Eleanor Of Aquitaine (29 page)

Henry took valuable prizes in the queen's famous palace. He ordered the royal smacks to put into the port of Barfleur and on them in the early summer of 1174 he assembled the remnant of the royal academy of Poitiers: Eleanor, the mistress of them all; his son John and his daughter Joanna; Marguerite and Alais, the French king's two daughters; Constance of Brittany, Emma of Anjou, the infant of Maurienne, and other highborn ladies. And if Marie de France was, as some now suppose, the king's sister, she too may have been of that company.

The Channel was, as the chroniclers say, "big" that day, and mariners reminded the king of the calamity of the White Ship in the waters off Barfleur. But Henry could not wait for weather, for the young king and the Count of Flanders were in Flemish ports awaiting a favorable wind for an invasion of England. With more than his customary pandemonium, Henry embarked his mercenaries and his captives in some forty ships. Then, spreading his hands to the stormy sky and uttering one of those challenges that served him for prayer, he called upon heaven to let the sea overwhelm his boats with all their freight unless God meant to vindicate his wrongs.
²⁴
With difficulty and after many bufferings, the smacks rode into Southampton on an evening tide. Thence the king distributed his captives in strong places out of the reach of Poitevin treachery. Marguerite was sent to the castle of Devizes and Eleanor was immured in Salisbury Tower, there to reflect upon that code of chivalry which was the masterpiece of all the arts that flourished under her patronage.

For the moment the feudal system triumphed. Sedition looked out from barred windows upon a world of havoc. The poets were dispersed, some to sing no more. The Poitevin knights who escaped went back to their native anarchy. Without regard for the
Tractatus
, the heiresses of Poitou and Aquitaine were henceforth given to those barons to whom they were due. The code of Marie and André the Chaplain fell for a time in abeyance. But ideas had gone forth from the palace in Poitiers, and these remained to shed a brightness in the world when rods had fallen from the hands of feudal kings and bolts had rusted in the tower of Salisbury.

Having looked to the security of his captives, Henry went at once, not to the succor of his hard-pressed liege men, but to the shrine of Saint Thomas to conclude his penance in the place hallowed by the martyrdom.
²⁰
When, at the edge of Canterbury, he came within sight of the cathedral crowned with its golden cherubim, he put off his soldier's habit and shoes, donned simple pilgrim's wool, and made his way barefoot over the rough cobbles of the streets. The rumor of his coming had drawn a crowd, but permitting no pomp of royal welcome, he went directly to the crypt, where, without food or sleep, he passed the night kneeling before the tomb shedding abundant tears. At matins he rose and made a tour of the ambulatory and heard early mass. Then, as at Avranches, he offered his bare back to scourgings, and the monks of Canterbury, some of whom had witnessed the martyrdom, each laid on three stripes
²⁷
Henry was then raised from the pavement, refreshed, and supplied with relics. He had come to peace at last with Thomas without the interjection of the salvos.

As he hastened back to London he was beset with alarming tidings. The King of Scotland and his confederates were laying waste the marches of the north; a troop of five hundred mercenaries dispatched from the Continent by the Count of Flanders was harrying East Anglia;
²⁸
strong castles had fallen into the hands of his enemies. However, the troops of the young king, expected to sustain the rebels in Britain, had not yet found favorable weather for sailing from Flanders for Dover.

In spite of the reassurances of loyal Londoners who met him with pledges and gifts outside the walls, Henry was weary and disheartened by the harbingers of disaster and the heavy odds against him. As soon as he reached his palace of Westminster, he dismissed his retainers and went at once to his closet. No harp or viol, says the chronicler, upon this night broke the stillness of his chamber. Overcome with the fatigues of his pilgrimage and his three day fast, he took to his couch, called his physician for a blood letting, and then, leaning on his elbow, dozed while a varlet chafed his feet bruised from the rough stones of Canterbury. Suddenly someone beat loudly on the door. The keeper rushed to quiet the disturbing noise.

"Who's there?" he called. "Begone. Come in the morning. The king is asleep."

But Henry, with one ear still open to the world, started up and shouted, "Open the door."

Without ceremony a young man whom the king had seen in the service of his faithful De Glanville burst, all sweating from the saddle, into the room and approached his couch. In spite of the joyful aspect of the youth, Henry braced himself for evil news. To his astonishment, the messenger in a tumult of words poured out the tidings of signal victories for Henry's forces in the north. The King of Scotland, his legs tied under his horse's belly, a captive of De Glanville in Richmond Castle; his barons routed, taken. The rebellion in the north, surprised by Henry's men and lacking the expected support of the young king's diversionary attack in the south, collapsed in a single day Henry, never a careless optimist, could hardly credit his senses, even when shown letters with De Glanville's seal.

