April Queen (28 page)

Seeking to give the enterprise some legitimacy, Henry sounded Louis out during a meeting in Tours, but the last thing Louis wanted was any further expansion of the Angevin possessions. Remembering all too well his own abortive expedition to Toulouse when married to Eleanor, to whom he certainly owed no favours, he retorted that he would not sanction a war launched by one of his vassals against another who had given no offence – and who also happened to be his sister’s husband.

In a series of meetings at Heudicourt in Normandy on 6, 7 and 8 June 1159, Henry failed to change Louis’ mind. A week later, the die was cast when a fleet of forty vessels disembarked Malcolm’s small army in Normandy to join the coalition. Together, he and Henry moved south, gathering other forces as they went, among them Thomas Becket at the head of an impressive contingent of 700 knights equipped and provisioned by a special and very unpopular tax he had levied on Church lands in England, the shortfall made up by a loan of 500 marks
from a Jewish moneylender.
⁵
In this martial enterprise, Becket was being trained for even higher things.

Meeting up with the Aquitain and Angevin elements at Poitiers, where Eleanor seems to have remained during the expedition, the entire force reached Périgueux on the frontier with Toulousain territory at the end of June. Henry’s logistics had run like clock-work, but his allies were way behind schedule. When they failed to show up at Agen, three or four days’ march to the south, there was a limit to how much time could be passed in feudal niceties such as tournaments and ceremonies with Henry dubbing Malcolm a knight and Malcolm in return dubbing twenty or thirty of Henry’s young nobles. Time was spent threatening the important river crossing and town of Cahors, whose citizens accepted the coalition rather than see their homes destroyed.

Elsewhere, crops were being laid waste and vineyards destroyed as everything that could be carried or driven off was taken and the rest burned to deny it to the enemy. For the troubadour Bertran de Born, lord of the castle of Hautefort in Périgord, this was the stuff of life:

Not until the beginning of August did the combined allies reach Toulouse,
⁶
by which time the commander of the city was not the weak and idle Count Raymond. Goaded into action by Henry’s lobbying, which had soured the memory of the joint pilgrimage to Mont St Michel, and already regretting the betrothal of Princess Marguerite to Young Henry, Louis had ridden at full speed from Paris with only a small entourage in order to stiffen the resolve of his brother-in-law, whom he suspected of being all too likely to seek terms at the outset of hostilities.

Once in Toulouse, he showed unusual powers of leadership, motivating the garrison and strengthening the walls, as a result of which Henry’s usual blitzkrieg tactics failed at considerable cost to the attackers. Among the casualties was William, the last surviving son of Stephen of Blois. For once, Louis had done everything right, and even provisioned the city to withstand a siege of many months. Stingy as ever, Henry had
contracted his mercenaries for only thirteen weeks, and his purse would be empty long before the Toulousains’ larders.

To everyone’s surprise, he announced that he had only come from loyalty to his Catalan allies, and would give a good example of feudal duty to his own vassals by refraining from attacking the city so long as his suzerain was present there.
⁷
With Becket’s contingent left behind in Cahors, Henry withdrew and the coalition melted away, leaving the peasantry contemplating the bleak prospect of a winter famine with their crops destroyed. As wars went, this was a small one, but what Bertran de Born saw as heroic had a very different look to Aimeric de Pegulhan:

Eleanor’s disappointment at the failure of the campaign was tempered by knowledge that Henry had an alternative plan which did not involve sharing Toulouse with any allies. They spent the time of the grape harvest and vintage on her estates in Poitou,
⁸
after which he headed north with Malcolm early in October. That he did not tarry in the renowned hunting forest of Talmond was due to Louis’ brothers Count Robert of Dreux and Bishop Henry of Beauvais having taken advantage of his preoccupation with Toulouse to invade Normandy. There, fighting dragged on into December, when the two sides agreed to a truce negotiated by the bishops, which was to last until Whitsun.

Eleanor rejoined Henry at Falaise for the Christmas court. Short of funds after the abortive Toulouse campaign, Henry sent her to England to bring back the money he desperately needed. She set sail on 29 December in his ship
Esnecca
,
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rode to Winchester, secured the bullion and coins and then escorted the precious consignment back to Barfleur before returning to England – all this in the throes of midwinter weather.

Her reward for this arduous errand was to be Henry’s regent there for much of the next three years, with Beaumont as chief justiciar, while Becket stayed initially in Normandy with Henry. The Pipe Rolls reflect her progress from castle to city to castle, living in some style as
she travelled extensively throughout southern England. In Winchester she had repairs carried out to the palace, the chapel and the walls and garden, and drew on the Exchequer for the considerable sum of £226 for herself and £56 for Prince Henry. As well as her children and servants, her household included maids- and ladies-in-waiting. If the married ladies spent short periods in her service, for which some were rewarded by money and some by gifts, a maid-in-waiting could often be a ward of the Crown for years.

In addition to her duties of state, Eleanor found the time and energy to polish the dull cultural scene in London by importing the latest fashions in poetry and music. Prone to send away from her Thameside court with a flea in his ear any man who appeared badly dressed or with hair uncut, she expected her ladies to follow her example in the latest continental fashions. For their amusement, Arthurian legends had to compete not only with
chansons de geste
recounting the deeds of Roland, Charlemagne or Godefroi de Bouillon on the First Crusade but also the legends of Greece and Rome and the poetry of favourite troubadours. It was arguably at Eleanor’s short-lived London court that European literature, whose business had hitherto been instruction, first developed the entertainment form it has never lost.

