Eleanor Of Aquitaine (38 page)

I
was Henry the King To me

Divers realms were subject

I was duke and count of many provinces

Eight feet of ground is now enough for me

Whom many kingdoms jailed to satisfy

Who reads these lines, let him reflect

Upon the narrowness of death,

And in my case behold

The image of our mortal lot.

This scanty tomb doth now suffice

For whom the earth was not enough
³⁴

The eagle of the broken pledge shall rejoice in her third nestling.

Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Propheaes of Meilin
, Book VII,

She is called the "eagle" because she spread her wings over two realms, the French and the English, the "broken pledge" signifies that she was disjoined from the French king by reason of consanguinity, and from the English king by her imprisonment, which lasted sixteen years. By her "third nestling" is signified Richard, her third son.

Ralph of Diceto, II,

HENRY DIED ON THE SIXTH OF JULY 1189. Guillaume le Maréchal, who had been in charge of his household in the last days, accompanied his body to Fontevrault, and there, before the obsequies, fronted the heir to the throne whom he had unhorsed on the road from Le Mans to Fresnay two weeks before. He did not, in the circumstances, expect to be made chancellor of England nor seneschal of Poitou. But, as a soldier of fortune, Guillaume had always taken his luck as he found it. He could at least reflect that loyalty to the dead king had not been treason to the latter's rebel son. Fidelity was some thing to barter for in the feudal world and might commend itself to the next Plantagenet, who knew the stuff of which Guillaume was made and would at once have need of men whom he could trust. Moreover, the marshal had something to say. But when the two met in the crypt of Fontevrault, Guillaume waited for the heir to speak.

"Maréchal," said the Count of Poitou, "you tried to kill me, and would have done it, if my arm had not turned aside your lance."

"Fair Sire," replied Guillaume, "I had no intention of killing you, nor did I make any attempt to do so. If I can drive my lance aright when armed, I can surely do it when unarmed, as I then was, and it would have been as easy for me to strike you as to strike your horse. If I killed your horse, I do not think I did wrong, nor do I repent."

"Maréchal," said the count, "I pardon you and hold no enmity."

"I thank you, fair sweet Sire," rejoined Guillaume, "but I did by no means desire your death."

It was the kind of reconciliation that
preux chevaliers
bred in the queen's court in Poitiers might be expected to make. Bygones were bygones.

"Maréchal," the count went on, "go forward with my Sheriff Piepart to look after my lands and my affairs in England until I come. Tomorrow I will myself bury the dead with the honors due so high a man."

Guillaume lingered valet-wise on one foot hesitating. He was thirty-five. The days of tournament were over. He had fulfilled in Palestine his crusader's vow as proxy for the young king. It was time for him to settle down. In all the bestowal of rewards with which Richard was certain to inaugurate the new regime, was there no recompense for a knight who could be trusted with a Plantagenet's high business? He gently reminded his new patron that the king who lay dead beside them had promised to reward his sterling fidelity with the young and exceedingly rich Countess of Pembroke and Striguil. The Count of Poitou had already offered this matchless prize to Baldwin of Bethune, who had ridden with him into Le Mans, but bethinking him that this was no time to cross his liege man, he revoked his promise to Baldwin then and there and bestowed the lady with her excellent fiefs upon Guillaume.

Two decades and many arduous undertakings had measured Guillaume's ascent from penury to magnificence. Twenty years before, as Patrick of Salisbury's landless nephew, he had in his first knightly exploit rescued Queen Eleanor from the ambush of the Lusignans on a highway in Poitou; and her graciousness and liberality had opened to him the palace of Poitiers in the days of its utmost splendor. He had then risen to the status of equerry to her sons, again to that of master-at-arms, tutor, mentor, tournament champion of the young king; had become the right arm of the elder king in his last days. He had known and served all the Plantagenets honorably, laying each in turn under some bond of gratitude. In the confused feuds of the reigning house, he had found himself tossed from side to side, but never in treason to his knightly vows. And now he came at last in his prime to the mighty dignities of Pembroke and Striguil. The girl bride, "the beautiful, the good, the wise lady of high birth," found Guillaume kind. The story of their long devotion, related in Guillaume's biography, is one of the most affecting domestic chapters in feudal history.