"By my faith," cried the young man, "may I be nailed to a cross, or hanged by a rope, or burnt at the stake, if all this be not confirmed by noon tomorrow."

Throwing off his coverlet, Henry leapt from his bed.

"Now," cried the king, "God be thanked for it, and Saint Thomas the martyr, and all the saints of God."

He then went about the palace rousing his sleep-drunk retainers from their midnight rest. In the morning he ordered the bells in all the churches of London to ring out the tidings to the loyal burghers and the garrisons in the Tower.

Three weeks had sufficed for the control of the revolt in England and the capture of the principal rebels. But across the Channel the young king and Philip of Flanders were still stalking abroad. Louis had recalled them from their scheme of invading England when he had learned of Henry's departure from Barfleur on the wings of a gale with his mercenaries and his precious hostages, two of whom were Capetian flesh and blood. The Franks as usual were just too late. But the forces that had been assembled in the Channel ports of Flanders could be turned to other uses. About the first of August, under Louis's personal direction, they attacked the capital of Normandy.

Rouen, from its position on a loop of the Seine and under the shelter of background heights, was highly defensible, and the Franks could come at it only in a narrow quarter. Here for more than two weeks they battered at its walls day and night, but were held off by the burghers and the garrison.
³⁰
Then came the tenth of August. This was Saint Lawrence's day, and Louis held Saint Lawrence in special veneration. He proposed a truce so that he and all good Christians could observe the feast.

The burghers of Rouen gave their assent without reluctance, but they used the respite unchivalrously for other purposes than that for which it was designed. They took the saint's day to thumb their noses at the Franks. Young men and maidens, says the chronicler, poured from the gates of Rouen, disported themselves with song and dance along the river in plain view of the armies encamped before them, practicing feats of derring-do, tossing their lances under the very eyes of their assailants. Philip of Flanders, who in two ventures had been unable to take the city, saw derisive gestures in these maneuvers and desired to take vengeance for the effrontery. He tried to poison Louis's mind with a perfidious scheme.

"Behold," he said, "the city for which we have sweat so long is now ripe for attack. Engrossed now with singing and sports, it offers itself an easy prize. Let us take arms quietly, set ladders to the walls, and overwhelm those who flaunt us."

"Heaven forbid," said Louis, "that I should stain my honor with such a blot. I have granted a truce this day for the veneration of the most blessed Lawrence."

But Philip's suggestion found general favor and Louis was overruled. Heralds went about secretly among the tents of the Franks giving orders for an attack without warning. However, as Newburgh relates, it happened that some monks of Rouen were celebrating the feast of the saint in more reverent ways in the lofty tower of a church overlooking the countryside. From their height they observed suspicious movements in the camps of the Franks and so, without waiting for consultation with their garrisons, they pulled the rope of that mighty bell, "old Rouvel," and sounded a warning to the burghers still amusing themselves far and wide. The people poured into the gates and, taking their places upon the walls, they gave the Franks such a reception that "the perfidy was turned against those who devised it."

Henry, on learning in England that his enemies were knocking at the gates of Normandy, roused himself again. Taking some of his more important captives seized in Britain, to whose number he added the King of Scotland, and embarking a contingent of Welsh soldiers with his
routiers
, he crossed to Barfleur. He stowed his hostages in Caen and Falaise and then hastened to Rouen to find the city stoutly besieged, though the crisis had been held off by the vigilance of the monks and the valor of the burghers. Henry was received into the gates on the day after the treachery to such a ringing of bells as had never been heard before — old Rouvel joined by the clamor of all the many belfries in the capital of the Norman dukes and the blare of trumpets from all its towers. The report circulated that he was prepared to cross the frontiers of Normandy with an army of redoubtable Welsh to lay siege to Paris itself.

Louis was stupefied by the suddenness of Henry's arrival and alarmed by the accounts he had heard of the army of barbarous outlanders the English king had brought with him.
³²
He took counsel with Philip of Flanders and the young king. Thereupon these allies folded their tents, destroyed their shelters for the siege, set fire to their engines, and withdrew, not, remarks the chronicler, without loss of honor.

