Eleanor Of Aquitaine (16 page)

Mars thy goodly reign.

May all thy days be joy.

Even old things were brought from the closet and refurbished with an eye to Plantagenet munificence. Philippe de Thaün revived interest in the bestiary which he had formerly dedicated to Henry I's queen, Adelaide of Louvain, with a few offertory words to the Countess of Poitou.

God save lady Alianor,

Queen who art the arbiter

Of honor, wit, and beauty,

Of largess and loyalty.

Lady, born wert thou in a happy hour

And wed to Henry King.

The queen's fame was spread far beyond the precincts of the court along the pilgrim routes by minnesingers and balladeers.

Were the lands all mine

From the Elbe to the Rhine,

I'd count them little case

If the Queen of England

Lay in my embrace
.

The new literature brought with it a cult of manners. Under court discipline the careless male learned that to present himself before the queen's assize with hair unkempt, "like an ill-dressed shock of barley," was to be effaced from the presence of majesty. John of Salisbury and Walter Map, who must often have seen what they describe, report that the aesthetic movement of their time was producing an effeminate effect upon the ways of hearty England. From the civilizing influence of dress, it was only a step to the ritual of flattery which these critics found so depressing. Barons renounced their native dignity and addressed each other in meaching phrases as, "best of men, mirror of wisdom, my refuge, my sun, my life."
³⁰
John declared that the foolish dawdling and love-making of rustics, once reckoned depraved by serious men, was affected by gallants of the court, a statement that suggests that the mortifying ritual of the courts of love was somewhat understood in London, even as it had been in Poitou and the Limousin. This particular branch of art, dramatized so especially by Ventadour and other troubadours in the queen's provinces, seems never to have had the thoroughgoing success in England that it enjoyed on the Continent; yet something it must have accomplished, for, when the innovations were well under way, the cynical Map exclaims, "There is now in London no Lucretia, no Penelope, no Sabine woman. Fear all the sex."

If the popular romance and
lai
turned men's thoughts from the robust elder literature into profane channels, the case with dramatic spectacles was even worse. John of Salisbury could find no words equal to expressing the measure of his censure for the forms of entertainment that came into vogue under his very eyes. He could only recommend excommunication for the mimes and histrions who were corrupting the public taste. Fabliaux, flouting virtue and making a comedy of vice, were the diversion of those who should have offered loftier example to their kind. Mimes, dancers, acrobats, prestidigitators, found their way into the most famous houses and delivered such business as even cynics blushed to see. Actors sought, said John, to provoke outbursts of gross laughter by their unrestrained gestures and loose buffoonery. They rolled their eyes, shrugged their shoulders, waved their arms. An infinitude of vain diversions engaged the idle, who would better have been merely idle than so employed. The whole situation reminded John, coming as he did from the sobriety of Thomas' house, of ancient Babylon, and the worst of it was that he laid the responsibility for the state of things he describes on the entertainers employed to amuse the wanton leisure of Henry's court.

The impulse to the secularization of the arts invaded even the special province of the church. Abbé Bernard, bred on the serene raptures of plain song,
³²
had long since explained that the charm of pure melody should never render the ear more attentive to the vocal inflections of the singer than to the thoughts those inflections were meant to insinuate into the soul. But what was the impious cacophony that John heard in the chapels of London? The soul was teased from its devotion, he declared, by the ludicrous pantomime with which choirs accompanied the swelling harmony of organs. Performers trilled, he says, and overlaid one cadence with another, and jangled their words until listeners were bereft of their senses and could not examine the merits of the substance.

William Fitz-Stephen, who, like John of Salisbury, belonged to the Archbishop's household, ascribes a decent sobriety to the city which the queen found on her advent.
³³
It was one of the distinctions of London among cities, he says, that instead of theatrical sights and scenic spectacles, the people had diversions of a sacred sort, miracles depicting the constancy of the holy confessors, the sufferings of the martyrs. But court tastes seem to have declined from these bourgeois standards, and one is constrained to see, in the whole aesthetic movement that so dismayed the chancellor's associates, the liberating and fashioning hand of the queen releasing her treasure of art and civility in London, introducing the scenic splendors of Antioch and Byzantium, to say nothing of continental cities, to her insular court and her Norman lords in exile. "The arts," says Map, "are swords of the mighty." These various diversions appear to have corrected in some measure the disproportionate traffic to Becket's gates of which the king himself complained. If we may judge from the works of Giraldus Cambrensis, as well as those of Map and John of Salisbury, the royal court at Westminster must presently have set up a lively competition with the chancellery as a place of resort in London, and drawn off from it, at least occasionally, all the notables the queen cared to welcome. Men of the world, perfectly
au courant
, men with careers to make and acquaintances to forge, could not afford to be unfamiliar with the wit and the novelty, the spectacles, the fashions, and the social rigors of the king's palace in Westminster.

