Eleanor Of Aquitaine (26 page)

Of course, they rationalize a conduct that has outburst the rigid feudal scheme for women; but disillusion speaks also in those noble ladies, who, though they divine some unattainable ideal value in life, know that actually they remain feudal property, mere part and parcel of their fiefs. It is plain that each and every one of the judgments in the queen's court is an arrant feudal heresy. Taken together they undermine all the primary sanctions and are subversive of the social order. No proper king or baron, even at the risk of being reckoned a boor, ought to subscribe to a single one of them. And indeed, among the artists and innovators in the audience, a few of the higher clergy and certain barons survey the whole scene in order to report to absent kings what goes on in the queen's palace in Poitiers.

At the culmination of the queen's significant remarks, the court adjourns to the pleasance for a breath of air. Lent is over, though the chestnut trees are still decked like paschal altars with their white wax lights. Laburnum pours a flood of gold along the wall and nightingales weave melody through a neighboring copse; frogs ply their bassoons in the oozy river bed that makes the city's outer moat. On the terrace the courtiers of the queen and the countess, pacing in the moonlight, discourse not at all of the
Tractatus
but of many other things: of the prompt canonization of Thomas Becket; of the recent confession of Henry for his share in the martyrdom, his absolution, his reconciliation with Rome; of his folly at Montmirail in parceling his dominion among his heirs, which is already accumulating a harvest of revolt against the king in Normandy, Anjou, and Brittany; of the young king, who, urged by his vassals to require for himself a status as fair as that of his brother Richard, is getting out of hand. They whisper of conspiracies and counterconspiracies in Paris, even in Poitiers. Here is the very center of rumor and surmise, and pitchers with big ears gather information to distill elsewhere.

The queen moves among her guests — bishops and clerks,
conteurs
and troubadours, the vassals of great fiefs, the Princesses of France, the Poitevin ladies of the courts of love, her daughters, nieces, cousins, her
fideles;
but, if she overhears omens of brewing disasters, they are to her like summer thunder bellowing on the distant plains of Normandy. Snatches of melody float on the air, fine and pure as plain song. She hears a tenor like that of Ventadour singing that poet's song in praise of her:
25

Lan-can vei la fo lha Jos dels al-bres cha-zer,

Cui que pres ni do--- lha, A me deu bo sa - ber.

Laughter comes from a group perched with the young Count of Poitou on the parapet. He is repeating with anecdote those famous words of Abbé Bernard (soon to be Saint Bernard), "From the devil they came, to the devil they will go."

But the April moon sets at last upon the grand assize of the ladies, and cocks call for the sun from a distant croft in the valley. Quiet falls upon the palace and the little streets of the high place where the carven saints and angels dream in the portals of the Romanesque facades; and in the stillness lauds sound faintly from the precincts of Saint Porchaire.

A man's enemies are the men of his own house.

Micah 7.6

WHILE THESE GAY REUNIONS were engrossing the younger generation in Poitiers, where were the feudal kings? Louis's role was only that of waiting with shuttered eyes for the dropping of those fiuits of justice and patience that had long been ripening on the bough. With the Countess Mane and her coterie so valued in Poitiers, he doubtless felt less cut off from his former homagers in Poitou and more privy to the counsels of that brilliant court. The neatness of his cooperation with it was presently revealed.

Time added only benignity to Louis. In his later years he renounced temporal aspirations and the vain shows of this world. Giraldus admired his simplicity when the great Capetian said without a touch of envy,
"The King of the Indies is rich with gems, with lions, leopards, and elephants; the Emperor of Byzantium and the King of Sicily boast gold and silken garments… Thy master, however, the King of England, lacks nothing. To him belong men, horses, gold, silk, gems, fruits, wild beasts, and all things else. As for us in France, we have only our bread, our wine, and simple gaieties."
1