The siege of Rouen had lasted just over three weeks. At the end of it, no foe of consequence was left in the field. Henry's victory was signal and complete from Scotland to the Loire, from the Seine to Finisterre. Nothing remained but to gather in his renegade sons. Pursuing these fugitives from place to place with threats and promises, he brought them together at Montlouis between Tours and Amboise at the end of September. Though the king displayed no thirst for vengeance, the rebels who had been offered good terms at Gisors the year before now contented themselves with less; yet never before had Henry conceded so much to give substance to the promises of Montmirail.

The young king, instead of one half the revenues of England with four castles there, or if he preferred, one half the revenues of Normandy with three castles there, now received an annual stipend of £15,000 Angevin, with two castles of Henry's designation. Richard, instead of one half the revenues of Aquitaine and three castles there, was allowed one half the revenues, but only two castles suitable for residence, and these without garrisons. Geoffrey received, as before, the inheritance of Constance of Brittany. But it was now stipulated that Henry's provisions for John were to stand. Castles on both sides were restored to ante bellum status and Henry liberated nearly one thousand hostages, almost ten times as many as the young king was able to free. Having triumphed, Henry was magnanimous. He placed the blame for the execrable strife on interested troublemakers — Louis, the queen, ambitious barons — and excused his sons' perfidy because of their youth. However, he took the occasion to document the treaty of Montmirail. Like William the Conqueror, he made it clear that, although all his strivings were for his sons' sakes alone, he had no intention of casting off all his clothes until he was ready to take to his bed. Richard and Geoffrey renewed homage to their father; but the young king was courteously excused because of his royal title.

You have been snatched from your own lands and carried away to an alien country. Reared with abundance of all delights, you enjoyed a royal liberty. You lived richly on your own inheritance, you took pleasure in the pastimes of your women, in their songs, in the music of lute and drum. And now you grieve, you weep, you are consumed with sorrow. But come back to your own towns, poor prisoner. Where is your court? Where are the young men of your household? Where are your counselors? Some, dragged far from their own soil, have suffered a shameful death, others have been deprived of sight, and still others wander exiled in far places. You cry out and no one heeds you, for the King of the North holds you in captivity. But cry out and cease not to cry, lift your voice like a trumpet and it shall reach the ears of your sons. The day will come when they shall deliver you, and you shall come again to dwell in your own lands
.

Richard le Poitevin, Lament for Eleanor

HENRY HAD NO NEED OF TRUMPETS to tell him that sedition in Poitou had not been quenched by the imprisonment of Eleanor. He had suppressed the rebellion that had threatened the Angevin empire with a success so signal that it was popularly attributed to the miraculous intervention of Saint Thomas. But to the prescient Angevin the conclusion had less the character of finale than of ominous prelude. The whole uprising had revealed, not only to him, but to his enemies, the extent of a many-sided discontent that needed only coherence to be overwhelming. The queen, though in his hands, remained the object of intrigue, the inspiration of her rival foot-loose sons and of the turbulent fortune seekers who found their profit in war and rapine. The king turned over in his mind the problem of what to do with his captive.

Some of the considerations that had boggled Louis's counsels when he had taken the Countess of Poitou in custody in Antioch in the mid-century now, twenty-five years later, perplexed Henry in Winchester. To divorce her might be tempting; the grounds were excellent — treason and two more degrees of consanguinity than had been sufficient in Louis's case — but he could not set her free in her own estates to make some new alliance of her own. Capable as he was of reading the lessons of history, he had no mind to repeat Louis's fatal blunder. He needed no legates to suggest to him how scrupulous the King of France would be in the interests of his vassal, if once she were at liberty. To keep her in custody (forever?) might hinder new intrigues; but this course would prevent him from fortifying himself with a new alliance. His choice was between unsatisfactory alternatives; to divorce her and then imprison her offered the surest prospect of ending her treasons. This remedy, which Louis had not ventured to apply, Henry tried.

About All Saints in 1175 Cardinal Huguezon arrived in England ostensibly to quiet a controversy between York and Canterbury. But more than one chronicler relates that Henry had bespoken the cardinal on an affair of his own and that he poured much sterling into Huguezon's coffers to expedite his business.
¹
He expected the legate to rid him of the disastrous Poitevin.
²
What he proposed was that, after a divorce that would leave him free for a possible new alliance, the Countess of Poitou should renounce the pomps of this world and exchange the coronet of her forebears for the abbatial cross and other insignia of the ss of Fontevrault.

