Eleanor Of Aquitaine (50 page)

In view of all Lackland's perfidies, the king's greeting of his downcast cadet reads like a role that had been rehearsed. The Plantagenets, it seems, had already resolved, as the first step in their strategy, to retrieve John and thus to seize the dilemma of the succession by the horns. Lackland might have no virtue with which to bless himself, but he, rather than Arthur of Brittany, could at any rate be counted on to fight for his whole Plantagenet patrimony on both sides of the Channel; and of the two he was by far the more dangerous instrument to leave in the hands of the Capets.

"John mistakes me if he is afraid," said Richard. "Bring him in. After all, he is my brother. Of course he has been foolish, but I won't reproach him now. The ones I want to settle with are those who seduced him."

When John fell at his feet in a flood of penitential tears, Richard raised him gently.

"Don't be afraid of me, John. You are young [he was twenty-nine] and you have been the victim of bad advice. Your counselors shall pay for this. Come, get up, and have something to eat."

Richard had become the patriarch of the Angevins. His words echoed great Henry's cockerings of the young king. Although John had abundantly fulfilled the evil augury of the fresco in Winchester, he dandled the crown. A fresh salmon which had just been brought as a gift for the king was cooked instead for Lackland, who dried his penitential tears and ate his supper under the consoling warmth of maternal solicitude and the relief of his brother's absolution. The colloquy over the salmon must have lasted far into the night, and there in all probability the question of the succession was settled among them before they slept in the house of their vassal; for from the time of this reconciliation John's views of his personal interests persuaded him that loyalty to his own house offered him the fairest future prospects, and thenceforth for some time he was proof against the efforts of the Capets to suborn him. Although he did not at once recover his castles, his wallet was replenished and he was given a troop of knights and sent to prove his contrition by relieving Richard's garrison at Evreux, sorely beset by the forces of Philip Augustus, and this he did.

*

When Richard arrived in Normandy, Philip's campaign for the conquest of Angevin provinces was well advanced. Both pride and interest led the King of the Franks to strike toward Rouen for the delivery of Alais. But in the midst of sharp operations on the Norman frontier, he also made forays at the narrow waist of the Plantagenet domain in Berry to recover the portion of his sister's dowry that was there in dispute; and on the guardian castles of the Loire in an effort to sever the queen's provinces from Anjou and Touraine; and in the south he reawoke the anarchy upon which the Capets had played in Henry's last wars with the young king. The
sirventés
of Bertran de Born revived in Poitou the native rebels' hope of throwing off the Angevin yoke and gaining freedom to settle their own feuds in their own summary way.

The frontiers of Normandy were safeguarded not by formidable barriers of terrain, but by a series of strong fortifications commanding the roads and river routes. During Richard's captivity, Philip had secured Gisors through the treachery of its castellan and had thus opened the way to Rouen on the right bank of the Seine, and he was, when Richard reached Lisieux, blockading Verneuil, the key to the left bank; and he already held a crest of border castles spearheading between Gisors and Verneuil upon the capital of Normandy itself. Verneuil, under siege since the 10th of May, if lost, would put Rouen and the whole course of the lower Seine in jeopardy.

Richard arrived in Normandy at the eleventh hour, but his whole being stirred at the prospect of coming at last to grips with the archconspirator against his life and empire and of wreaking his own vengeance on the traitor. Without mercy for human endurance nor for horseflesh, he pressed on from his meeting with John in Lisieux, covering the leagues to Verneuil in three prodigious stages. On the 28th of May he came in sight of the plateau above the Eure, where the fortresses set there long before by Henry Beauclerc were holding out desperately against the French blockade.

Philip had not the same ardor to meet in combat the prince of chivalry whom he had wronged beyond the hope of mercy. He knew that he too was worth a ransom. A sound instinct warned him not to expose his person on the marches. On hearing of Richard's approach he put some leagues between himself and the frontier, abandoning engines and supplies in the field. On the 28th the garrison of Verneuil opened its gates to Richard. The Normans defending the fortress, who had been exposed not only to assault but to bribes and treachery and the rumors of the king's death, "embraced each other." says the chronicler, "with tears of joy," for they knew that if the Franks could not take Verneuil, Normandy was redeemed. From Verneuil Richard passed swiftly to the relief of Vaudreuil, near the tip of Philip's penetration toward Rouen.

