April Queen (27 page)

After the Christmas court in Bordeaux Henry and Eleanor rode north separately, she receiving petitions and dispensing justice on the way. From the list of witnesses to a charter signed at Ruffec, it can be
seen that she was attended by her own ducal entourage of vassals and a chancery headed by her clerk Matthew. Notably absent were Henry’s intimates like Becket. Having abandoned his former allies of Thouars to Henry’s mercy, Geoffrey of Anjou was enabled by the largesse of his pension to live in such generous style that the citizens of Nantes, who had just deposed the count of Brittany, offered the title to him instead.
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With Henry’s agreement, he accepted.

At some point on the journey north, the two households must have met, for Eleanor was pregnant again when she returned to England in February 1157, leaving Henry in France. He followed shortly afterwards, to counter the Welsh threat to Chester, but was foiled by the terrain and tactics that had frustrated the Roman legions. After a truce had been agreed, Becket, Lucy and Beaumont were summoned to join him for an extensive tour of the realm, during which Eleanor caught up with them at Oxford.

Henry I’s palace there, called the King’s House, was among the more comfortable of her temporary homes, with its great hall decorated with murals, and its chapels, cloister and private quarters for the queen. On 8 September she gave birth there to yet another son, destined to become England’s most famous king. Named Richard, he was designated in William’s stead as Eleanor’s heir to the county of Poitou and therefore the duchy of Aquitaine. With nurses and maids – including Hodierna, the wet-nurse to whom Richard remained deeply attached throughout his life – to look after her children, Eleanor was free to travel with Henry. This was not to keep his roving eye in check but because she was inured to the discomforts of feudal travelling since childhood and loved the business of state.

For the Christmas court of 1157 held at Lincoln there was time for the queen’s maids- and ladies-in-waiting and their servants to unpack their wardrobes from the travelling chests and leather sacks in which they had been growing mouldy during weeks of one-night stays. Henry too would dress up on these occasions, so that the royal court provided a glittering contrast to the penury and misery of the common people.

Christmas over, Henry headed north to secure the border with Scotland, Eleanor catching up with him at Blyth in Northumberland and accompanying him to Nottingham. From there began a relentless itinerary amounting to over 3,000 miles in twelve months. At Mass on Easter Day in Worcester Cathedral the king and queen removed their crowns in a mysterious ceremony whose symbolism remains unexplained, laying them on the shrine of St Wulfstan
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after swearing
never to wear them again. Through Shropshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset they headed before going north again to Carlisle in June.

At some point in the progress they learned from Paris that Queen Constance had been delivered of a daughter christened Marguerite, leaving poor Louis pacing the corridors of the palace on the Ile de la Cité muttering about the frightening number of princesses with which God had blessed him.
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Betrothing Young Henry to her seemed to Eleanor and Henry a way of bridging the rift between London and Paris. The complication was that few of Louis’ advisers would look favourably on the marriage of the infant princess to a son of the Whore of Aquitaine.

Overcoming their resistance was a job for a master diplomat. Becket rose to the occasion, setting out from the Norman capital of Rouen at the beginning of summer to charm the French capital. He entered Paris with a show of pomp and affluence that was never to be excelled. Eight wagons were laden with his personal effects and wardrobe, another carried his chapel and devotional objects, another the linen and coverings of his bedchamber, another the utensils of his kitchen. Drays followed, lurching under casks of good English ale to quench Parisian thirsts, and covered wagons stuffed with more bags and chests of clothing, carpets and hangings. Twelve packhorses bore so much plate to grace his table, together with his library of books and scrolls, that armed guards prowled alongside to prevent theft. Grooms led finely bred hounds on the leash and hawkers strutted among them with falcons on their gauntleted wrists.

As if that were not enough to impress the inhabitants of Louis’ capital, there followed a spectacle worthy of an Olympic Games opening ceremony: groups dressed in traditional costume from every region subject to Henry, each singing in its own language. Next came knights in full armour and bishops no less grand, followed by squires bearing their shields, and clerks. Last came Becket, more magnificently apparelled than any who had preceded him. If this was only the Chancellor of England, the Parisians whispered, how far more splendid his master must be!
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With no accommodation inside the walls large enough to house his entourage, it was only in the Templars’ splendid new halls outside the city that Becket could find a setting grand enough for his embassy.
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When he visited the shrines, he charmed all who came within reach of his generosity, whether an abbot with hand outstretched or a wayside beggar or the citizens of Paris who ate and drank their fill at his table. Gifts of fine clothes, jewels, horses, hawks and hounds flowed from the
chancellor to every Frankish noble he met; to the common people went his generosity in food and wine; to the English students at the schools, of which he had been one, went purses of coin to fill their bellies with food and their minds with books for months after his departure. Asking nothing in return, Becket contented himself with implanting the message that the daughter of Louis’ Spanish queen would be the instrument to reverse the disaster of his first marriage to Eleanor.

Before the end of the long progress through England, Henry had learned of the sudden death on 26 July of his brother Geoffrey, aged twenty-four. On 14 August he crossed to Normandy, leaving England in the hands of a heavily pregnant queen and Lucy the justiciar. Under the pretext of swearing fealty for Geoffrey’s interest in Brittany, he met Louis on the banks of the Epte, an otherwise unimportant river that divided the Frankish Vexin from his own Norman Vexin. There he confirmed Becket’s proposal to betroth Princess Marguerite to four-year-old Prince Henry, the marriage to be celebrated when she reached puberty
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and her dowry of three castles in the Vexin to be held in trust by three Templar castellans until then. Louis stipulated only that his daughter should not in the normal way be raised in Eleanor’s household, but in Normandy with a family to be mutually agreed.

