Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (19 page)

Meanwhile the queen mother wrote terrible letters to the pope, drafted by that eloquent stylist, Peter of Blois. She complained furiously that the arrest of her son had violated the ‘Truce of God’, the hallowed convention that crusaders were free to come and go as they liked. She accused the pontiff of doing nothing to help when ‘the kings and princes of this earth have conspired against my son, the Lord’s annointed’. Richard ‘is held in chains while another lays waste his lands … and all this while the sword of Peter stays in its scabbard’. She bemoans the young king and Geoffrey of Brittany who ‘sleep in the dust’ while ‘their unhappy mother lives on, tortured by their memory’. In Richard, she continues, ‘I have lost the staff of my age, the light of my eyes’. She even hints that she will bring about a schism and divide Christendom: ‘The fateful moment draws near when the seamless robe of Christ shall be rent again, when St Peter’s yoke shall be broken, when the Church shall be split asunder.’ In one letter she calls herself ‘Eleanor, by the wrath of God, queen of the English’. Despite this alarming correspondence Celestine III, who was now eighty-seven, was too old and timid to take swift action.

Understandably, Philip II and John were delighted by the news of Richard’s misfortune and immediately began to exploit so golden an opportunity. The former seized Gisors and then besieged Rouen where, however, he was successfully defied by Eleanor’s old friend, the earl of Leicester, who sarcastically invited the French king to come in and try his hospitality. But at last Philip had the Vexin. John crossed the Channel and summoned the barons of Normandy to meet him at Alençon and acknowledge him as his brother’s heir. The summons fell on deaf ears, so he went to Paris, where he offered to do homage as duke of Normandy and duke of Aquitaine, and even as king of England, to confirm the surrender of the Vexin, and to divorce his wife and marry the unfortunate Alice of France. He then went back to England with an army of mercenaries, where he garrisoned Windsor and Wallingford, tried to occupy various other royal strongholds, and attempted to persuade the English barons to join him: he put it about that Richard would never return.

Eleanor’s reaction to John’s plotting was what one might expect from so shrewd a mother and so sophisticated a politician. Instead of confronting her youngest son, she simply out-manoeuvred him. She and the justiciars called out the English
fyrd
(home-guard). In the words of the chronicler: ‘On the orders of queen Eleanor, who was then ruling England, in Passion week, at Easter and later, nobles and commons, knights and serfs, took up arms to guard the sea coast that faces Flanders.’ Most of John’s mercenaries were arrested as soon as they landed, and put in irons. John himself and a small party managed to reach England in secret and engaged a band of Welsh mercenaries. He and his supporters then established themselves at Windsor and at Wallingford. The queen’s men at once besieged John in Windsor castle, besides investing all his other strongholds. Yet he might one day succeed to the throne after all, and Eleanor may have detected a certain nervousness in the English magnates. John held out stubbornly. Everything depended on how soon Richard would return to his kingdom.

In the meantime the two abbots had found Richard, in mid-March 1193, as he was being taken under escort to a new place of imprisonment on the Rhine. He cannot have been an easy prisoner: his chief relaxations were playing unpleasant practical jokes on his gaolers and trying to make them drunk. On 23 March the English king appeared before the imperial diet at Speier to defend himself against a variety of specious charges, after which he publicly exchanged the kiss of peace with the emperor. Henry was under strong pressure from the Welf (or anti-Hohenstaufen) magnates, who admired Richard, and also from pope Celestine, who had excommunicated duke Leopold for having violated the ‘Truce of God’ in seizing a crusader. The emperor was not going to overplay his hand, and he needed money badly. He was much too subtle to ill-treat or torture Richard in order to make him agree to a ransom: that would merely damage imperial prestige. Instead Henry simply threatened to hand him over to Philip of France.

On 20 April Hubert Walter at last returned to England. He had been in Sicily on his way home from the Holy Land when he heard of the king’s arrest and had immediately gone to Germany to look for him. Having found Richard, he returned to his native land, bringing a depressing message from the king to the effect that to obtain his freedom he was probably going to need a ransom of 100,000 marks, though there was no guarantee that he would be set free on payment.

