Eleanor Of Aquitaine (58 page)

The most circumstantial account that has been found came to knowledge after the events of 1203 had become history. In the annals of the abby of Margain in far-off Wales, a monk set down in the chronicles of his monastery the story as he had heard it perhaps considerably after the occurrence, from some source now suspected of being Guillaume de Braose or Hubert de Burgh, or some of their followings.
¹⁴
The annal is succinct: "On the day before Good Friday, after dinner, when he was drunk with wine and filled with the devil, he [John] killed him [Arthur] with his own hand and tied a heavy stone to his body and cast it into the Seine, whence it was dragged up in the nets of fishermen and, having been brought to shore, was identified and secretly buried in Notre-Dame des Prés, a priory of Bee, for fear of the tyrant."

The
Philippide
, in which the French king's chaplain celebrates the reign of Philip Augustus, presents the more detailed story that circulated among the Franks, who were more than eager to fix the blackest of crimes upon John himself. The poet, it seems, heard much the same story as that transcribed at Margain. He relates that on the eve of Good Friday in the middle of the night, John sailed up the channel of the Seine in a small boat and, coming to Rouen, drew up at a haven whence, when the tide had somewhat ebbed, he could have access to a postern of the tower in which Arthur was imprisoned. He ordered his nephew to be brought down and, himself standing in the high stern, dragged his victim into the boat and at once made off. Deaf to the wild supplications of the youth, John seized him by the forelock and dispatched him with his Sword and then cast his body, weighted with a great stone, into the Seine. The poet omits the tale of the recovery of the body by the fishermen and of its burial at Notre-Dame des Prés.

Within two weeks of Easter Queen Eleanor and the magnates in her region received in Poitou a messenger from John bearing an oral communication too confidential to be committed to writing, together with a letter which survives. The letter proceeded from Falaise under date of April 1 and was attested by Guillaume de Braose. It conveyed to Eleanor in cryptic language the certain knowledge that her grandson, the "Hope of Brittany," would no more darken the horizon of the Plantagenets :

"The King… to the Lady Queen his mother, the Lord Archbishop of Bordeaux, Robert of Turnham, Seneschal of Poitou, Martin Algais, Seneschal of Gascony and Périgord, Briscius, Seneschal of Anjou, Hubert de Burgh, Chamberlain, brother Peter of Vernolio, William Mangot, and William Cocus, greeting. We send to you brother John of Valernt, who has seen what is going forward with us, and who will be able to apprise you of our situation. Put faith in him respecting those things whereof he will inform you. Nevertheless, the grace of God is even more with us than he can tell you; and concerning the mission which we have made to you, rely upon what the same John shall tell you thereof. And we command you, R. de Turnham, not to distribute the money we have transmitted to you, unless in the presence of our mother and William Cocus. Witness Guillaume de Braose, at Falaise, on the 1 th of April."

Philip Augustus' summons in the name of the Bretons to produce Arthur, accompanied by "ferocious threats" from the barons themselves, made it clear to John that the value of his mystery would be limited. The report that Arthur had really perished must have spread soon after Easter, to judge by the stirrings among them. The strength and cohesion of the baronial revolt had increased from week to week in the preceding months and turned inevitably to Philip for support. John's victory at Mirebeau now drove him to defense. He had all the hostages and all the mystery, but these in the issue availed him little. The captives were too dangerous for release, even for the huge ransoms they were worth, yet to keep them increased the fury of hostility; and the mysterious rumors exposed him to revulsions that spread among his own followers. His forces were scattered for defense against the treachery he suspected everywhere. Because he could not trust his vassals, the king had to rely more and more on hired
routiers
, and these mercenaries had lost their experienced leadership when Mercadier was murdered in Bordeaux. The royal revenue, shallow at his accession, had dwindled through the loss of the Vexin and the defection of the baronage.
¹⁷
He was forced now to negotiate with the great moneylenders of the Continent. He sent magnates to England for levies of men as well as for tithes; he appealed to his nephew Otto, the Holy Roman Emperor, and sent envoys to Innocent in Rome. In the meantime he concentrated what he could of military strength in Anjou in order to prevent his enemies from cutting off Queen Eleanor in Poitou.