When his daily duties and offices were done, Louis played a quiet game of chess, but when prelates like Bishop Hugh of Lincoln were announced, he hid his board away, lest he suffer rebuke for hours lost to good works.
²
As he felt age stealing on him, he fell back more and more on his role as Abbé of Notre Dame. He gave himself increasingly to fast and meditation, when possible observed the hours and lunched frugally with his monks in their refectory. He dozed innocently wherever he happened to find himself in need of rest. In his ordered background he mellowed like autumn fruit on an espalier. His brother-in-law, the Count of Champagne, was once alarmed to find him on a summer's day alone and asleep in the green alley of a garden near a grove with only two guards on watch nearby, and reproached him for so exposing himself to villainy. A serene smile overspread the king's face.

"Although alone," he said, "I sleep free from danger, for no one wishes me ill."

Sometimes he woke from a dream of carrying the oriflamme again to Jerusalem; but this vision faded in the sober light of day in the realization that younger arms would carry that banner to the Holy Land. Probably with a new crusade in view, he sent his youngest daughter Agnes, born of the noble house of Champagne, with a distinguished escort of bishops and barons to Byzantium to be wedded to the son of Manuel Comnenus,
⁴
who had entertained him and his counselors and the Amazons so brilliantly in his palaces on the Bosporus. At home he could look forward to laying down the heavy burden of his crown, since his prayers for an "heir of the better sex" had been requited.

King Henry Plantagenet was not slumbering in shady groves nor dreaming of crusades nor praying for release from the burden of his crown. In the twenty years of his reign, Henry had withstood formidable foes — popes, kings, archbishops, and barons — but never had he been confronted with such a confederation of enemies, nor enemies with unpredictable courses and subtle instruments of malignity that sheer force could not restrain. The whole malevolent world, it seemed, had seized upon the negotiations of Montmirail to menace his security.

Becket's martyrdom in 1170 had cost Henry much prestige. The instant fame of Canterbury as the scene of miracles, the vast popular pilgrimage to Becket's shrine, the prompt movement for his canonization, gave ever wider currency and significance to the incidents of his exile, his return in the face of death, his murder in the very sanctuary at the hour of evensong. Thomas among the saints in heaven became more difficult to circumvent than Thomas on the parley fields of France and Normandy. His blood cried out to the Christian world from the stones of Canterbury
^.5
As veneration for Saint Thomas grew, the Angevin lost some of his honor among men. Who could tell what share the king bore in the terrible sacrliege? Henry had not pursued nor punished the assassins. Was this because, although he may not have ordered the act, he nevertheless condoned it? Or because, if he brought them to justice, he would seem to have been doubly wicked in punishing them for doing his will?

The apportionment of their prospective inheritances among his sons at Montmirail had bred rancor among the brothers Plantagenet and encouraged their rival vassalages to nurse the princes' grievances. Meantime the queen and her eldest daughter, that flower of the court of France, were maintaining in Poitiers, under cover of their brilliant entertainments, heaven only knew what commerce with his other enemies, and, worst of all, were filling the minds of his own sons not only with folly but with sedition. Henry Fitz-Empress took stock of his situation and with Angevin energy and thoroughness set about a program of threats and appeasements to recover control of his household and retrieve his waning prestige.

*

Henry . . had that goodly household, valiant, wise, and prudent, father of the young king who jousted with such ardor, father of Richard the cunning, who was so wise and so shrewd, father of Geoffrey of Brittany, who likewise was a man of great deeds, and father of John Lackland, because of whom he suffered much strife and warfare.

Ambrose,
L'Estoire de la gueire sainte

Louis Capet and the young king were appeased in 1172 by a second coronation in Winchester in which Marguerite shared her husband's dignities.
⁸
It was perhaps for this occasion that Henry went to considerable expense for the repair of the palace of Winchester and the painting of new frescoes on its walls. In one chamber he for some time reserved a bare space to be filled ultimately with a conceit of his own. When the fresco was at length executed, it depicted a great eagle with spread wings set upon by four eaglets. Two of the fledglings, with furious beak and claws, wounded the pinions of the parent bird; a third dug at his vitals; and a fourth, perched upon his neck, clawed at his eyes. Asked what this grim figment meant, Henry explained that the great eagle was himself, and the eaglets were his four sons. "Thus will they pursue me till I die," he said, "and that least one, whom I now cherish with so much affection, will be the most malignant of them all."

