She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (24 page)

The territorial settlement at Montmirail left many questions unanswered – not least in making no provision for the youngest of Henry and Eleanor’s sons, John, who was not yet three. There would be time enough later, it seemed, to consider the claims of the baby of the family, although the treaty meant that as he grew into boyhood he was already known as
Jean Sans Terre
– John Lackland – in sympathy for his limited prospects. But the Montmirail agreement did sketch out an understanding of what share of their father’s empire each of his elder brothers should expect to rule, and a basis on which the kings of France and England might find a way to act in co-operative tandem rather than at destructive loggerheads.

The accord was given ceremonial confirmation at Westminster Abbey eighteen months later, when young Henri was crowned king of England in his father’s presence – a calculated deployment of the same stratagem of coronation-in-advance with which the French kings had traditionally sought to guarantee their sons’
succession, and which Stephen had failed to secure for the ill-fated Eustace before Henry himself had taken the throne. Only the fact that the young man was anointed by the archbishop of York rather than the archbishop of Canterbury (Thomas Becket’s rift with his king being one of the few issues left unresolved and festering by the diplomacy at Montmirail) cast a pall over the lavish celebrations. But preceding all of these carefully calibrated dispositions – and laying the foundation for them, in fact – had been a telling change in the royal family’s political and domestic arrangements. In 1168, Eleanor had come home to Aquitaine.

It was not that, during the previous fifteen years, she had either been constantly at her husband’s side, or totally estranged from her native land. Far from it: the hours that Henry regularly spent in the saddle as he rode at punishing speed around his domains meant that the couple were frequently separated. Meanwhile, Eleanor’s more stately travels had taken her to Aquitaine’s cities of Poitiers and Bordeaux as well as to London and Oxford, Argentan and Angers. But her move in 1168 was qualitatively different. Between 1156 – when Henry did homage to Louis VII for his new wife’s duchy and received that of the Aquitainian barons in his turn – and 1167, not a single surviving charter produced by the ducal administration of Aquitaine had mentioned its duchess. Eleanor, it seems, had been too busy producing heirs, and too firmly sidelined by a husband intent on demonstrating the overriding force of his own will, to play more than a decorative role in the government of her people.

Now that was changing. Henry’s thoughts were turning to the possibility that the future of his empire might lie in delegation rather than centralisation. And, in the case of Aquitaine, his mind was concentrated by the particular challenges the duchy posed to its rulers – challenges that were multiplied many times over if those rulers came from beyond its northern frontier. Aquitaine was huge in size, covering an area larger than Normandy and Anjou put together, and, for northerners travelling south, its territories became ever more alien as their journey progressed, not
only in language but in culture, customs and climate. It had to be said that Anglo-Normans and Angevins themselves were not the easiest of bedfellows, but the tensions between them were born of proximity and long experience, of similarity rather than difference. Aquitaine was another matter. For inhabitants of Normandy and Anjou alike, the peoples of the south could appear disconcertingly foreign, whether foppishly refined to the point of degeneracy, or disgustingly uncivilised in their habits and dress. Either way, clearly, they were not to be trusted.

Henry’s countrymen, therefore, whether in England, Normandy or Anjou, were all too likely to assume that Aquitaine was virtually ungovernable. The truth, however, seen through less prejudiced eyes, was more heartening. The duchy was a region not only of extraordinary cultural sophistication – its poetry and music matched by the exquisitely carved stonework of its churches – but of extraordinary wealth. Besides its agricultural riches, its golden fields and dark forests, coiling rivers and open coasts, Aquitaine plied a profitable export trade in two of twelfth-century Europe’s most valued commodities: salt, essential for food preservation, which was distilled from sea water all along the duchy’s Atlantic shore, and wine, produced to a superb standard in Bordeaux and Saintonge, and shipped to markets across Europe. That trade filled the duke of Aquitaine’s coffers with revenue from customs and tolls, and – although power was in essence a matter more of land and loyalty than of commercial transactions – ready cashflow would more than help to raise an army or keep it in the field.