In the intervals of her cultural activities, Eleanor, crossing and recrossing the Channel at any season of the year, and making the rounds from castle to castle in England and abroad, shared Henry's confidence and the labors of his government. Sometimes in his absence, herself holding a royal court, she sat with the king's justiciars on matters of importance and set her own seal to writs of royal exigence.
³⁴
She drew her own revenues and kept oversight of a lively domestic household, as is shown by her expenditures for rushes, plate, and linen. And in the meantime, with a perversity to confound the Franks, she secured the future of the Angevin empire and supplied the instruments of a diplomacy which, no less than force of arms, was to solidify the whole.

Her first son, Guillaume, born on the Continent before Henry's accession, died in 1156;
³⁵
but in the meantime she had given birth to Prince Henry (February 1155) and to a princess named for the Empress Matilda (June 1156). In September 1157 the future Coeur-de-Lion was born in the palace of Oxford and designated in Guillaume's stead as the queen's special heir to the County of Poitou and Duchy of Aquitaine. In 1158 a fourth son, born at the moment of Henry's absorption of lower Brittany, was named for the king's brother Geoffrey, and subsequently designated as the Count of Brittany. In September 1161 the queen gave birth in Domfront in Normandy to a second daughter, who was baptized by the cardinal legate with her own name; in October 1165 the Princess Joanna was born in Angers; and in Oxford in December 1166, John "Lackland," the last of the "eaglets." The names make a roster of famous kings and queens.

WHILE THE QUEEN AND HER COURTIERS, left somewhat to their own devices, were teaching London to emulate the most famous centers of civility in Christendom, Henry, chiefly abroad, was occupied with Angevin problems of another sort. In Normandy he found himself near the mid-point of an elongated empire that stretched from the borders of Scotland over a vast latitude to the foothills of the Pyrenees. He knew his lands, for he had measured them from the saddle, rood by rood, with his own eye. He knew the diverse aspects of them and their diverse worth, from the vineyards and olive groves of Aquitaine to the sheepfolds of the English midlands and the fens and forests of Northumberland. He knew their populous towns, each cast in its archaic mold and busy with its local crafts, their fairs and markets, their fortressed tors looming over the junction of roads and the crossings of rivers, their ys and granges, salt marshes and fisheries, their malt and dye houses, forges, tanneries, wine presses, their mill and water wheels, their fields brought to tillage by the immemorial toil of ox and colon, the vast hunting ranges where his hounds bayed and his falcons soared. He regarded the small husbandry by the wayside — osier beds, dovecots, apiaries. And he took for overplus the careless largess of earth and sky — heather and broom, the magpie scouring the turned furrow, English lark and nightingale of the Limousin. He was rich beyond the dreams of Angevin counts. Time too unrolled before him, time enough for enterprise.

Henry set himself to the colossal tasks imposed by his fortunes, first among them the fusing of the diverse provinces that spread from Gascony to Scotland into one solid realm, and the girding of them with impregnable frontiers. A month's journey measured the length of his empire; but only a short day's journey from Tours to the edges of Brittany, through the heart of his ancestral province of Anjou, marked its narrowest breadth and therewith its weakest point. At his father's deathbed Henry had agreed that, upon his accession to Normandy, he would cede to his brother Geoffrey that part of Anjou lying south of the Loire and including the castles of Chinon, Loudun, and Mirebeau. But after his marriage with Eleanor this triangle sharply indented Henry's borders, thrusting like a wedge between his lands and the queen's County of Poitou. The King of the English therefore repented of his promise to his brother, and by siege recovered this portion of his patrimony, with the southern marches of Anjou. Then taking advantage of a local strife over the inheritance of Brittany, he secured the election of his brother Geoffrey as count of that province; but when Geoffrey shortly died, he claimed this land as his own inheritance, and so gained control of Nantes and the outer reaches of the Loire.

In this time of accumulating treasure and rising fortune, Henry bent his energy and his substance to strengthening his hold upon the uneasy domains he had consolidated and his access to all parts of them. He stormed and took the castles of rebellious vassals and overhauled their garrisons; put docile prelates, when he could, in vacant sees; descended like the judgment upon drowsy stewards and crooked seneschals. Everywhere he razed the strongholds of presumptuous barons, but strengthened and rebuilt his own capital fortresses. Upon the sovereign heights of his river valleys he marked the craggy bulwarks set there by his forebears, who had built grandly in every generation. The strategic castles of his realm underwent vast extension and repair: the seat of the Norman dukes in Rouen; the castle of the Norman exchequer in Caen; the fortress that guarded the passage of the Loire in Tours; Argentan on the marches of Anjou; the treasure castle of Chinon looking down from Anjou into Poitou and Aquitaine. He dyked the floods of the Mayenne and the Loire near Angers, reconstructed bridges over the Loire and the Vienne, restored roads and fords and barbicans.