On the face of it, the match was a good one whereby the house of Capet bestowed a superfluous princess on the eldest son of its most important vassal in the reasonable expectation that her children would rule the whole of western France and England too. The two daughters Eleanor had left behind in Paris had already been used to cement the alliances of the house of Capet with those of Champagne and Blois – a family that had suffered so much from Matilda and Henry during the civil war in England and had every reason to keep the border between Berry and Anjou in a state of unrest.

Louis considered that the engagement of Princess Marguerite to Prince Henry enabled him to play the game both ways. Equally satisfied that he had won this round of the betrothal game, which could win the throne of France for a grandson of his, Henry accepted Louis’ invitation to collect the infant princess in Paris. First, however, he had to stake his claim to Brittany, now that Louis had legitimised it. In Nantes, the Breton capital, the citizens acclaimed Count Conan IV as his vassal in the hope that their new overlord would usher in an era of peace.

In early September Henry returned to Paris with a modest retinue. Dressed like any other noble pilgrim, he visited shrines and distributed largesse to the poor, to lepers and to religious foundations. Like all his visits, it was brief.
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Within the week he rode away with Princess
Marguerite to Nantes, where she was given into the care of Robert of Neubourg, the pious justiciar of Normandy, to be raised and educated by him. For Queen Constance to thus hand over her six-month-old daughter according to feudal custom was as good as giving her away to strangers with no expectation of seeing her again. Across the Channel, on 23 September, Eleanor, continuing her joint regency with Lucy, gave birth to her fourth son, christened Geoffrey after his late uncle and designated duke of Brittany.

Louis, still a monk at heart, accepted an invitation to visit Mont St Michel as Henry’s guest, which enabled him to visit the new home of Princess Marguerite at Neubourg and the city of Avranches, which Henry had promised would be one of her honours. At Le Mans a retinue of high churchmen was assembled to accompany the two kings to the shrine together. There, cut off by the tide, they heard Mass together and dined with the monks in the refectory, as Louis loved to do.
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At low tide they rode back to the mainland, spending a night at Bec, where Louis offered prayers to the memory of Anselm and Lanfranc, who had preceded him there. On Henry giving up his own bed for his suzerain, Louis exclaimed to all within earshot that he loved no man more than the king of the English. He returned to Paris confident that the betrothal of Marguerite and Young Henry had ushered in a new era of fraternal love between their fathers.

As though the excess of piety that had seduced Louis was too much for him to stomach, Henry showed a different face to the canons of Bordeaux Cathedral meeting to elect a successor to Geoffroi de Lauroux, who had died in July. Unable to agree, they delegated the decision to the bishops of Aquitaine, who met in the spirit of the freedoms granted by Louis and his father, as confirmed by Innocent II, Lucius II, Eugenius III and the new Pope Adrian IV.

In the middle of the bishops’ conclave, Henry burst into the room, ordered them to elect a pliable schoolman from Poitiers nominated by him and added menacingly that he would remain during the vote. The prelates were silent until the bishop of Angoulême rose and announced that their deliberations could not continue until he left.
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Surprisingly, Henry accepted defeat. He had bigger things on his mind.

A
mong the many inducements for Henry to marry Eleanor, not least was her claim to the county of Toulouse, lost to the duchy of Aquitaine by William IX mortgaging his second wife’s dowry as a way of financing his departure on the First Crusade.
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If the former boundaries of Aquitaine from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean could be restored, uniting the two great cities on the River Garonne, trade would benefit enormously. Important customs dues would come from the resultant traffic in precious commodities like silk and glass and spices, shipped across the Mediterranean to Narbonne, up the River Aude to Toulouse and down the Garonne Valley to Bordeaux and from there by sea to England along one of the great natural trade routes of Europe.

Henry had an additional reason to covet this avenue to the Mediterranean. At what point he confided this to Eleanor is unknown – it could have been broached during Geoffrey the Fair’s secret talks with her – but all the evidence points to him having a grand design, in which Toulouse had an important part to play.

A crafty chess-player, whether on the two-dimensional board or in the four-dimensional world, he could bide his time before a crucial move until he was assured of success. With England firmly in his grasp and the Welsh and Scottish borders stabilised, and with his continental possessions as peaceful as they were ever likely to be, the time seemed ripe to move against Toulouse in August 1158 when Count Berenger of Barcelona allied himself with his neighbours of Béziers and Montpellier and the formidable warlady Ermengarde of Narbonne.
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If Henry joined them, Toulouse would be surrounded by enemies on three sides.

After the Christmas court at Cherbourg, for which Eleanor crossed over from England, the Catalan count was invited to an Easter meeting at Blaye on the Gironde estuary, where Eleanor’s presence gave legitimacy to Henry acting as duke.
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Together, they tied the knot of friendship by engaging eighteen-month-old Prince Richard to the count’s daughter Berengaria.
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Seemingly unaware that not all Henry’s betrothals ended in marriage, Count Berenger was delighted at the idea of his daughter one day becoming the duchess of Aquitaine.

Since Count Raymond V of Toulouse and St Gilles was not only Louis’ vassal, but also his brother-in-law, the next move was for Eleanor to send him a demand that the county be handed over to her. That refused, Henry gave instructions for his vassals in England and France to assemble with their knights at Poitiers by Midsummer Day, ready to move south. In default, they were to pay scutage. In addition, his seventeen-year-old ally Malcolm IV of Scotland – known as Malcolm the Maiden because he died before marrying – promised an expeditionary force.