Then, "swift as a Balearic sling,"
²⁰
the king turned southward to the valley of the Loire to recover the castles surrendered by John during the captivity, and the strongholds of Loches and Chateaudun, which he himself had yielded under duress. Moving with incredible speed, Coeur-de-Lion overtook the intercepting forces of Philip near Fréteval and drove them back so sharply that their withdrawal became a rout.
²¹
Again the Capetian showed no desire to meet his foe on the field of battle.
²²
Near Vendome he was forced to abandon not only his engines but his chapel and his treasury. While Guillaume le Maréchal engaged the Frankish rear and gathered in abundant loot, Richard and Mercadier pursued Philip himself in headlong flight toward the marches of the Ile Dieu Donné, cut off from his forces and with his archenemy at his heels, turned into a side road and took sanctuary in a church, so that Richard lost wind of him and rode by furiously, only to find, when he had galloped leagues beyond the turning, that he had missed his quarry far in the rear. Among the spoils gathered in by Guillaume in the backward areas of the rout were the charters of the particular Breton, Angevin, and Poitevin barons who had pledged their allegiance to the Franks. The capture, while it gave abundant evidence of John's recent collusions with Philip and revealed the Plantagenets' domains honeycombed with treason, also unmasked the traitors singly and severally for vengeance. Thence Richard turned to Aquitaine. The absence of Eleanor from her provinces since 1192 had left her vassals, in spite of the rigors of her seneschals, a measure of freedom for their seditious plans. For the time being they forgot their internecine feuds to combine against Richard, whose ferocity before crusade they vividly remembered. The Count of Angoul
ệ
me, whose vast domains cut across the ducal highway between Bordeaux and Poitiers, and the great seigneur, Geoff
roi de Rancon, whose castles marked the valley of the Charente, merged their rancors against Coeur de Lion and trusted to widespread confusions to right their own grievances. Raymond of Toulouse, the weather vane, bestirred himself to settle old scores with the house of Poitou. And all these smoldering hostilities were blown into flame by the rousing
sirventés
of Bertran de Born and Philip's timely proffers of assistance.

When Richard came to Poitou, he came home, and this time he came to finish what he had left undone on leaving for crusade. He and Mercadier knew the fortresses of the rebels inside and out, their sites and their defenses, every access, every cranny Coeur-de-Lion had learned his first lessons in the use of military engines in assaults on their ramparts and had sharpened his sword time and again on their barred gates. In the month of July he fell upon the traitor strongholds with a fury and spread desolation far and wide. Within three weeks he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury:

"Know that, by the grace of God, who in all things has consideration of the right, we have taken… all the castles and the whole territory of Geoffroi de Ranfon, as well as the city of Angoulême and all the territories of the viscount. The city and the borough of Angoulême we took in a single evening; and we have taken full three hundred knights and forty thousand armed men."
²⁴

The foremost cavalier of Europe had emerged from captivity with no diminution of his valor. In the first contest for the great stakes, Coeur-de-Lion had won every round and driven his foe within his own borders. It was ten weeks since he had left England. Says Diceto, "From Verneuil to the Pyrenees not a rebel showed himself to the King of the English."

But the conflict was nowhere decisive nor could any conclusion be foreseen. New excursions and reprisals devastated the marches. The razing and burning of strongholds continued in many localities as the tide ebbed and flowed. In the chronicles that record events in Normandy, where Philip made his strongest thrusts, place names crowd the pages as great border castles fell, were recovered, and fell again.

Both church and vassalage viewed with dire dismay the progress of a catastrophic struggle that had already wasted the mighty effort of crusade and threatened to prevent its resumption. The turbulent first years of Richard's reign and the colossal perfidies that had issued from events had brought the feudal lords of the Angevin domains a dangerous insecurity. The plots hatched during Coeur-de-Lion's captivity betokened an early onset of something more unsettling than the perennial struggle for local advantage or the rectification of frontiers. Richard's spectacular recovery of prestige in his first campaigns restored a temporary outward confidence among his liege men, but the times invited anarchy and imposed a fear on those among them who understood the unresolved personal rancor that divided the kings. Uncertainty about the outcome of a renewed struggle gave occasion for intrigue. Insecurity bred treason and treason insecurity. While Richard's successes were still resounding, clergy and march barons on both sides sought by every means to allay the strife. They urged mediation and arbitration, the purchase of disputed march properties, indemnities, the old expedient of uniting scions of the rival dynasties by marriage.