Guillaume sped with Piepart through Maine and Normandy to take ship at Dieppe,
²
pausing only to certify his possession of some of his heiress' estates in the neighborhood of the port. In their haste to catch a ship, both suffered injuries in the crash of a landing stage, and Guillaume alone succeeded in making the crossing. With all haste he made for Winchester to break the bars of the queen's prison and restore her to the world. To his great surprise he found her at liberty upon her own recognizance, her gates wide open to the English summer. "Could any be so uncivil or so obdurate as not to bend him to that lady's wishes?" Cavalcades of magnates were already moving over the highways of Britain to proffer homage in her court. No one, not even De Glanville, the keeper of the Plantagenet hostages and marriage prizes, the custodian of the queen, had dared to hold her one day in captivity when the death of Henry was certified. Times had changed. Guillaume found her welcoming
(avenante)
as in the old days in Poitiers and, in spite of the catastrophic events abroad, "happier than she had been."

Queen Eleanor was now about sixty eight, a ripe age for the twelfth century. For fifteen years of her precious prime she had been restrained from that share in the fashioning of her era to which her feudal fortunes entitled her. Her years of grace had been squandered. Yet she came from her retirement not as one who had set her face against her day, but as one furnished with richer understanding and prepared to meet the issues of the hour. It had been impossible to keep her out of commerce with her world. She had had her occasional traffic with bishops and barons and with emissaries from her sons, with whom she had never lost her authority. Even in utmost penury she had known the ministrations of chaplains and clerks, of keepers and serving folk. She emerged with no diminution of her energy or insight, but with a political sagacity and prudence that had not characterized her earlier days. It was as if, in her captivity, she had nourished her spirits at night on Boethius'
Consolation of Philosophy
and listened by day, not only to the echoes of the greater world, but to the little voices of little men that penetrated the fine chinks of her prison.

Guillaume was a rude chronicler, but the queen read current history from his garbled tale as from an open book, plucking from his blunt and succinct words the salient facts and deciding at the same time what must be done. While Richard was delayed abroad to accept the homage of Henry's doubtful vassals, to make his castles safe, and to receive the glaive and banners of Normandy in Rouen, Eleanor at once assumed the regency in England. Gathering a retinue with that sudden urgency to which Henry's vassals were accustomed, she proceeded at once with the marshal to London. There she convened at Westminster all the nobles and prelates within reach of her summons and took from all, under the witness of the Archbishop of Canterbury, oaths of allegiance to the new king. No one questioned the authority of the aging woman suddenly brought from her long seclusion to set her own seal upon affairs of state. During her brief stay in London, among other duties, she assisted in the distribution of the valuable marriage prizes that had been accumulating in the custody of the Plantagenets, and so cemented the allegiance of strong young men 5 Only the Princess Alais was kept in reserve and under strict surveillance. Here Guillaume received the young Countess of Pembroke. He had no leisure to woo her according to the
Tractatus de Amore
. In view of the urgency of the times, he was advised not to dally. He borrowed decent clothes from a friend, wed the countess without delay, and then retired, as his biographer relates, to a "quiet and pleasant place" in Surrey to nurse his recent injury during his honeymoon.

From London Eleanor made progresses to other centers. She convened her assemblies, as the chronicler says, "wherever she pleased," received the oaths of homage to her son, and transacted the business of court and chancellery, setting her own seal upon her sovereign acts. She appeared without hindrance in the royal castles, not as agent or emissary, but as their undisputed mistress. Rome was arrested at her gates. She expelled a papal legate for presuming to set foot on English soil without her warrant and safe-conduct. Never had her mandates been more authoritative.