Then followed a letter from Richard, dated 19 April and addressed to ‘his dearest mother Eleanor, queen of England, and his justiciars and all his faithful men in England’, to say that William Longchamp — of all unlikely people — had persuaded the emperor to agree to see Richard at Hagenau after Hubert Walter’s departure, and that king and emperor had made ‘a mutual and indissoluble treaty of love’. Among other clauses this treaty stipulated that Richard was to pay a ransom of 100,000 marks and to provide military assistance for Henry’s forthcoming campaign against Tancred of Sicily. The king asked his subjects to be generous in subscribing to the ransom and ordered some highly practical measures to be implemented. All Church plate of any value was to be impounded; every baron was to give hostages for his share, who would be under Eleanor’s care before being sent to Germany; a register of the magnates’ contributions was to be forwarded to Richard so that he might learn ‘by what exact amount we are indebted to each one’. Significantly all monies were to be entrusted to the queen mother or to those nominated by her.

Eleanor and the two justiciars at once set about raising the ransom. It was a daunting task. The exorbitant sum mentioned in Richard’s letter was confirmed in a ‘golden bull’ given by the emperor in person to William Longchamp, who in turn presented it to the great council of England when it met at St Albans in the first days of June 1193. Since April Eleanor had been trying to find the money, and by now she must have known that it would not be easy, because Richard had already bled the country white in financing his crusade. At the council she hopefully appointed officers to superintend the operation, and issued decrees for new taxes; these included one quarter of the yearly income of every man whether lay or cleric, a fee of twenty shillings — a vast amount for the period — from every knight, and, just as the king had ordered, the gold and silver plate from every church and abbey in the land; the Cistercian monks, the Gilbertine canons and the white canons, who possessed neither gold nor silver but owned enormous flocks of sheep, were to donate a whole year’s wool-clip. Normandy and the other Angevin lands across the Channel were also burdened with these draconian levies. By Michaelmas, waggons were trundling down the muddy roads to London, laden with treasure that was to be placed in coffers at St Paul’s cathedral under the seals of the queen mother and the chief justiciar.

In the event far less money was raised than the queen and the council had expected. Many people evaded the taxes or simply refused to pay them; abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds threatened officials with the saint’s curse if they dared to plunder his shrine. Despite the ruthlessness of the tax collectors a second levy and then a third had to be imposed. There was a good deal of administrative confusion; the money was not handled by the Exchequer, and the government had no clear idea of how much the new taxes and levies would bring in, so the collectors’ accounts could not be audited properly. According to William of Newburgh, the collectors stole most of the money. It also seems that the actual tax-payers had few scruples about under-valuing their own resources.

Among those who exploited the confusion over taxes was count John, who levied them mercilessly in his own lands and estates and kept the money for himself. He still hoped that his brother would never return. However, early in July 1193 Philip of France received news that, because of fresh negotiations between the emperor and Richard, it seemed likely that the latter would be released before the end of the year. He immediately sent a warning to John: ‘The devil has been let loose.’ Terrified, the count slipped out of Windsor and fled from England to join Philip in Normandy. But even then John did not abandon all expectation of profiting in some way from his brother’s captivity. He made a fresh alliance with the French king, offering him eastern Normandy and eastern Touraine if he would install him in Richard’s possessions on the French side of the Channel; he also sent word to his supporters in England, ordering them to rise in revolt as soon as they heard that the French had invaded Normandy. However, Eleanor was ready. She had no trouble in persuading the great council to confiscate all John’s English lands and to besiege his strongholds with more vigour than hitherto. Normandy proved equally loyal.

William Longchamp, the ousted chancellor and justiciar, had been causing the queen mother some concern. When he returned to England to deliver the emperor’s bull and Richard’s commands, he obviously had high hopes of re-establishing himself. But the bishops would not lift their excommunication, and London refused to admit him and barred its gates. At St Albans the great council treated him with public disdain and accepted the bull and the king’s commands from him only after making him swear that he came simply as a bishop and a messenger, ‘not as a justiciar, not as a legate, not as a chancellor’. Eleanor — as good a judge as ever of popular feeling — would not obey Richard’s order that the young hostages be entrusted to Longchamp to take to Germany, and refused to hand over her grandson, thus enabling the magnates to disobey the king’s command; they inferred that the man was a voracious homosexual, stating, ‘We might put our daughters in his care, but never our sons’. It is probable that the queen mother complained about Longchamp to Richard, who soon recalled him.