These pressures by the magnates brought the kings or their representatives together at various stages for a series of
pourparlers
. But the "truces" were illusory, for, as one chronicler relates, they merely provided respites for the reaping of harvests and the recuperation of forces on both sides. The atmosphere in which they were invoked reminded the Dean of Saint Paul's of Egypt's darkness in the days of Pharaoh.
²⁶
Now here, now there, the conflict raged anew, and many march barons changed their allegiance as they changed their coats.

*

In all the fortunes of war Eleanor shared with Richard the burden of policy. Though the chroniclers have little to say of her special activities during this period, her whereabouts is known and events occurring within her purview bear the mark of her Poitevin ingenuity. She appears to have left purely military affairs to her competent son and devoted herself to matters that belonged more properly to her natural sphere. She took up her station, as she had so often done for Henry, at a crossway near the heart of the Angevin empire whither access was convenient from all directions and whence she could bend her eye and ear over a wide circuit and root out sedition within her radius. The court of Poitiers had long since dispersed. It had never revived as a center of civility after Henry's purge of 1174. The pomps of chivalry were effaced by war. The queen began to realize her age. She needed release from the distractions of a great chatelaine; comfort rather than pomp, escape from trivialities, freedom to come and go. She set up her unostentatious chancellery in Fontevrault. Here she could barricade herself in the inviolable cloisters from the rabble of hangers on that swarmed wherever she fixed her residence, deny herself to troublesome visitors, have rest when she needed it, and all this without losing grasp of what was afoot in the provinces.

The domain of the y, where the river Vienne wound in sunny shallows through cultivated fields and vineyards, or darkened in the shade of woodlands, had a mellow and tranquil charm. It was familiar. Within its walls her younger children had been secluded from the too stimulating air of the Poitevin court in those gorgeous days when the Countess of Champagne had presided over it. The Princesses Eleanor and Joanna and lack-land John had been nurtured there for their high royal callings. In the nuns' choir in the crypt, great Henry, with his rough hands folded on his breast, slept amidst the sweet odors of sanctity. There was plenty of agreeable society (although perhaps too prone to reminiscence) among the superfluity of royal ladies washed up in this refuge from the corners of feudal creation; and there was abundance of news to be had from those hooded brethren who plied the thoroughfares north, south, east, and west, and from the assorted wayfarers who beat a perpetual tattoo upon the gates. No site could have been more admirable as a listening post. Fronting the disorders in Anjou and the intrigues in Brittany, the queen could keep the eye in the back of her head upon Poitou.

In the comparative quiet of the abby Eleanor seems to have given her attention to unraveling the matrimonial perplexities of the Plantagenets in the best interest of the dynasty and of a peace, which she had come above all to desire. The problems, which were very individual, centered especially in Berengaria, the widowed Joanna, and Alais Capet, the latter still awaiting justice long delayed in the tower of Rouen.

The relations of the Plantagenets to Berengaria are not made clear in the chronicles. The associations of Richard and the Princess of Navarre were occasional and of brief duration; yet whenever the royal court assembled the younger queen seems to have enjoyed the respect due to her. The position of Eleanor left but a small office for Berengaria in the palaces of the Plantagenets, eager as they had been to fetch her from Navarre, and richly as they had endowed her. Her failure to provide Richard with an heir left her without a role in destiny. However, Richard was in any case too restless and too incessantly at war for life in residential seats. Even more vagrant than Henry, he lived in the saddle and on the field in ceaseless movement and activity. Though reared in the Countess of Champagne's school of manners in Poitiers and bred to its punctilious observances, he was no captive in the courts of love. His vassals complained that, in order to build castles, he had forgotten gallantry and forsaken courts and tournaments.
²⁷
His delights were in hardy exercise; his "parloir" his barracks; his poetry, not the languishments of Ventadour, but the rousing
sirventés
of Bertran de Born. It is also possible that Berengaria, who had been gently bred, had had enough of shipwreck and
chevauchée
in the course of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land to desire again the life of a camp follower. Though apparently upon fair terms with Eleanor, who had certainly usurped her function, she seems to have kept mainly to her own dower properties in Maine, but without establishing a court of resort for herself or Richard.