*

These bold Plantagenet operations in the West had as one of their effects that of driving Louis Capet within the confines of his own proper domain centering about the Ile de France. It remained a fact, to be sure, that the Count of Brittany owed a vassal allegiance to Louis which was disturbed by Henry's sudden occupation of that province; but this hardly more than nominal dependence mattered little to Henry, so long as he was in actual possession of the land. More important still to the Angevin's security were two other segments which jutted from the domain of the Capets into his eastern frontier: the indispensable Vexin with its border fortresses controlling the Seine between Paris and Rouen, which Geoffrey the Fair had bartered away to Louis for value received in the year of the queen's divorce; and Berry, which with the force of the hostile house of Blois behind it, drove sharply into the edges of Poitou. The logic of Henry's plans required the recovery of the Vexin and the addition of Berry, which could only be had at the expense of his overlord. But bold and sudden as he was where projects were clearly realizable, he forbore to make war upon Louis to obtain these precious morsels.

It was the Capets themselves who presently offered the Plantagenets an opportunity to expand in the direction of the Vexin. Early in 1158, Louis's amiable Spanish Queen Constance, in whom no defect had hitherto been found, presented her lord and her expectant people with a disappointing female child. It was at about this time that Louis began to murmur about the, "frightening superfluity of his daughters,"
³
It had become clear, on the other hand, that the Angevin dynasty would not collapse for want of lineal heirs of "the better sex." There were already three young Plantagenets not counting the eldest Prince Guillaume, who had died in infancy, and two of these were sons (Henry and Richard). The plain, if second-rate, remedy to balance matters for the Franks, was to warm up the feudal allegiance the Angevins owed the Capets by strengthening feudal ties, before Henry Fitz-Empress should affiance his very desirable scions to some other noble house. Thus, if worse came to worst, in another generation at least a grandchild of Capets and Plantagenets might own sovereignty over all of western Europe; yet if heaven should in the course of time vouchsafe a male heir to the Capets, the alliance with the Angevins could not prejudice his claims to the Frankish domain, but would on the contrary buttress it. The church favored the employment of the "meaner sex" (Louis's words) as instruments of destiny to quiet uneasy borders and forestall bloodshed over property. Eleanor's two elder daughters, whom at the time of her divorce she had abandoned in the court of France, had already been employed to bolster the Capetian dynasty. They were now, in childhood, betrothed to brothers of the house of Champagne Marie to Henry, Count of Champagne; Alix to Thibault, Count of Blois. And this house, after the long struggle between Stephen of Blois and Henry Fitz-Empress for the succession in England, were no friends of the Angevins.

The political theories of the Franks were very clear to Henry. He too foresaw his grandson — if the Angevin star did not fail him — wearing the double crown of France and England. In the spring of 1158 Henry met Louis on the marches of Normandy and came away with a most advantageous bargain.
⁴
By its terms not only was the disappointing infant Marguerite affianced to the three-year old heir of England, but for her dower it was agreed that she should, at the time of her marriage, receive the precious Vexin and its castles, which Geoffrey the Fair had bartered away to Louis just before his death.

The Franks had not, however, as yet subdued their rancor over the Angevin's treachery in detaching Poitou and Aquitaine from the French domain. This alliance of Henry's son and Louis's daughter required some preparation in the public mind. In the face of Frankish fear and hatred of the Plantagenets, the coup could not be managed with sheer Angevin bluntness nor Capetian naivett. The case seemed to the Plantagenets one to employ the brilliant talents of the king's chancellor. In spite of Becket's experience in negotiation, it can hardly be doubted that in the matter of this strategic alliance, which set her forth with renewed luster in Paris, Eleanor advised him about the manner of his assault upon the citadel of her overlord. Certainly the equipage with which Thomas set out from the Norman capital in the summer of 1158 exceeded the bounds of Henry's artistic imagination and of his wonted expenditure for mere display, and it outdid in sumptuary effects anything Becket otherwise devised in the whole course of his gorgeous career as chancellor.