The important establishment of Fontevrault, that rich community of monks and nuns ruled always by a noble ss, seemed a suitable sanctuary for the queen. It was in the countryside of her predilection, yet safe in Angevin territory.
⁴
It was par excellence the asylum where ladies of rank whose worldly destinies were at an end, or the turbulent or merely inconvenient relicts of kings and princes and high barons, or the superfluity of princesses that embarrassed noble houses, were given an interval to put off vaingloriousness before putting on immortality.
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The hierarchies of the world were there respected, the commitment dowries regal, the dignities high, the preferments honorable. A cell in Fontevrault and ultimately an enrollment in its necrology should have satisfied a captive queen of fifty-three, whose path in life had led her in any case to seclusion from the world.

But the queen was not reasonable. She refused to forget her sovereign inheritance, her loyal sons, her liege men, or the fact that her provinces were in the vassalage of France, or that her favorite son had been invested with their titles. Even at fifty-three, she felt no vocation for the monastic life. She would entertain no idea of going back to the region of Poitiers in the weeds of an ss. She had the support of her eldest three sons, who had been summoned to the Easter court in Winchester in 1176 for this matter and probably also to discuss the projected marriage of Joanna Plantagenet to William, King of Sicily. It is said that Eleanor appealed to the Archbishop of Rouen as her ghostly father against closing the cloistral doors upon her, and that he, in spite of the fact that she had the year before ignored his exhortations to be reconciled with Henry, refused his consent to her commitment to the y. However, domestic fury notwithstanding, Henry appealed to Alexander for license to repudiate the queen.

Even though in durance Eleanor seems not to have been strictly confined to a solitary tower nor deprived of the light of heaven. If one may judge by the centers from which her allowances for maintenance were paid, she appears to have moved about, sojourning at times in Salisbury, Winchester, or Ludgershall, in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, but always under the surveillance of De Glanville or Fitz-Stephen or some other high public servant — watched, restrained, denied her sovereign liberty, her ancestral revenues, the use of her years of prime.
⁶
The king, says Gervase, ordered her kept in custody in the most strongly fortified towns. Her resources in this seclusion dwindled to mere pittance, if the Pipe Rolls show their totality. Upon a few occasions in the years of her confinement, she emerged, probably on the demand of her children, to preside at some family conclave or plenary seasonal court. Thus at the time of her daughter Matilda's visit to Britain with her children, Eleanor appeared at Winchester and in something more than penitential garb.
⁸
The Pipe Rolls record a royal expense of more than £28 for scarlet robes, gray fur, and embroidered cushions for her, together with perquisites for her maid Amaria; and upon another occasion a payment for a gilt saddle for the queen with fur and raiment. Twice during her surveillance she was taken under custody to the Continent to justify Henry's claims for lands she held in fee. But, except for brief journeys, she who had been the observed of all observers was held back from the currents of life and obliged to survey from the windows of her prison events to which she had given impulse. For news from that world she became dependent upon her keepers and the chaplains who ministered to her spiritual needs "It is in solitude," wrote Pierre de la Celle, "that merits accumulate." Some of the queen's purveyors learned in time to admire her insight and her fortitude.

*

Just what plans Henry revolved after the rebellion of 1173 for the reordering of his whole dynastic system is matter for conjecture. But his project for divorce gave rise to various speculations, which may have been bred from fear and suspicion in the minds of the young Plantagenets and spread from thence. A theory circulated that Henry, having lost confidence in the beneficiaries of Montmirail, who had proved ungrateful for his paternal liberality, weighed the possibility of repudiating that Poitevin brood of eaglets, retrieving his misprized gifts, and setting up the child John, who had shared neither the dispositions of Montmirail nor the unfilial upbringing of his elder brothers, as the chief heir and object of his bounty. For John the king had made a conquest of Ireland, the lordship of which he now, in the presence of his barons and bishops, conferred on his youngest son;
¹⁰
for John he had cut strategic portions both in England and Anjou from the young king's inheritance; and now, the infant of Maurienne having died, he arranged a marriage between John and his own (the king's) cousin, Isabelle (otherwise Hawisa or Avise) of Gloucester, the heiress of the most powerful in England who had defended the hereditary claims of Matilda Empress. These enrichments were viewed as something more than the mere providing for John Lackland his due place in the sun.
¹¹
Furthermore, in spite of pressures from the Ile de France and the importunities of Richard, Henry continued to put obstacles in the way of the marriage of the Count of Poitou to Alais Capet, which had been arranged at Montmirail. Why? Why did Henry withhold the Frankish princess, who was of marriageable age, from her betrothed, whereas Marguerite had been wedded to the young king in infancy? Alais's dowry, Bourges and its appurtenances in Berry, was as essential to rounding out the Angevin frontiers as Marguerite's dowry, the Norman Vexin. Why did Henry hesitate? For what destiny was Alais waiting?