Giraldus, who relates the story as if Henry himself had displayed the painting to him and interpreted its meaning, was impressed with the fierce irony of the piece. It is he who cites the words of the prophet: a man's enemies are the men of his own house.

The scions of the Plantagenets in 1172 were no longer the passive boys of Montmirail, and their diverse characters had become apparent in the years following the occasion on which the elder king had designated for each his inheritance. Among their intimates the brothers were wont to repeat jocosely the legend that the Angevin line had descended through a few generations from the demon countess of Foulques the Black.
¹⁰
They bandied the words Abbé Bernard was said to have uttered years before when he had scanned the infant face of Henry Fitz Empress: "From the devil he came; to the devil he will go."

If the Plantagenets bore the legend of demonic ancestry as part of their Angevin inheritance, the Countess of Poitou had, in the view of the times, brought little to redeem it. The Franks — probably as ex post facto explanations for her withdrawal from their court — reproached her for her levity, her flouting of authority, her impenitence.
Instabilis
(fickle, unsteady) is the word the chroniclers use to characterize the Poitevin line. "A giddy unstable kind of man," says Malmesbury of the queen's troubadour grandfather. "A very intelligent woman, sprung from a noble race, but unsteady"
(Prudens femina valde, sed instabilis)
, says Gervase of Eleanor herself.

The young king was a Poitevin.
¹²
He was tall, beautifully formed of body, of most agreeable countenance, so full of golden words that few could resist his blandishments. He had a native warmth and grace that drew his own generation to him irresistibly. He was grandly munificent. Guillaume le Maréchal describes him as the "beauty and flower of all Christian princes, and the fountain of largess." The prince had a regal taste for splendor and for military pageantry that gave some semblance of reality to the titles he bore. The Abbé of Mont-Saint-Michel tells that once, when a gay impulse was on him, the prince bade his heralds summon all the knights in Normandy who bore the name of Guillaume to dine with him, and one hundred and ten guests hastened to the royal board.
¹³
Salimbene relates that once the young king and his followers came to a spring to drink after a strenuous hunt; there it was discovered that the servants had brought only one bottle of wine for the prince and none for the company.
¹⁴
Observing this, the young king emptied the bottle into the spring that all might share the little he had. Whether true or false, the story is in character. Yet it must be said that the largess he distributed with so free a hand was the rich substance from his father's treasure chests, or plunder taken on the jousting fields by his valiant knight-at-arms, Guillaume le Maréchal, or the promissory notes of Philip of Flanders. "He was less generous than prodigal," says the monk, Geoffroi de Vigeois;
¹⁵
"foolishly liberal and spendthrift," adds the Abbé of Mont Saint-Michel.

Though lauded as the prince of chivalry and the rewarder of champions in the list, he possessed, if we may credit the biographer of the marshal, no extraordinary skill at arms. His was rather the talent of the patron and the courtier. Inconstancy was his very name. "He was," says the chronicler, "like wax." He had the sudden inspirations and made the imprudent plans of a man unsure of himself, driven now by this, now by that flickering vision of his destiny, by this or that evil counsel, this or that compunction. At various times he fell under the spell of stronger men — Philip of Flanders, Guillaume le Maréchal, the trouvere rebel Bertran de Born. His interests were diffused and without permanence. Often in crises, when his whole attention should have been engaged with affairs, he would be found solitary, deep in a book. He flew easily from rage to tears, from bold defiance to abject submission, from high hope to desperation. "He was," says Newburgh, "a restless youth born for many men's undoing."

