April Queen (31 page)

D
uring the Easter court of 1166 at Angers Eleanor became pregnant for the eleventh time, possibly as a last attempt to keep some kind of relationship with Henry despite her resentment at being shown by him none of the respect due to the queen of England; in recent years, all he had used her for was to beget more sons and daughters he could trade in some alliance. With the menopause approaching, she knew she would be completely discarded.

The widening rift between them may have been triggered by his giving her a venereal infection, caught from one of the many whores he used. Gonorrhoea and chancres were common. Although syphilis was not formally identified in Europe before contact with the Americas, what was called sexually transmitted leprosy was a condition which, in symptoms and treatment, had much in common with syphilis. Before returning to France on 16 March, Henry had been very inactive for six months, apparently due to ill-health. He was only thirty-three years old, but in later years limped badly from a leg broken when a horse kicked him and badly set, so this may have
been the cause. But after Easter he was ill again at Chinon and did not recover until July.

He suffered increasingly debilitating bouts of malaria, but may also have had other health problems. Whatever this one was, his being ill meant that Becket could not include him when, at the great pilgrim church of Vézelay, he excommunicated just about everyone else involved in framing the Constitutions of Clarendon. At Henry’s request, Pope Alexander annulled the excommunications and warned Becket to desist. His health improving, Henry turned his attention to Brittany, forcing Count Conan IV to abdicate in favour of his daughter Constance and betrothing her to eight-year-old Prince Geoffrey.

Eleanor had put up with much to be Henry’s partner in building an empire, but her pride would not let her sink to being ‘just another vassal’. Determined to bend her to his will, he issued a summons from Caen, calling all her vassals of Poitou and Aquitaine to meet him at Chinon on 20 November. There he announced that he would hold a Christmas court in Poitiers, at which they would be required to swear allegiance to Young Henry as nominal duke of Aquitaine in addition to the titles to England, Normandy and Anjou which he already held.

Eleanor was furious at this dispossession of Richard. Returning with him and Princess Matilda to England, she spent a troubled Christmas at Oxford with all the children except Young Henry, whose Channel crossing with a considerable retinue to impress her vassals in Poitiers had cost £100. On 27 December 1166 at the age of forty-four she gave birth in Oxford to the last of her brood, christened John after the Baptist, whose feast-day it was. Within a few hours of the birth Henry was forcing the barons of Aquitaine to swear fealty to Young Henry in Poitiers. The anger Eleanor felt coloured her attitude to John from birth, for she never liked him. In Aquitaine, Henry’s latest high-handedness lit the fire of a rebellion led by her uncle William Taillefer. Its swift repression did not stop another dissident vassal, the count of Auvergne, from appealing for feudal justice directly to Louis.

Heading east to put him in his place, Henry met Count Raymond of Toulouse at the monastery of Grandmont. In order to marry Richilde, widow of the count of Provence, Raymond had just divorced Louis’ sister, who had been very popular with the citizens of Toulouse. Furious at this insult, Louis was threatening armed intervention. The count therefore placed his domains under Henry’s protection by declaring himself a vassal of the duke of Aquitaine. In this roundabout way, Eleanor saw the breakaway county temporarily re-attached to Aquitaine, ironically at a time when her hold over the duchy was at its weakest.

This was the excuse for Louis to reopen hostilities against Henry in Normandy, ostensibly over a long-running dispute as to how the money raised in both their territories by the current crusade tax should be spent.
¹
Hardly had a truce been arranged in August 1167, to last until the following Easter, than Henry marched west to subdue some independent Breton lords who refused to recognise Prince Geoffrey. That campaign was cut short by the news that the Empress Matilda had died on 10 September. Aged sixty-five, she had been politically active to the last, firing off letters urging bishops to arrange a truce in Normandy and castigating Becket for his ingratitude to the king who had raised him to greatness.

It is indicative of the emotion and respect Henry still felt for his mother that he executed Matilda’s will to the letter and did not filch property or wealth from her estates. In poor health once again, he attended her funeral with a frigid Eleanor. The rift between them had gone too far to be bridged. With Becket his sworn enemy, the Empress Matilda dead and Eleanor irrevocably alienated, Henry was without any close advisers.

To ensure that Princess Matilda’s long-delayed marriage to the Lion of Saxony did take place, Eleanor took her back to England. The first of the princesses to be married off, she was given a suitable dowry and a regal send-off that together cost around £4,500, or a quarter of the realm’s annual revenue. By feudal custom, this money was raised by an
auxilium
tax levied for the occasion. In addition to a trousseau that cost £63, the twelve-year-old princess was provided with luxuries such as scarlet saddles with gilt fittings for her palfries and a train of thirty-four packhorses to transport her belongings. All this was to enable her to arrive in fitting style in Saxony, where the wedding was eventually celebrated at the beginning of 1168.

After accompanying her to Dover for embarkation on a German ship, Eleanor busied herself assembling her own movable property with the intention of leaving England for good. Historians have argued that it was Henry’s plan for her to take over the government of Aquitaine in order to leave him free to govern his northern domains, but that would not have involved moving seven entire shiploads of her furniture and other belongings across the Channel.
²
Nor would weakening her authority by replacing her appointee Richard with Young Henry as titular duke have been an intelligent move on Henry’s part if he intended Eleanor to resume direct rule of the duchy.

Of the fourteen and a half years since the May wedding in Poitiers, she had spent the equivalent of six entire years pregnant, bearing Henry
five sons, of whom four were still living, and three daughters. This was after the three pregnancies by Louis that produced his first two daughters, and in an age when every pregnancy could be lethal, the slightest complication resulting in agonising death.