*

The French king will destroy the royal race of England as an ox crops the grass at its roots.

Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, 332

John was too late. In his victory at Mirebeau the sacredness of the feudal oath, abjured in so many previous instances, vanished entirely, and with it the solidity that law gives to societies. The empire caved in less from outward pressure than from inner corruption. Anarchy supervened and those individuals saved themselves who could. Defections even in Normandy came fast in the wake of the rumors that spread after Easter. The hammers of war merely finished the work.

On the ninth of April Guillaume des Roches took, almost without a blow, the Angevin castle of Beaufort only a few miles from Fontevrault, where the figures of great Henry and Coeur-de-Lion slept with their crowns on their heads and their scepters in their hands. With this stronghold protecting his right flank, Philip proceeded cautiously down the Loire by boat and took possession of the strategic castle of Saumur, a short distance from Angers. Then, finding the garrison of Chinon offering a stiffening resistance, he struck suddenly northward through Maine and Anjou by way of Beaumont and Alenon. A line of castles covering main routes from the fortresses of the lower Loire to Rouen fell like ripe fruit into his hands. Through the spring and summer Sées, Conches, Le Mans, Falaise, Domfront, Coutances, Bayeux, Lisieux, Caen, Avranches, surrendered one after another, some through defection, some through John's failure to provide for their defense.
¹⁸
In the course of these disasters John sent his noblest magnates, Hubert Walter of Canterbury, Guillaume le Maréchal, and the Earl of Leicester to the French king to negotiate a truce. But Philip, as always in a time of rising fortunes, made catastrophic claims and the envoys came away unable either to accept the terms or to enforce better ones.
¹⁹
Now the denizens of Normandy were subjected to the spectacle that had outraged the western provinces. Captive knights, this time of John's allegiance, bound to their mounts, their faces turned to their horses' tails, were paraded over the roads of the Vexin on their way to the dungeons of the Franks. Heaven, said the chronicler, was imposing retribution at last for the crimes of the Plantagenets.

Philip's triumphant course was halted briefly at Vaudreuil, where only a deep loop of the river and twelve miles of road separated him from Rouen. Here a stout resistance was expected, for Vaudreuil was manned by English defenders. But this bastion of the lower Seine yielded without assault. In August, looking backward toward Paris from this vantage point, Philip cast up his eyes at the cliffs of Château Gaillard, which Coeur-de-Lion had sworn to defend even if its walls were made of butter. The huge bastion hewn in the rock and molded to its contours with heaviest masonry loomed disdainfully upon its height.

Elated as usual by success, Philip took the measure of Gaillard with deliberation.
²⁰
No engines could breach the ramparts of the Rock, which he had sworn nevertheless to take even if its walls were made of iron. The situation of the fortress with all its encircling outworks seemed proof against anything but earthquake. But here was the citadel of Normandy, the true barrier between Paris and Rouen, the lower Seine, the sea. It was worth a king's ransom and had cost Coeur-de-Lion not much less. The King of the Franks set about the difficult business of blockade. He directed his engineers to destroy the outworks that secured access and controlled the waters. They breached the stockade of spiles driven to obstruct the traffic of the river below the fort, demolished the bridges that connected the Rock with the isles of the Seine and the left bank of the river. Pioneers working like ants threw up embankments to isolate the fortress from the landward side. In the fall days Philip set up his vigil below Andelys, prepared, if need were, to outsit the seasons. In the course of the autumn one of his maneuvers drove the dwellers in the town of Petit Andelys into the keep for protection and gave the beleaguered garrison five hundred extra mouths to feed from their irreplaceable stores. These wretched villagers, driven out again by the exigencies of the garrison, were obliged to winter, starving and defenseless, in crannies of the Rock, and many of these hapless refugees were kindred of the defenders of the castle. While Philip's six months' campaign gathered momentum, where was John that he let his Norman fortresses fall one by one into the hands of his enemy? What was he waiting for?