From his cities of Poitiers, built on a great promontory overlooking streams surrounding it on three sides, and Bordeaux, the bustling port on the west bank of the Garonne where the river meanders to the sea, the duke therefore stood every chance of dominating vast tracts of his duchy. The regions from Poitiers west and southward down the coast to La Rochelle, Saintes and Bordeaux, and then east and south again to Agen, were prosperous and peaceful. But there was no denying that the lands of Poitou and the Limousin in the centre and east of the duchy – and particularly
the castle-studded territories south of Poitiers belonging to the counts of Angoulême and the great Lusignan family – had the potential to be profoundly troublesome. Either of these vassals of the duke could use the strategically crucial location of their estates to disrupt communications between the key cities that owed allegiance to their overlord. The challenge of managing ambitious and aggressive men with such widespread scope to cause conflict had been a familiar one to Eleanor’s father and grandfather; and, if Henry needed a reminder to keep his eye on the region, he got it in 1168 when Geoffroi de Lusignan rose in rebellion against him.

The threat was manifest: the Lusignans were bullish and intransigent, and support from Louis of France would always be forthcoming for those in Aquitaine who sought to throw off his rival’s yoke. And the violence had alarming consequences. The earl of Salisbury, an experienced soldier despatched with Queen Eleanor to hold Poitou while Henry was engaged in urgent diplomacy with Louis, was killed in action: an unfortunate casualty of unlucky fate, said the Lusignans; stabbed in the back while unarmed and defenceless, protested the earl’s outraged men. Either way, the killing – rather than the more usual imprisonment and ransom – of a trusted noble lieutenant was, for Henry, both shocking and sobering.

The Lusignans’ revolt was suppressed by a combination of the treaty agreed with Louis at Montmirail in the following year and a virulent campaign of repression waged by Henry in its wake. But the need to find a long-term strategy for the rule of Aquitaine, and Poitou in particular, was left in stark relief. And that circumstance lent a great weight of significance to Eleanor’s return to the turreted palace at Poitiers in which she had spent so much of her childhood. She was the hereditary duchess of Aquitaine, freed now from the labours of childbearing to take up the reins of government among her vassals, who had sworn allegiance to her long before they had bowed the knee to the second of her husbands. For Henry, who had learned much from his gifted mother, this was a deliberate decision to deploy the skills and charisma of his equally, if very differently, gifted wife – Eleanor’s fearlessness
marking a counterpoint to Matilda’s shrewd caution. For Aquitaine, it was the restoration of a measure of native rule (which, however tempestuous the politics of the duchy under Eleanor’s father and grandfather, remained infinitely preferable to domination from the north). And, for Eleanor, it was not only a home-coming but, at the age of forty-four, her first clear chance at sustained political autonomy on a public stage.

Her new role as Aquitaine’s duchess was founded on her own hereditary rights, but it was reinforced and amplified by her functions as wife and mother. She was her husband’s lieutenant in this part of his empire, even if his right to rule there originated with her. She was also serving as guardian of the duchy during the adolescence of her son Richard, who had been named as Aquitaine’s future duke in the settlement of 1169. Richard was an exceptionally able boy and, it emerged, his mother’s favourite – a bond that was established decisively in these years when he was immersed, with her, in the culture and landscape of her own girlhood. And, just as his older brother Henri’s position as heir to England and Normandy had been ritually confirmed by his coronation at Westminster two years earlier, in June 1172 fourteen-year-old Richard was formally enthroned as duke of Aquitaine.

In the cool interior of the Romanesque church of St Hilaire at Poitiers, watched by the painted gallery of bishops, martyrs and saints on the richly coloured walls, Richard sat in the abbot’s chair – by tradition, an honorific right of the counts of Poitou – to take possession of the sacred lance and banner that symbolised the authority of the dukes of Aquitaine. Because that authority reached further than Poitou, the ceremony was then repeated seventy-five miles to the south-east at Limoges, chief city of the Limousin. There Richard received the ring of St Valérie, a virgin martyr of the early Church whose rapidly developing twelfth-century cult identified her as the symbolic embodiment of Aquitaine itself. It was the young duke who wore the saint’s ring, but the ritual personification of the duchy as a woman could not help but focus attention on the woman who ruled with and for him.