Romances were dedicated to her. There was no public theatre, but plays performed at court included a lost tragedy
Flora and Marcus
, written by the brother of Peter of Blois. Chrétien de Troyes may have been another of the queen’s protégés; his habit of describing himself as ‘of Troyes’ indicates a knowledge of English and he did later frequent the court of her daughter, Marie de Champagne. And the mysterious poetess Marie de France – whose topical
lais
include the 1,184-line poem
Eliduc
about a devoted wife whose husband brings a second wife home from overseas – also appeared in England at about this time, to be patronised by Henry’s bastard William Longsword and probably the queen also.

Both John of Salisbury and Walter Map complained that all these entertainments were distracting men’s minds from more serious matters and that Eleanor’s regal but flirtatious southern ways were effeminising the men of her court. To them, such devices as the shepherdess seduction theme of the
pastorela
were a perversion that romanticised the rutting of peasants. If Map was simply sarcastic, Salisbury went so far as to suggest excommunication of all who earned their living as entertainers in Eleanor’s London – an attitude that persisted in the long denial to the acting profession of burial on consecrated ground. Even Eleanor’s music, embracing the concept of harmony that had
pleasured her ear in Byzantium, had been condemned by such as Abbé Bernard, who complained that the human voice was given to man for no other purpose than to praise God without any of the devil’s artifices of harmony and counterpoint getting in the way.

Yet Gerald de Barri – better known as the Welsh chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis – had to admit later that the cultural revolution brought about by Henry’s queen made the royal court at Westminster interesting enough to compete with the attractions of Becket’s house in the city. Jealous tongues wagged until inevitably the same accusations of loose living that had been levelled at Eleanor on the Ile de la Cité were soon heard in the cloister at Canterbury and the streets of London. Innocent Louis had probably never heard the rumours before departure on crusade, but had there been any substance to them in London, there is no doubt Henry would have known. A king whose constant curiosity and perpetual paranoia drove him to quiz every newly arrived messenger not only about the state of the roads over which he had travelled but also the latest news from Jerusalem and Rome, could not have failed to learn of misconduct by his queen. And had he learned of such, he would have locked Eleanor up without any qualms, as later events were to prove.

Being an Angevin, he understood that what to the Anglo-Norman eye looked like scandalous intimacy between a troubadour and his adored mistress was no more than a game by which the frustrations of ladies married off for reasons of state could be sublimated without any harm to them, even if from time to time an importunate poet like Bernat de Ventadorn did become a casualty of the game. So long as Eleanor performed her duties as his queen and provided sons for the succession and daughters to use as pawns, it mattered little to Henry that she took her pleasures thus, so long as things went no further. Others were less tolerant: in disapproval of this neo-pagan society centred on the queen’s court, in the summer of 1160 the archbishop of Canterbury begged the king to return to England on the grounds that the growing princes needed their father’s moral guidance.

In September Henry ordered Eleanor to bring Prince Henry and Princess Matilda back to Normandy, not out of paternal sentiment
¹⁰
but for another round of betrothals. At a cost of seven English pounds, according to the Pipe Rolls, the queen hastened to cross the Channel. For diplomatic reasons she was not present when Henry witnessed Prince Henry’s act of homage to Louis for the duchy of Normandy, given on bended knee to make amends for his father’s invasion of Toulousain territory and because Henry had in mind to
betroth Matilda to the child about to be born to Louis and Constance, should it be male.

The next step in the plan went awry as misfortune struck the king of France yet again. In giving birth to his fourth daughter, Queen Constance died. Forty years old, the widowed father of four girls and no sons, Louis was desperate for an heir. His counsellors advised strengthening the house of Capet by taking a wife from the house of Champagne, despite his late brother Philip having been denied a bride from that family on the grounds of consanguinity. Less than a month after Constance’s death, Louis risked that sin by marrying Alix or Adele of Champagne, who was a sister of his future sons-in-law, the counts of Champagne and Blois!
¹¹

To Henry, this smelled of conspiracy. Assembling the whole family at Neubourg, he took advantage of the presence of two papal legates soliciting his continued support of the new Pope Alexander III against the German Emperor Frederik Barbarossa, who supported the antipope Victor.
¹²
Princess Marguerite, now three years old, was married by Cardinal Henry of Pisa to five-year-old Prince Henry
¹³
in defiance of the requirement to obtain a papal dispensation for the marriage of minors and in total disregard of the oath of fealty the boy had sworn so shortly before.

What had this to do with Toulouse? It seems that Henry’s support for the pope was also part of his grand design.

Neubourg was perilously near French territory. Lest Louis should be tempted to kidnap the two children and find grounds for the dissolution of the unconsummated marriage, they were whisked away to the safety of Eleanor’s household despite the specific undertaking to Louis that Marguerite would not be brought up by her. By advancing the marriage a decade, Henry legitimised to his own satisfaction the plan to take possession of Marguerite’s dowry castles straight away. The three supposedly neutral Templar castellans chose to comply with his imperious demands,
¹⁴
given the appearance of papal sanction by the legates’ presence.

In retaliation, furious at having been again outwitted, Louis expelled all the Templars from his domains and began massing his forces, plus those of Champagne and Blois, on the borders of Normandy. With the speed of a snake Henry struck first, capturing the castle of Chaumont from Thibault of Blois before Advent ended campaigning for the year. The Christmas court of 1160, held by Henry with Eleanor in Le Mans, was in celebratory mood.

On 18 April next Archbishop Theobald died unmourned by either the protégé he had raised so high or the king for whom he had done
so much. It is significant that he knew Becket’s character too well to propose him as successor. Indeed, few in the Church hierarchy seriously considered him for the office. Yet, with Henry’s record of interfering in Church matters on both sides of the Channel, the canons of Canterbury Cathedral had little hope that he would allow them to choose their new archbishop.