As 1203 drew to its close, the Plantagenet horizons were altogether dark. While the castles of his Angevin inheritance fell to bribes and threats and assaults, John kept closer and closer to Rouen and the port of Barfleur. He made a few onsets to divert Philip from the valley of the Seine and to recoup his losses in the west by a movement at the heart of old military operations in Falaise and Argentan, and by ravaging the borders of Brittany; but Philip let these affairs take their course and kept his eye steadfastly upon the Rock.

When his diversionary maneuvers failed of their object, the Plantagenet took to fitful movements in Normandy controlled by no apparent plan. Even his intimates were sometimes at a loss to account for his flittings,
²¹
or to guess what projects infused him with energy. Like a fugitive with hounds on his trail, he moved furtively from place to place, traveling at unexpected hours, before daybreak, after sundown, over secondary roads, to obscure destinations, changing suddenly his routes and schedules, so that his comings and goings were matters of secret or surprise. Castellans with whom he had lodged for the night woke to find the king had departed without farewell while they thought him still asleep, and was already seven leagues on his way. He shifted his treasure, his charters, his hostages from place to place and changed his castellans with the suddenness of doom. Messenger followed messenger, the second to overlook the first; and his communications were set in codes and signs or cryptic language. Though John was irreligious, he was superstitious, and some of his counselors could account for his devious courses only by suspecting he had resorted to fortunetellers and astrologers
²²
Others guessed him haunted by the specter of Arthur and fear of reprisal for the doom of that young man; by fear of the ancient law, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. When his soberer intimates tried to find a method in his confused operations and besought him to consider some solid means for checking the progress of the Franks, he affected a debonair self confidence that drove his followers to desperation.

"Let me alone," he said. "Let me alone. When the time comes, I will shortly recover all I have lost."

At last in December when little remained but Rouen and the beleaguered Rock and the Norman fringes of the Channel, John bestirred himself; but even his own men were doubtful whether his sudden resolution indicated a genuine purpose to defend his heritage, or merely veiled a flight from the dismal military situation and the treachery that had engulfed him on the Continent. Accompanied by Queen Isabella and a few of his associates, Guillaume le Maréchal, Guillaume de Braose, Robert de Vieuxpont, and others, he sailed from Barfleur. From Portsmouth he set about a tour of his master castles, and visited Winchester and the Tower of London on pretext of obtaining men and money to recover the Angevin empire from the marauding Capets and the faithless baronage.

But the English, without ignoring the perils of his situation, had suffered enough for the unprosperous Plantagenets, whose proverbial Angevin luck seemed, with Henry's death, to have forsaken them. They reviewed the crusade, the ransom, the cost of fortifying and defending the continental empire of their kings, the pressure of new levies to redeem Lackland's vanishing fortunes and his debts. The seeds of Runnymede and Magna Carta were burgeoning in their minds. What had their poured out treasure of men and gold profited them? Why pour more into the fathomless pit of his calamities? They had had enough of John's faithlessness, his capaciousness, his tall talk, his reckless passions. The horrible betrayal of the captives in Corfe Castle on their own shores, without regard for the feudal custom respecting hostages, had spread abroad; and the sinister rumors regarding Arthur's disappearance led all sorts of men to look askance at John. Clergy and other pious folk did not overlook his persistent rejection of communion nor his cynical disregard for other holy sacraments. Tongues were emboldened to voice their discontent by the vast numbers of the king's enemies. Even the English barons with estates in Normandy, when all was weighed in the balance, had a better prospect of prosperity as vassals of Philip Capet than of John, since Philip at least kept war from his own borders and managed his affairs more thriftily. As John prolonged his stay in Britain for months, many desired to know why the Duke of Normandy did not go with those transmarine forces, whose business it was, to the defense of his marches and his sorely beset castellans, instead of living softly with Isabella in strongholds safely remote from the catastrophe.