The gaping crowds that witnessed Thomas' journey to Paris to confirm the alliance beheld a nine days' wonder on the road, such as the later pageants of Benozzo Gozzoli scarcely rival. First they beheld eight wagons bearing the chancellor's personal gear, besides wains carrying his chapel marked by its gilded cross, the furnishings of his bedchamber, his kitchen hung underneath with pots and buckets. Carts followed with loads of English beer with which to treat the Franks, cargoes of food and drink for the journey. Then came barrel-topped wagons covered with hides and weighted with bags and coffers containing vestments, carpets, and bedcovenngs for the chancellor's lodgings. Twelve sumpter horses bore Thomas' table plate, his books and rolls Armed guards accompanied by fierce and terrible dogs escorted the cortege On the back of each lead horse rode with gravity a long tailed ape. Next came grooms and hawkers leading pairs of hounds and carrying upon their gloved wrists those highly bred falcons and gyrfalcons in which the King of England took special pride. Then followed a jovial English exhibition two hundred and fifty stalwarts, in companies of five and ten, passed through the towns singing in turn their native songs in native dialect. Squires bearing their knights' shields, pack-trains, servants of the household, then mounted knights and clerks, two and two, drew on, and finally as climax of the spectacle, the magnificent chancellor himself accompanied by the dignitaries of his office. The pageant offered a notable contrast to Louis's unpretentious progresses from shrine to shrine. No one failed to get the correct impression. "If this," said the burghers and the yokels, "be but the chancellor of the English, grant us sight of the king himself." It occurred to the Franks that the Countess of Poitou had forsaken the court of the Capets for a higher high place; but the grievances they had suffered seemed now in the way of amendment.

The new halls of the Templars outside the old walls offered the only lodging in Paris that could be proposed for such a host, and even here it spilled into adjoining streets. Louis closed the markets of Paris to prevent his guests from providing for their own needs while in his capital. But the chancellor's stewards circumvented him. Scouring the bazaars of suburban towns, they gathered provision for a thousand men. In this jubilee for vendors a dish of eels for Thomas' table is said to have sold for one hundred shillings sterling. With unexampled liberality the chancellor bestowed gifts of clothing and vestments, plate, horses, dogs, falcons, and English beer in appropriate quarters of Paris. In the city in whose streets he had wandered as an obscure student in the days of Abbé Bernard and Master Abélard, he now rode resplendent, dispensing a royal largess to all poor scholars of English blood. It became plain to every soul in Paris that the princess bestowed on the Franks by Constance of Spain was destined one day to retrieve the disastrous fortunes brought upon their king by the Countess of Poitou There are no details of the chancellor's interviews with the Capets and the barons palatine, by which the miraculous effects of his grace and his dialectic could be judged; but the mission must be reckoned as not the least of his diplomatic triumphs.

It only remained for Henry to collect the guarantees. In September the King of the English went less ostentatiously to Paris, where he earned the praise not only of the Capets but of the citizens of the Ile, who had dreaded some catastrophe from the meeting of the two monarchs upon this business. If the chancellor had offered some display of Plantagenet wealth and power, the king bore himself with modesty and restraint. He eschewed the royal escort proffered by his overlord, and went about Paris with simple elegance, making more of good works than of himself. He took pains to visit all the shrines, to deal liberally with churches, with lepers and the poor. He dined in the old Merovingian palace with the Capets, but did not tarry overlong.

On the Sunday that ended the visit, Queen Constance delivered her firstborn into the hands of Henry's
mesine
to be reared, according to feudal custom, in the domain of her destiny Louis accompanied the cortege bearing away his daughter as far as the royal city of Mantes, where the six months old infant was consigned to the keeping of Robert of Newburgh, the dapifer and justice of Normandy, a man of unexceptionable rank and piety. A few understandable stipulations the Capets seem to have made: first, that the princess should not be bred, as feudal custom might have dictated, in the household of Queen Eleanor, but in certain Norman castles near the marches of the French domain; and second, that the priceless castles of her dowry should not be at once surrendered to Henry, but should be held in custody by three Knights Templars against the day of her marriage.

Later in the autumn, as if afflicted with a vague malaise, Louis made a pretext for a progress through the whole breadth of Normandy. He had long desired to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of the archangel, Michael in Peril of the Sea. Incidentally he looked in upon the arrangements for his daughter Marguerite in Newburgh and inspected the city of Avranches, which Henry had designated as one of her honors, and he cast this eye upon the events developing under Henry's heavy hand in Brittany. The castles and ys of Henry's provinces opened hospitably before him as he proceeded toward the shrine. From his ancestral city of Le Mans, Henry convoyed his overlord with an escort of bishops and s to the mount of the archangel. Together, to the rush and roar of the tide, the two kings heard mass in the y above the sea, and then dined austerely in the refectory with the monks, as Louis loved to do.
⁸
This communion upon the pinnacle of Mont-Saint-Michel, above the clamor of the world and the tides that wash its shores, was one of the happiest and most fraternal incidents in the whole intercourse of the two kings. On the homeward way Louis rested at the y of Bee near Rouen and admired that scholars' citadel, which the sanctity of Lanfranc and Anselm had rendered famous. Here Henry vacated his own chamber for the use of his overlord, and Louis exclaimed — to somewhat astonished bystanders — that he had hardly found any man he could, on near acquaintance, so thoroughly love as the King of the English. He returned to Paris laden with gifts and the most agreeable impression of the Angevin good will and generosity.