She Wolves (14 page)

Eleanor must have eagerly awaited Richard’s return to England in order to put an end to John’s pretensions. However, in January 1193, the devastating news reached England that Richard had been captured on his way home from the crusade. Eleanor immediately dispatched the Abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge to the Germanic states to find out where Richard was being held.
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From them, Eleanor learnt that Richard had been captured by the Duke of Austria and handed over to the Emperor Henry VI. Eleanor called a council at St Albans in June 1193 to discuss the terms of Richard’s release and to appoint officers to collect the ransom demanded by the emperor. She threw herself into securing Richard’s release and personally selected 200 hostages from amongst the nobility to be sent to the Germanic states.
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Eleanor also wrote two remarkable letters to the Pope, begging for his aid and expressing her grief. The first began:

The second letter continues on the same theme of grief and touched upon Eleanor’s dead sons:

These letters show more about Eleanor’s character than any other. They demonstrate her passionate nature and the great grief she felt. Even by the 1190s, Eleanor had outlived her generation and many of the younger generation. These letters show clearly that she keenly felt her age and the losses which time had inflicted on her. They also show her as a very effective propagandist.

Despite her pleas, Eleanor received little help from the Pope. Nonetheless by 1194 the ransom was raised and Eleanor and the Archbishop of Rouen were summoned by the emperor to bring the ransom to Speyer.
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Eleanor’s hopes of seeing Richard again were dashed, however, on 17 January when the emperor announced that he had received an alternative offer from King Philip Augustus of France and John to keep Richard in prison. It took all her negotiating skill to secure Richard’s release later that month by convincing Richard to declare himself the emperor’s vassal. She then returned in triumph with Richard to England where he was ceremonially recrowned at Winchester.

Soon after the coronation, Eleanor and Richard crossed to Normandy where Eleanor engineered a reconciliation between Richard and John. Eleanor must have felt pleased about the work she had done for her sons but she began to feel her age around this time. Soon after the reconciliation she retired to the Abbey of Fontrevault where she must have hoped to live quietly until her death. Eleanor rarely appears in sources between 1194 and 1199 and appears to have lived a secluded religious life.

She did not, however, cut herself off totally from the world and was ready for action in April 1199 when she received word that Richard was lying dangerously wounded at Chalus. Eleanor travelled day and night to be with him but he was beyond help when she arrived. He died in her arms on 6 April 1199, having named John as his heir.
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Despite the deep grief she must have felt, Eleanor immediately threw herself into securing the throne for John. The succession was disputed between John and her grandson Arthur, son of her dead son Geoffrey of Brittany. Eleanor was acting as John’s chief advisor in 1199 and advised him to go at once to Chinon to secure the royal treasury before meeting with her at Niort. John then crossed to England to be crowned whilst Eleanor toured her lands in Aquitaine to ensure their support for John. In mid-June she even travelled to Tours where she did homage to Philip Augustus for Aquitaine in order to ensure that Arthur could have no claim to the duchy.

Soon after the Christmas of 1199, John and Philip met to discuss a truce. It was agreed that in order to secure the truce, John would supply a bride for Philip’s son. Eleanor therefore set out on the long journey to Castile to select one of her daughter Eleanor, Queen of Castile’s, daughters. There she spent several months, no doubt reacquainting herself with her daughter and meeting her grandchildren, before selecting the youngest daughter, Blanche. Eleanor and Blanche then began to journey to Normandy, parting company when Eleanor unexpectedly decided to return to Fontevrault. It seems likely that Eleanor, at the age of seventy-eight, had begun to feel the effects of an arduous journey and could go no further. Blanche continued to Normandy where she was met by her uncle, King John, and married to the dauphin of France.
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Eleanor must have been pleased with the work she had done in securing her and Henry’s empire for their last surviving son.