This is the worm that dieth not, the memory of things past

Bernard of Clairvaux, De Consideratione

IN THOSE DAYS WHEN the foreshadow of some new order in the world was dimly taking shape in the minds of men, and the appeal to "ancient custom" was giving place to new sanctions, the Britons took account of the worsening of their lot since the steady, if heavy, hand of Henry Fitz Empress had been withdrawn. What demon had entered into the race of the Angevins? The prestige of Queen Eleanor suffered in the general distrust of transmarine ties. She had doubled the Angevin empire for Henry and enriched his house with a brilliant posterity; and when he had gone, she had defended his empire with a political sagacity that had brought the highest magnates to her counsels and earned for her the trust and confidence of popes and emperors and kings. But now she became an object of calumny. Clerks, like Giraldus Cambrensis, with rancors of their own to appease, asked to know what could be expected of the brood of the "eagle of the broken pledge," of the Poitevin who had renounced the pious King of the Franks for the Angevin king and abandoned one crown for another. Hugh of Lincoln, that disciple of Saint Bernard, held that her marriage with Henry was "adulterous" and the Angevin eaglets "spurious."
¹
Although throughout her long history as Queen of England, no breath of scandal had touched her good fame, the old legends the Franks had used in the mid century to discredit her — legends discreetly suppressed in Henry's day — were brought out of limbo and refurbished and bequeathed to balladeers, who used them to season broadsides and chapbooks down to the seventeenth century. The impossible story of Eleanor's murder of Rosamond Clifford got its vogue and passed into folklore, and has never ceased to serve to her disparagement as theme for opera, romance, and poetry.

After Mirebeau Eleanor had withdrawn from the habitations of kings to her own ancestral provinces, to places familiar before she had dwelt with Louis Capet or Henry Plantagenet. She left the roar of hopeless war behind. She could no longer lead armies in the field, collect ransoms, scale mountain barriers, or deal with magnates or envoys in the interest of empire. In Poitiers she was safe among the loyal citizens of her own capital. Like Henry at the last, she was obliged to put off vainglory and echo his words, "Let all things go as they will. I care no more for aught of this world."

The eternal aspect of her earth, unchanged by all the ravages of conflict, must have renewed its patient poetry and solace. Beyond the rivers that moated the ancient high place of the Poitevin counts the land ebbed away, nursing on its bosom here a hamlet, there a mill, yonder a priory. The immemorial toil of ox and colon went forward in the field, and the tireless magpie skimmed the furrow. The chestnuts bloomed again. In the busy commune all about the palace were heard the creak of wheels, the slithering of horses' hoofs upon the cobblestones, the drumming of hammers, the rasp of the stonecutter's adz, the voices of housewives, and the cries of children; and over all the other sounds the dissolving resonance of bells — the bells of Saint Pierre, Saint Radigonde, Saint Porchaire, and Notre Dame la Grande, proclaiming the office and the calendar of the everlasting church.

The great assembly hall where the duchess once held her courts of love is now used as an antechamber to justice and is known as the "hall of lost footsteps"
(la salle des pas perdus)
. Already in the queen's day it thronged with ghosts, some of whose footfalls had died away in the long past: the ribald, philandering, musical troubadour, her grandfather, with his huge laughter and his inimitable travesties; the gay Countess of Châtellerault; her father, fire-eating Guillaume le Toulousam, of the gorgeous appetite and the reckless imbroglios; Louis Capet, young, wilted with the summer heat, and plainly dazed by his confusing role as king, bridegroom, count of the Poitevins; the lovely Countesses of Champagne and Flanders ushering in the areopagus of the courts of love, the marriage prizes of the south; André the Chaplain with his choir of poets and his corps of clerks polishing the peerless
Tractatus de Amore;
the troubadours of the Limousin and the valleys of Provence — Ventadour, Rudel, Vidal, and many more; Guillaume le Maréchal, brave and loyal, leading in her sons triumphant from the jousting fields, the beautiful young king, gallant Coeur-de-Lion, the clever Count of Brittany, with their households of
preux chevaliers
, their hair smoothed down with sweet-smelling unguents and their nostrils shaven; Marguerite and Alais of France, Constance of Brittany, Joanna of Sicily, and Eleanor of Castile; Thomas Becket, with the tall figure and the burning eyes… Thomas the Chancellor… Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury… Saint Thomas… Thomas Martyr! The grim figure of Henry Fitz-Empress on the threshold of her palace hall; the awful ghost of Falaise and Rouen, his spectral eyes still stricken with a horror that was mortal; the ghastly Channel crossings to and from the foggy island on the edges of the world. Salisbury Tower. This is the worm that dieth not, the memory of things past.

