supply. Food was lavishly provided for the spectators who had braved the cold to walk from London and who packed the gardens and roadways about Westminster. At the finish everything which had figured in the ceremony was given away to those who had served the newly married couple, even the Queen’s bed being claimed by the chamberlain.

The start had been more than auspicious, but Henry promptly destroyed the fine effect of it by not sending back the large train of attendants accompanying the Queen. Louis of France had packed them all off as soon as he married Marguerite (Blanche of Castile, that managing woman, saw to it), but Henry liked them so much he could not part with them. Three uncles had come to England with the Queen. One of them, William, the bishop-elect of Valence, gained an immediate hold over Henry, who considered him wise and enlightened and listened to everything he said. Peter of Savoy, another of the trio, a very handsome and superior-mannered man, made such an impression on the gullible Henry that he was created Earl of Richmond and given (or, rather, sold for three feathers) a strip of most valuable land on the Thames for the building of a permanent home which became known as the Savoy. The third uncle, Amadeus, was also given valuable lands, which he promptly sold at a fine price. Even Thomas of Savoy, the father of this brood, was given a grant
of a groat on every sack of English wool which passed through his territory.

The King, in the first flush of his enthusiasm for the wonderful thing which had happened to him, filled the pockets of the rest of the train with gold and even granted life pensions to many of them. One Richard, a musician, was made the King’s special harper and was allowed forty shillings and a tun of wine a year. Henry of Avranches, a poet, was put on the household list as the King’s versificator, which made him the first poet laureate. Master Henry wrote some verses about Cornishmen which made hackles bristle in the duchy, but this did not lose him possession of his hundred shillings a year. All this, however, was of small importance; what counted most seriously was the fatuous King’s granting of pensions to all the Queen’s relatives running into thousands of marks.

The Provençals were a most superior lot. They voiced the greatest contempt for everything English and looked down their long noses at the native population. They shuddered at the weather and sang mournful songs about their beautiful, sunny Provence so far away; but they were only too glad to stay and in many cases never did go back to beautiful, sunny Provence. The English people conceived a hatred for them which grew with each day.

Henry, it will thus be seen, was one of the most generous of men but with a perverse habit of displaying his generosity in all the wrong quarters. He never had any left over, certainly, for his subjects who paid the bills. The royal wedding and the orgy of spending which preceded and followed it left him in a most serious financial position. All the money granted to him for his sister’s dowry, amounting to two marks on each knight’s fee of land, and for his own marriage expenses, had vanished. Not a penny had been sent to Germany, and the royal spendthrift, moreover, acknowledged that he had gone deeply into debt as well.

The dissatisfaction of his subjects was so great that less than three weeks after the wedding a great council was held at Merton to discuss the King’s situation and the new danger which had arisen from the influx of foreigners. The barons most emphatically affirmed that no change was to be made in the laws or the methods of government.

The attitude of the Council should have been a warning. Henry preferred instead to listen to the advice of his new friends. They said to him in effect, these poverty-stricken but haughty relatives of
the young Queen: “Be firm. Don’t give in an inch to these English traitors. Let them know you are the King.” This was the kind of advice Henry liked to hear. It coincided with his own thinking, the inner convictions which he had never dared state openly and unequivocably, although he had often given intimations of the reactionary ideas he harbored. Now, following the advice of the feudal-minded Provençals, he came out into the open. He let it be known that he intended to take the full task of government into his own hands. To this end he appointed a new council of twelve to act under him and follow out his orders. William of Valence was at its head, and none of the leading men of the kingdom were included.

On the twenty-ninth of April the Common Council of the kingdom gathered to protest these arbitrary measures which were in direct contradiction to the Great Charter which Henry had sworn so often to observe. Their indignation was so vigorously expressed that the King, never of stout enough resolution to face the whirlwind he continuously sowed, took his adored Eleanor to the Tower of London. They remained in the safety of its high stone walls until, in a somewhat cowed mood, he gave the barons his solemn promise to reform.

The promise had been made without any intention of keeping it. The new council of twelve was retained, with William of Valence at its head, and several of the officials who had served during the regime of Peter des Roches were called back to office. Henry, with his land-hungry in-laws whispering in his ear, was being firm in his own fashion.

The Queen, having conceived a poor opinion of the people over whom her husband ruled, was never happy unless surrounded by her relatives and favorites from Provence. In addition to those who remained permanently there was a constant stream of visitors. It is recorded that when the four sisters were together the two elder, Marguerite and Eleanor, insisted on the two younger sitting on stools in their presence because they were not queens. This irked Sanchia and Beatrice very much, neither realizing that fate (without any assistance from the archschemer Romeo) would provide both of them with crowns ultimately and that Beatrice particularly would live a most romantic and exciting life.