The queen's statesmanship in this period was neither subtle nor roundabout. Her measures were timely and practical. She made a plain ingenuous bid for popularity and addressed herself with perspicacity to those who bore grievances under Henry's dispensation. She knew that Richard, bred for another destiny, was neither known nor loved in Britain. Though born in Oxford, he had since his infancy made two brief visits to the island, and then his first thought had been to put the Channel between himself and Southampton as soon as possible. He knew neither the language nor the visage of the domain which a series of fatalities had brought to his inheritance Richard, as
freux chevalier
, might be the beau ideal of Poitiers, but the islanders, less exposed to the utter refinements of chivalry, were not to be overborne by his merely sumptuary aspect. The castellans and burghers of Britain had somehow to be bewitched into forgetting that they had recently been at large expense of life, limb, and treasure to extinguish the seditions of this splendid fire brand Count of Poitou.

In this difficult situation the queen knew exactly what to do. Her long confinement had taught her, as Hoveden says, "how hateful prisons are," and that it is "a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be liberated therefrom." The English dungeons teemed with subjects awaiting the justice that Henry's confusions on the Continent had long delayed, and especially with trespassers against his oppressive forest laws. "For the good of Henry's soul," Eleanor opened the keeps where these culprits languished and loosed scores of obscure creatures to praise in scattered towns and hamlets the clemency of the new regime.

She gave clerks likewise a reason to rejoice. For his sudden journeyings Henry had stabled relays of horses in the ys, where the burden of maintaining them was an intolerable nuisance and expense to the abbots and the chapters. The queen delivered the orders from this imposition and thenceforth cowled personages, riding to and fro upon their multifarious business, proclaimed in priory and town and chapter house a new, more spacious time. Meanwhile she did not neglect preparations for a magnificent coronation. "Such as I see you, thus I deem you," was a proverb in Poitou. Nothing so puts a populace in good humor as to pay for a splendid demonstration. The queen well knew the value of effects.

So competently had Eleanor managed that when, on the 20th of August, Richard landed in Southampton, England was joyful at his advent, hoping by all the good auguries of the month just past for an amendment of their affairs. Whom Henry had dispossessed, says Hoveden, Richard had restored; whom Henry had banished, Richard had recalled; whom Henry had imprisoned, Richard had set free; whom Henry had afflicted with penalties, Richard had sent away rejoicing.

*

Little time was gone by ere he had himself crowned at London. There did I see great gifts given, and I saw such abundance of meats set forth that none might keep tally thereof, nor ever in my life have I seen a court served in nobler fashion. And I saw vessels of great price in that hall so fair, and tables saw I so close pressed together that they could in no wise be numbered.

Ambrose, L'Estoire de la guerre samte, p 13

For the first time since the Conqueror the succession was undisputed. Against the coming of the king, London streets, so long without royal display, were cleaned and sweetened with the strewing of fresh rushes. House fronts were hung with tapestries, garlands, and green boughs, and in window embrasures burghers set their holy images. In cellars and kitchens butchers, bakers, and vintners, and guilds of citizens, each with special perquisites, vied in making ready the prodigious coronation feast.
¹²
The crowning was set for Sunday, September 3, marked on the calendar as an "Egyptian" or unlucky day;
¹³
but time pressed and the Plantagenets were less superstitious than the folk of the time.

The coronation ceremony still in use in Britain was already, in Richard's day, traditional. Then as now it presented that twofold dramatic allegory, prefiguring in act and symbol not only the already historic relation of the king to the people who accepted him, but also that mystical relation between the state and the church, the king and the primate, that even the martyrdom of Becket had not dissolved. No one but the Archbishop of Canterbury could crown and consecrate the king accepted by the people; but the primate might not touch the crown before the king had himself taken it from the altar and placed it in the hands of the archbishop, who only then, and with the assistance of two nobles, placed it upon the royal head. In the ceremony echoed the salvos, "saving the dignity of our order." "saving the honor of the king."

Richard, moving amidst all the colors of the estates and the orders and the symbols of temporal and eternal efficacy that pricked through the clouds of incense and the fluttering glow of tapers, appeared on this day less august as heir of all the Angevin empire than as the soldier of Christ destined to lead the forces of Christendom to the rescue of the holy shrines. The white cross of his dedication outburned the gold and gems of the royal regalia.Many of that host in Westminster were signed with the same emblem. The
TeDeum
that swelled in the vaults of the y were presently, if prayers were fulfilled, to resound in the citadel of Jerusalem.