Eleanor’s story does not end with her second retirement, however. Arthur of Brittany still posed a major threat to John and must have been a source of worry to his grandmother. In May 1202 Eleanor decided to travel to Poitiers to help John in his war against Arthur. When Arthur learnt that his grandmother had left Fontevrault, he immediately set out in pursuit in an attempt to capture her and Eleanor found herself besieged in the flimsy castle of Mirebeau.
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Eleanor sent an urgent message to John at Le Mans before trying to delay Arthur with attempts at negotiation. This tactic had limited effect however and by the time John arrived Eleanor was trapped in the keep with the rest of the castle occupied by Arthur’s men. John had force marched the eighty miles from Le Mans and caught Arthur by surprise. He swept into Mirebeau and won his only victory on the continent, rescuing his mother and taking Arthur prisoner.
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Eleanor must have been relieved to see John and seems to have gladly returned to her retirement at Fontrevault. She is unlikely to have been sympathetic about the fate of Arthur following his attack on her at Mirebeau. He disappeared into John’s dungeons and was probably murdered soon afterwards.
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Eleanor never emerged from her third period of retirement at Fontevrault. At some point in 1204 she slipped into a coma and died on 1 April 1204, aged eighty-two.
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Her death meant John lost his most able advisor and it must have been painful for Eleanor to watch him gradually lose the Angevin empire from her retirement at Fontevrault.

She died at an ancient age by the standards of the time and she may have reflected, in the end, that she would be remembered as a great queen. Certainly, Eleanor of Aquitaine was a powerful and influential queen and brought much to the role. However, she did not always conform to the behaviour expected of a queen and, as such, has a somewhat ambiguous reputation.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was a legend in her own lifetime and her story is still of immense interest to readers today. But Eleanor has never been universally admired. To medieval writers, she was a woman who interfered in politics when they did not concern her. The fact that she was the ruler of an independent state which was larger than the country ruled by her first husband was immaterial to her contemporaries. As a married woman, it was for her husband to rule her lands and for Eleanor to placidly obey and bear children. In her refusal to do this, Eleanor attracted unwelcome attention from the male chroniclers; influential churchmen, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, were no friends to her. As a powerful and independent woman, Eleanor was a threat to male rule, just as her first threats of divorce to Louis directly threatened his dignity and kingship. To her contemporaries, Eleanor was an oddity and they could easily believe that she was an adulteress and disloyal wife with ambitious and unwomanly characteristics. Like her mother-in-law, the Empress Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine was a woman in a man’s world and consequently her reputation suffered. She is therefore remembered as a notorious queen and an example of what a queen should not be. Eleanor, as one of the most vivid women of the medieval period, probably would not have cared. Like the Empress Matilda, Eleanor is not universally criticised in the sources, and it is admitted that she had some positive traits. Her daughter-in-law, Isabella of Angouleme, on the other hand, is recorded to have had no redeeming features whatsoever and, unlike her more famous mother-in-law, is portrayed as a model of true queenly wickedness.

Isabella of Angouleme has one of the most grim reputations of any queen of England. She led a tumultuous life that was filled with high drama and intrigue and she was infamous across Europe even during her lifetime. Isabella is remembered today as an adulteress, a disloyal mother and a poisoner. One contemporary writer even went so far as to describe her as ‘more Jezebel than Isabel’. Today, Isabella is considered dishonourable like her mother-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but with none of the older woman’s admirable qualities. In short, she is seen as the sort of consort that her husband, King John, deserved. There is no doubt that Isabella was hated and feared but how much she deserved this amoral characterisation is debatable. Isabella was the wife of the disastrous and highly unpopular King John and it is not surprising that much of his bad reputation infected hers. She lived in turbulent times and, as a prominent landowner in her own right, Isabella often found herself at the mercy of the changing fortunes of the English and the French on the continent. Therefore it is not entirely surprising that she sometimes sought to play the two off against each other in an attempt to preserve her lands. Although Isabella has been unfairly blamed for the loss of English lands in France, in reality she suffered as much for this disaster as anyone. She merely provided a useful scapegoat for criticism of royal policy.