Of all his sons Henry loved this eldest one with special predilection. In him were fixed his hopes and his ambitions. The prince was to become the first potentate in Europe, allied to the most noble houses, heir to all the king's own striving and contriving. The beauty and brilliance of the boy promised well, and the king planned to bend the twig to the tree of his desire. Peter of Blois urged Henry to look to the education of the prince. A king without learning, he said, was a ship without a rudder, a bird without wings. But Henry, taught himself by the best masters in Angers and Le Mans, and in the household of his uncle the Earl of Gloucester, did not need the admonition. He placed his heir, as a young child, with the infant Princess of France, in the household of Becket, to be taught, bred to courtesy and to familiarity with men of substance and with the affairs of the king's chancellery. Between the prince and Becket, says the chronicler, there was such love as exists between noble kinsinen whether they happen to be together or apart. They walked abroad hand in hand. Henry himself had often presented the little prince in court to receive the homage of the nobles. He trained him from childhood to sit in his company in the royal assize and at the Christmas and Easter courts of the Plantagenets. He accustomed him early to
chevauchée
, and himself taught him all the arts of the huntsman and the falconer. For tutors he gave him the most famous scholars and the best legists of the day. He tried as far as he could to center the prince in England, to indenture him to English law and custom, and for this purpose maintained for him separate households, apart from the itinerant royal ménage.

But the prince had known no settled residence, no continuity of experience, no steady discipline. His precocious induction into the role reserved for him made him witness of the violent conflicts of the mid-century and subject to the tensions of irreconcilable loyalties. As a child of nine he had been snatched from the well-ordered household of Becket to attend the stormy assize of Clarendon, and had been moved now with indignation, now with ruth, in the bitter quarrels that ensued between, the king his father and the archbishop who claimed him as his "fond foster son." He saw his father first in terrible triumph over Becket and later enduring his penitential stripes for his confessed share in the martyrdom. As son in-law of Louis Capet, he was subjected in the French court to a view of Angevin history and Angevin aspirations quite inconsistent with that which prevailed in Rouen and Le Mans. He was party to the domestic strife that had driven the Countess of Poitou to her own domain, and there, in her lively continental court, he had learned to prefer the glamor of chivalry and romance to the hardier business of synod and assize in Britain.

The Plantagenet princes could not but feel that the foyer of the culture to which they were heir was on the Continent in those ancient capitals of Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Poitou, with their venerable establishments, their mellower atmosphere, their greater luxury and more elegant diversions. The young king was ill content to accompany his father on his laborious inspection of garrisons and law courts, of tax and tithe in Britain, while his junior in Poitou enjoyed ampler freedom in the more brilliant environment of the queen.

Richard, the queen's favorite son, was the best Angevin among the brothers.
¹⁸
Though taller than his father, he probably bore most resemblance to him. He had the ruddy color of the Angevins, their bold expression and furious eyes. His build was stocky but not ungraceful, his fiber sinewy, his stance that of the soldier and the horseman. In physical strength and in boldness of action, he greatly surpassed his brother. He was a born strategist and warrior and in all this a worthy descendant of the Angevins, Foulques the Black, Foulques, King of Jerusalem, and of his own father. His mind was quick and his interests were more concentrated and persistent than the young king's. Nothing more completely engaged his attention than military engines, the design of fortresses, the craft of siege and assault. He displayed likewise the Angevin suddenness and violence. He was quick to take offense and to accept a challenge and more ruthless to conquered foes than the king his father. This prince figured at tournaments less often than the young king. He had plenty of real warfare to divert him in Poitou and Aquitaine and needed no mimic outlet for his genius on the jousting fields. But when he did appear, the hardiest made way for him. Though born in Oxford, he early abandoned interest in England as having no special significance for him. He never learned Saxon nor adapted himself to insular ways of life. He cared "not an egg" that Henry should wear the crown of England so long as Poitou was his portion and Poitiers his capital.