It would be interesting to know who presided in the Plantagenet courts in Britain after the stormy Channel passage of the royal ladies in the summer of 1174. In that year Henry gave his sister, Emma of Anjou, to a Welsh prince who had supported his wars upon the marches.
¹²
If she who styled herself Mane de France was another sister, she emerges later as ss of Shaftesbury. Among the ladies of mark there was that seventeen-year old matron, the young Queen Marguerite, who doubtless often served in place of the imprisoned queen, for her allowances, as the Pipe Rolls show, now greatly exceeded Eleanor's. But Marguerite followed the young king's fortunes and spent long intervals in Angevin domains abroad, or in Paris with the Capets. Henry was often at Woodstock in 1176 and 1177, and possibly Rosamond Clifford sometimes kept him company there; but she died in 1177 after a pious retreat in Godstow nunnery.

In the court there remained alone of the famous coterie of the Plantagenets the Capetian princess Alais. In 1176 she was sixteen. No fault was found with her person. She was comely, gifted, nobly dowered, and she too had been polished for her role in the school of Marie of Champagne. Why was the Frankish princess alone of all that noble company of
dames choisies
left unwed in the palaces of the Plantagenet king? Why had other marriages been proposed for the Count of Poitou? The world made these inquiries and the Capets pressed them home. In 1177, in extreme agitation, Louis appealed to Rome to enforce the marriage of Alais to the Count of Poitou on pain of interdict on all the lands of Henry Fitz-Empress on both sides of the Channel.

The chroniclers are discreetly reserved about the facts; but mischievous rumors got abroad and found their way to the court of France. They traveled quite possibly by the agency of the young king and queen, who had been at Winchester at the time of Cardinal Huguezon's visit and had gone from there to Paris. Giraldus relates that Henry, confident of his prospect of getting rid of the queen through his appeal to the Pope, intended to take the Capetian princess for himself, disinherit the fierce eaglets of Poitou as the bastards of a consanguineous marriage, and rear a new progeny to possess the Angevin empire. Giraldus, never more piously enthusiastic than when exposing Henry's vices, declares that after his separation from the queen, the king turned openly to the evil courses he had long secretly pursued. Briefly he flaunted the beautiful Clifford, and when she had vanished from the scene, he made a mistress of his precious hostage, the daughter of his overlord, the bride affianced to his son.
¹⁴
Did the Angevin mean to erase from his life story the chapter of his union with the disastrous Poitevin and go back to his earlier plan for a primary alliance with his overlord? It was recalled that before he had sold his birthright for Poitou and Aquitaine, he had sought a marriage with Louis's eldest daughter, the Countess of Champagne.

*

Inactivity is shameful for a young man.

(Long repos pour un jeune homme, c'est la honte
)

Guillaume le Maréchal
, III,

When, after the peace of Montlouis which had ended the rebellion, Henry proposed to take his recreant eldest son with him to England, that young man eluded him. The prince fled to Paris, where he was warned that in Britain he would surely be a captive. Had he not already been his father's prisoner in Argentan? Was not Queen Eleanor held in Salisbury Tower? Had not even the young queen Marguerite been detained in Devizes? Had not the whole Poitevin court been taken into custody? Not for his weight in gold should the young king risk his liberty. However, the Capets did little to relieve their son in law from the intolerable debts that oppressed him. With his stipend cut off, the patron of champions cut hardly more figure than a starveling troubadour. At last, by dint of promised indulgence and cajolery and engagements to set his affairs aright, Henry induced the prince to join him. Then, as always, the young king found himself unable to resist the placating grace, the patient overtures of affection that sought, no matter what his derelictions, to bring him home. Before solemn witnesses the young man threw himself at his father's feet, implored his forgiveness, and begged to be received into his homage. Presently, as says Diceto, the two kings whom recently the whole realm could not contain because of their rancor crossed to Britain in the same ship, slept in the same chamber, ate at the same board.

While Henry repaired the havoc in Britain and made it safe after the rebellion, he tried to root the young king there and give him a share in the onerous business of government. Together they made a pilgrimage to Canterbury and at the shrine purged away some of the bitterness over Thomas that had so long divided them.
¹⁷
Then they made a wide circuit of the island.