Tableaux from remoter times must have taken semblance and fled away, dismembered and recombined, strange interminglings of feudal palaces at the crossroads of Christendom, and of personages that made the century glow. Paris, the Ile de la Cité moored like a barge in the Seine, teeming with students and clamorous with bells, stirred now by the love songs, now by the fulminations of Abélard, now by the subtle discourse of Abbé Bernard… Saint Bernard, "that well of flowing doctrine"; wise and temperate Abbé Suger; the Counts of Champagne; Petronilla and the one-eyed Count of Vermandois; nights on the Danube below Durrenstem; Byzantium crowned by the domes of Sancta Sophia set between the sweet and bitter waters of the West and East; sleek and crafty Manuel and his dowdy German empress, who had not learned, even in Byzantium, how to lay on her fards… The horrible geography of Paphlagonia, the unspeakable Turks; Antioch the glorious, the lilies of the field, the latter rains; Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulcher, the tottering dynasty of the Latin Kingdom, the stony pilgrim roads of Palestine… the pirates of Barbary, Pope Eugemus in Tusculum.

"This life," says the chronicler, "is but a journey and a warfare."
²
In the day of every man's pilgrimage to holy shrines, the metaphor had special meaning. The duchess' long road, beset with every kind of accident and every sort of weather, had brought her home at last, but in a night of storm. Had she chosen the saints of her devotion, her route and destination, or had she been driven by the press of throngs and the waywardness of storm to unforeseen harborages, to havens not even on the map? Had Fate been capricious, or had she?

Above the Loire the masonry of Henry's empire, which she had helped to build and fortify, slid down under the blows of Philip Capet, Dieu Donné, whom, according to Giraldus, heaven had sent in answer to the prayers of Louis and the Cistercian brotherhood to be "a hammer to the King of the English"; and not an Angevin stirred among the smoking rubble of its towns to retrieve the inheritance of his forebears. Only the echo of crashing ramparts reached her as one fortress after another from Rouen to Saint Michael-in-Peril of the-Sea fell to the son of Louis Capet. She did not live to hear of Bouvines or Runnymede; perhaps even the news of the surrender of Gaillard fell on deaf ears. But it was as if the messenger reporting the loss of that master fortress of the Angevins brought her summons too. On the sixth of March the castle hung out its white flag. Barely three weeks later the queen "passed from the world." "as a candle in the sconce goeth out when the wind striketh it." She was in her eighty-third year. Chroniclers are not even agreed about the place in which she died. The chronicle of Saint Aubin of Angers declares she ended her days in her own capital; but others say she was taken at the last to Fontevrault, where she put on the garb of a nun before closing her eyes.

In the terror and dismay that swept over the heritage of Henry, her death was hardly noticed. The nuns of Fontevrault, who knew her through many stages of her journey, gave her a paragraph in their necrology:

She enhanced the grandeur of her birth by the honesty of her life, the purity of her morals, the flower of her virtues; and in the conduct of her blameless life, she surpassed almost all the queens of the world.

Matthew Paris ventures to say, "In this year the noble Queen Eleanor, a woman of admirable beauty and intelligence, died in Fontevrault."

But among the discreet chroniclers, whose records were subject to review by the clerks of various kings, the inscription is noncommittal and meagerly informative about Eleanor of Aquitaine and the four kings. Scanning a dozen entries yields no more than this: Anno 1204. In this year died Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, who was divorced from the French king by reason of consanguinity, and then married Henry Fitz-Empress, and was the mother of Richard, called the Lion-Heart, and of John, who in turn succeeded him.