We cannot now reconstruct many of the details of Eleanor’s government in Aquitaine, but the fact of her role is unmistakable. In 1168 and 1171 she held great Christmas courts of her own, as she had never done before, gathering her vassals around her in Aquitaine in the absence of her husband, but with her young son by her side. And, after a decade in which she had appeared in not a single extant ducal charter, in five years she now issued fifteen surviving charters in her own right and on her own authority, sometimes in association with her husband or son – ‘I and Richard my son’, some acts began, while others were addressed by the queen-duchess to ‘the king’s faithful followers and hers’ – but never dependent on them. Meanwhile, Henry neither issued any charters of his own for Aquitaine during these years, nor saw any need to confirm or otherwise validate those of his wife.

It seemed, therefore, as though the delegation of power within Henry’s empire, of which Eleanor’s rule in Aquitaine formed a key part, was working. Certainly, it survived two major shocks in 1170. That summer, the unthinkable happened when Henry, the thirty-seven-year-old king whose superhuman vigour was the stuff of legend, fell so seriously ill that rumours of his death flew around France. He recovered, slowly, but the will he had drawn up when he believed he would not survive confirmed his commitment to the distribution of his lands between his sons (and, in practice, his wife) that had been agreed at Montmirail. And then, once restored to health, both Henry and his regime proved able to ride out the international storm unleashed at the end of the year by the murder of Thomas Becket, hacked to death in his own cathedral by knights who believed they were acting on their king’s orders.

It took almost two years to emerge from the tempest of outrage and recrimination, but by the summer of 1172 Henry had done public penance for his part in the killing and had at last been freed from the threat of excommunication. The clouds, it seemed, were lifting; and the division of power among Henry’s family appeared not simply to be functioning but to be reaching maturity, with the investiture of Richard as duke of Aquitaine in June and yet
another English coronation for his brother Henri in August, this time at Winchester with his young French wife at his side.

Appearances, however, could be deceptive. What Henry had declared his intention to do, and what he had actually done, were two very different things. Perhaps the clerk Walter Map had been right after all to suggest that the king set too much store by his mother Matilda’s advice that an unruly hawk might be brought under close control by the proffer of a juicy piece of meat, but only if it were snatched away at the last moment. By the beginning of 1173 Henry’s eldest son, now seventeen, and Richard, fifteen, had heard many fine words describing their rights as king and duke, spoken in reverent tones amid a haze of incense in hushed cathedrals. Of the reality of royal and ducal authority, they had seen very little. Perhaps it should not have been surprising that their tirelessly controlling father should find it difficult to hand over the fundamentals, as opposed to the accoutrements, of power. Conflict between fathers and sons had, after all, been a perennial side-effect for the Capetians too when they had tried to secure the succession to the French throne by this same method of preemptive enthronement. But the thwarted hopes of Henry’s sons were mingled with the driving ambition and fiery temper they had inherited from their implacable father. It was a toxic mixture.

The situation began to unravel in February 1173 at what had promised to be a moment of triumph for Henry. He was in the process of agreeing a peace intended to secure the south-eastern frontier of his territories, of which the centrepiece was a proposed marriage between his youngest son, six-year-old John, and the daughter and heiress of Count Humbert of Maurienne, a territory that lay east of Provence in the Savoyard Alps. The settlement was proclaimed at a magnificent meeting of Henry’s court at Limoges, attended not only by the count of Maurienne but also by the rival southern powers of the king of Aragon-Barcelona, the king of Navarre, and Count Ramon of Toulouse, against whom Henry had undertaken an imposing but largely unsuccessful military campaign in 1159. On 25 February, Count Ramon gave ceremonial
expression to the concord he had now concluded with his former enemy by doing homage for Toulouse first to Henry, and then to his eldest son. Young Henri, it seemed, whatever his simmering resentments, had been accorded all due recognition in this gathering of potentates.

But then Count Humbert asked the king what lands the child John would bring to the marriage, to match the riches of his own daughter’s inheritance. Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau, came the reply: the three castles in Anjou that had been the focus of Henry’s conflict with his brother Geoffrey nearly two decades earlier. At this, young Henri exploded in fury. He had been crowned king of England – twice – and invested as duke of Normandy and count of Anjou. He had just turned eighteen, already two years older than the age at which his father had taken command of the duchy of Normandy. And yet his father had not handed into his control any of the lands of his inheritance, to which his right had been so publicly and repeatedly proclaimed. Now, the final insult, three of his castles were to be given away to his baby brother. He did not agree. He would not agree. And his father would have to do something about it.