Isabella was the only child and heiress of Aymer, Count of Angouleme. Her date of birth is not recorded, but her parents cannot have been married before 1184. They are first recorded as married in 1191 and it is likely that Isabella was very young at the time of her marriage to John in 1200.
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She is often described as being twelve years old in 1200 but since this was the legal earliest age for marriage, this may have been an official age. It has been suggested that Isabella was as young as eight or nine in 1200.
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Isabella’s father technically held Angouleme as a vassal of the duchy of Aquitaine. However, in reality, he had a great deal of independence. He had caused trouble during the reign of Richard I of England, claiming independence and doing homage directly to Philip Augustus.
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Count Aymer is known to have entered into a more formal alliance with Philip Augustus soon after John’s accession.
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As part of this agreement, he abandoned his claims to the neighbouring county of Le Marche in favour of Hugh de Lusignan.
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Isabella’s future was also tied up in this agreement and, in early 1200, Isabella was betrothed to Hugh de Lusignan and sent to live in his household until she was old enough to be married.
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A marriage between Isabella and Hugh posed a serious political threat to John, who was at that time still trying to impose his authority on his empire. The merging of the counties of Angouleme, La Marche and Lusignan would split the lands of the duchy of Aquitaine in half, dividing Gascony from Poitou.
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It was therefore very much in John’s interests to stop the marriage between Isabella and Hugh.

It is often claimed that John’s marriage to Isabella was driven by lust with all the criticism of Isabella that this implies.
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In the summer of 1200 John set out on a progress through Poitou. During his progress he visited the Lusignans at Le Marche.
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John saw Isabella for the first time there and, according to reports, immediately lusted after her, desiring her as his wife. Isabella was, at most, twelve years old at this visit but she is depicted by contemporaries as a young temptress, fuelling the king’s lust with her beauty and betraying her fiancé, Hugh de Lusignan. This is clearly unrealistic; Isabella had had no say in her betrothal to Hugh, nor did she in her betrothal to John. Having met Isabella, John spoke to Count Aymer discreetly about the match and Aymer, eager for his daughter to become a queen, agreed to recall his daughter.
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John then sent Hugh de Lusignan to England on official business before returning secretly to Angouleme with the Archbishop of Bordeaux.
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On 23 August 1200, Isabella was informed by her parents that she was to marry John the next day. Her feelings concerning this are not clear and she must have been bewildered at the sudden change in her fortunes. Both Hugh and John were considerably older than her and she is unlikely to have been emotionally attached to either man. It has been claimed that she wept and protested
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; equally, it has been suggested that she greatly desired to be a queen.
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Whatever her feelings, Isabella would have had no option but to go through with the marriage and she was married on 24 April 1200 at Bordeaux.

Following the marriage, John and Isabella crossed the channel and were crowned together in Westminster Abbey on 8 October 1200.
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By the end of 1200 John probably felt he had reason to congratulate himself on the way he handled his marriage. The Lusignans initially did nothing and Hugh accepted Matilda of Angouleme, Isabella’s cousin, as an alternative bride.
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Matilda was no compensation for the loss of Isabella’s county, however, and the insult rankled the Lusignans. In 1201, trouble broke out in Poitou and John charged the Lusignans with treason. The Lusignans turned to Philip Augustus for support and, in 1202, Philip declared that John had forfeited Aquitaine, Poitou and Anjou and gave them to John’s rival, Arthur of Brittany.
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John seems to have blamed Isabella for the loss of his French possessions and apparently told her this in 1205.
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Sources also blame Isabella, claiming that following their marriage John and Isabella would lie in bed together rather than attend to business, again suggesting that Isabella’s precocious charms kept the king from his proper duties.
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No sensible blame can be attached personally to the very young Isabella and she is treated only as a useful scapegoat in these sources. As a woman, Isabella would always be viewed with suspicion by both the political leaders at John’s court and by male clergymen, and it was convenient to blame a helpless child who in reality had been forced into an arranged marriage. If anyone should bear the blame for the defection of the Lusignans it is John and the underhand way in which he married Isabella. Isabella herself was never an active participant in this but, as a woman, she was an easy target and the rumours of John’s sexual misconduct would always attach themselves more to Isabella than to the king. Isabella never attained a political role in John’s reign but her name will always be associated with the loss of the Angevin Empire due to the actions that others took on her behalf.