The queen's cortege brought her at any rate to Fontevrault, and her tomb was erected in the crypt. The nunnery had become, as Merlin was believed to have prophesied, the necropolis of the Angevins. The tombs, all crowned with effigies, were disturbed during the French Revolution, but were subsequently replaced in the choir in new array, all of them damaged in detail by the ravages of time and war. The queen now reposes between Henry Fitz-Empress and Richard Coeur-de-Lion, whose scepters and crowned heads are epitaph enough. Nearby rest Joanna and Isabella of Angoulême. Here Eleanor lies serene, the play of a smile in her whole expression, in her hand a small volume, which one of her apologists has said need not be regarded as a missal. Tranquil, collected, engaged with her book, the queen seems to have found at last, beyond the wrath of kings and the ruin of the Angevin empire, that domain of peace and order to which her vast journeyings amongst the high places of feudal Christendom had never brought her. The highhearted Plantagenets are marble still. The dusty sunlight falls softly where they sleep.

1204 In hoc anno obiit Alianor
.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1: THE RICH DOWER

1.
Ch St D
, 195.

2. Sug,
Vie L. VI
, 127;
Ch Eg
, 432.

3. G de V,
HGF
XII, 435.

4. Sug,
Vie L. VI
, 128.

5. Sug,
Vie L. VI
, 58-59.

6. Sug,
Vie L. VI
, 121—22.

7. Sug,
Vie L. VI
, 128.

8.
Ch M
, 83.

9. G de V, HGF XII, 435. 10.
       
    10. R of Dic, II, 292.
     11.
PL
141:8.

12.
Ch Eg
, 373.

13. Wm of M, II, 510.

14. G de V,
HGF
XII, 434-35.

15.
G le M
, III, 28.

16. Sug,
Vic L. VI
, 129.

17.
Ch M
, 83-84.

18. Sug,
Vie L. VI
, 129.

19.
Ch T
, 134.

20. OV, IV, 182.

21. Sug,
Vic L. VI
, 129.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2: O PARIS!

1. For the configuration of Paris, see Halphen, 5-100; Po
ẽ
te, chap. IX.

2. Guy de Bazoches,
Éloge de Paris
, tr. Helen Waddeil.

3. J de V, cited Rashdall, II, 691.

4. G le B,
Gestis P.A
., 82.

5. Berthaud, 55.

6. Pierre de la Celle,
PL
202:519.

7. J of S,
PL
199:113.

8. Stephen of Paris, 89.

9. Ab,
Hist Cal
, 15.

10. Héloise to Abèlard,
PL
178:185.

11. Sug,
Vic L. VII
, 150.

12. Richard, II, 67, citing Lair,
Bibl. de l'école des Chartres
, XXXIV (1873), 591.

13. Sug,
Vic L. VII
, 151.

14. Ab,
Hist Cal
, II.

15. Ab,
Sic et Non
, I339ff.

16. Bern,
Vita Prima
, 305.

17. Bern,
Vita Prima
, 246.

18. Bern,
Vita Prima
, 327;
Vita Teitia
, 527.

19. Bern,
Epist
, 386.

20. Bern,
Epist
, 540; Berengarius of Poitiers,
PL
178:1861.

21. Bern,
Epist
, 281.

22. Bern,
Vita Secunda
, 505.

23. Adapted from Bern,
Epist
, 257-259 (epistle cxiii).

24. Bern,
Epist
, 286.

25.
Ch M
, 87;
Hist Fr
, 116.

26. Sigebert, appen ,331.

27.
Hist Fr
, 116.

28.
Hist Tr
, 116.

29. Bern,
Epist
, 385.

30. Gervaise,
Hist Suger
, III, 94.

31. Bern,
Epist
, 191.

32. Panofsky, 64-67.

33. Gervaise,
Hist Suger
, III, 98.

34. Gervaise,
Hist Suger
, III, 96.

35. Frag.
Vita S. Bernardt, PL
185:332, 527.