The new negotiations between the emperor Henry and Richard that had so alarmed John and king Philip had taken place at Worms at the end of June 1193. After four days of wrangling, Henry and Richard reached a fresh agreement: the English king would be released on payment of 100,000 marks of the ransom money (the total was raised to 150,000 marks, 50,000 of this being instead of taking part in the expedition against Tancred of Sicily), and on receipt of 200 noble hostages as a guarantee for the remainder; the former ‘emperor of Cyprus’, still in his silver chains, was to be handed over to Henry; and Eleanor of Brittany, the daughter of Richard’s brother Geoffrey, was to be betrothed to duke Leopold of Austria, the man who had captured Richard. When the imperial envoys came to London in October, Eleanor was able to show them that the necessary 100,000 silver marks were ready for shipment — thirty-five tons of precious metal.

Richard, understandably anxious that nothing should go wrong, sent orders that the queen mother should personally accompany the silver on its way to Germany. A fleet of vessels assembled at the Suffolk ports of Dunwich, Ipswich and Orford. It is very likely that Eleanor spent a night or two in the beautiful little castle at Orford; built by her husband in the 1170s, when it was the latest thing in military design, this elegant polygonal keep is one of the very few buildings in England that she would still recognize were she to return today. Accompanied by her faithful archbishop of Rouen, Walter of Coutances, by other great magnates (including William Longchamp), and by the 200 young hostages, Eleanor set sail with the treasure in December. Her fleet was packed with soldiers in case pirates should try to intercept so alluring a cargo. England was left in the capable hands of its new justiciar, Hubert Walter.

Despite the winter the queen mother seems to have had a smooth crossing. Once across the North Sea, she continued her journey by road and then up the river Rhine to join her son at Speier. Here she was to have celebrated the feast of the Epiphany (6 January) with him. But in the meantime the emperor Henry had postponed the date for Richard’s release — originally intended to have been 17 January 1194 — and was threatening to repudiate the precarious agreement between them. The exact reasons why Henry changed his mind will never be known. The most likely explanation is that it was because king Philip and count John were offering him a further 100,000 marks in silver if he would keep Richard in captivity until next Michaelmas, by which time they hoped to have partitioned his lands between them. Henry, who may have possessed a sense of humour, showed John’s letter to Richard.

It must have been a cruel disappointment for Eleanor after her long journey in the depths of winter. She had not seen her favourite son since that short meeting in Sicily in the spring of 1191. But she quickly ended the deadlock in negotiations, with an inspired suggestion that showed all her skill as a diplomatist.

Plainly the emperor Henry, notoriously avaricious, had been strongly tempted by the prospect of more money from Philip and John. Indeed the latter was certain that the emperor would accept the offer and actually sent an agent to England to order his castellans to prepare for war. Henry, however, was alarmed at the outrage expressed by the princes of the empire; the king’s imprisonment had been relaxed and he had employed his liberty to make useful friends among the Germans. Richard’s charm and elegance had a considerable effect on the princes, who were already deeply impressed by his exploits in the Holy Land. (Probably he had even then begun to be known as ‘the Lion-heart’, although it is unlikely that the legend of his tearing out with his bare hands the living heart of a lion that attacked him had yet developed.) Moreover Henry knew very well that Philip and John were hardly the most reliable of business partners. Then, in a public debate at Mainz before the princes, the English king aroused still more admiration by his majestic eloquence, calling on them to come to the help of a man who had been seized when on crusade. Many of his hearers shed tears.

The emperor realized that he would be wise to forgo Philip and John’s bribe, but he wanted something else in compensation. To the consternation of the English he demanded that Richard should pay homage to him as his vassal. It was now that Eleanor intervened. Always a realist, she saw that by accepting this humiliating, though in fact meaningless condition, her son could escape. On her advice Richard took off his leather hat and placed it in the emperor Henry’s hands as a sign of vassalage. The Hohenstaufen promptly returned it, stipulating that the English king should pay him a yearly tribute of £5000.