When she married for the second time, she was no manipulable under-age bride dominated by an older husband, but a woman of thirty with fifteen years’ political and life experience behind her – and the strength of will to break free from Louis and his powerful clerical and lay advisers. She knew many examples of royal and noble ladies who had chosen not to have large families, whatever their husbands wanted.

Henry’s own mother had grudgingly borne three sons before refusing to produce any more. His maternal grandfather had married Edith-Matilda, daughter of St Margaret of Scotland, and found her more interested in good works, like washing the feet of lepers and kissing them on the lips, than in sharing his bed. After dutifully producing a son and a daughter in the first three years of her marriage, she ‘ceased to become pregnant or give birth, and tolerated with equanimity that the king was occupied elsewhere’
³
while her husband proceeded to father more bastards than any other English monarch.

Apart from abstinence, contraceptive methods included magical spells that worked as often as the law of averages allowed. Clemence of Burgundy, the wife of Count Robert II of Flanders, practised ‘womanly arts’ after producing three sons in three years, according to Hermann of Tournai.
⁴
Mechanical methods included tampons soaked in vinegar, olive oil and other liquids. By observation, the so-called rhythm method was known, if unsuccessfully practised. Prolonged breast-feeding never lost its reputation for preventing ovulation, although the conditions under which it has an acceptably low failure rate were not understood. Anal and intercrural inter-course, coitus reservatus and coitus interruptus were penalised by confessors, who considered abortion and infanticide as murder, but the penalties show that the practices existed. In addition, the Church proscribed intercourse for pleasure, during pregnancy and menstruation, on the Sabbath and a whole list of feast-days and during Lent.

Henry’s own register of wards and widows compiled in 1185 and covering 112 large noble families in England gives an average of less than four children per couple. By one means or another many noble and royal wives succeeded in limiting the number of children they bore, in order to avoid exactly the problem by which Henry was hag-ridden into his early grave: too many sons fighting over their patrimony.
⁵
For an example, Eleanor needed to look no further than
Henry’s great-grandfather William the Conqueror, who fathered nine legitimate children, only to die while one son was in armed rebellion against him, leaving an empire over which the three surviving legitimate sons fought bitterly. After William Rufus’ death, Henry I kept his elder brother Robert Curthose in prison for twenty years to debar him from the throne.

So why did Eleanor want all those sons?

Given Henry’s promiscuity, she had every excuse after producing a couple of sons to take refuge in real or feigned religious vocation or simple frigidity and tell Henry she had done her duty and was no longer interested in bearing more children. But she chose not to. And since she was aware of the problems of dynasties with too many sons, one has to ask, why?

The only satisfactory answer to the question also unlocks another great mystery: why did Henry appoint Becket archbishop? The standard answer of contemporary chroniclers and modern historians is that he needed a compliant prelate through whom to curb the independence of the Church. But if Henry was at times violent, cruel and arrogant, he was also one of England’s more intelligent monarchs, and such a move was unworthy of a chess-player of his intellect. With many years’ experience of interfering in ecclesiastical elections in England and in France, he could have manoeuvred any of several ambitious and compliant churchmen into the post – Roger of York, Henry of Winchester or Gilbert Foliot, to name only three. So why throw away his versatile and extremely competent chancellor and companion to do the job that one of them could have done?

Becket had also served him in the field on the Toulouse expedition and during the Vexin campaign of 1161, when he had acquitted himself well in command of Henry’s vanguard totalling 6,000 horse and foot. So, in chess terms, appointing him to the see of Canterbury was the equivalent of trading more than a knight and a castle in order to have only a bishop on the board, albeit the chief bishop of England – unless there was more to the move than meets the eye.

Historians have seen the dispute between king and primate as the turning point in Henry’s fortunes. The clerical chroniclers portrayed the problems of his later years as divine retribution for his part in Becket’s martyrdom, but the downturn came
before
the murder in the cathedral. Their difficulty in discerning Henry’s game plan lay in a tendency to present success and failure, health and illness, riches and poverty in terms of divine reward or retribution – and in medieval maps, adequate as route planners but not for reading strategy in Henry’s league.

An alternative analysis of the evidence is that Becket’s appointment was intended to be a once-in-a-lifetime game-winning move, so that when his hitherto obedient lieutenant refused to play the role allotted, Henry knew that the endgame for which he had worked so long was lost. The sustained fury with which he persecuted Becket was curiously similar to the fury he directed against Eleanor.

It was no secret that Henry had had frequent trafficking with papal legates for years before the break with Becket. According to the nineteenth-century French historian Alfred Richard, who spent his life immersed in the medieval charters of the Limousin region of Aquitaine, these negotiations were in furtherance of Henry’s ambitions
ultra montes
, that is, south of the Alps, where he had been seriously considering an invitation to become king of Lombardy
⁶
as a springboard for all Italy.
⁷

His obsession with the return of Toulouse and the alliances with the northern Spanish kingdoms, his support for Popes Adrian IV and Alexander III in the schisms of the Church, the marriage alliances he effected with Saxony, Castile, Maurienne and Sicily, and the placing of Becket on the throne of Canterbury, can all be seen not as disconnected ploys but parts of a unified grand design if Becket’s appointment was not an aim in itself,
but the vital step in him becoming pope
.

There is nothing far-fetched in that. Pope Adrian IV was English and had been rejected by the first monastery he applied to join because he was a Saxon, illiterate in Latin. If an illiterate Saxon from St Albans could make it to the top without any patronage, it was entirely within the bounds of possibility for an astute, politically experienced Anglo-Norman with Becket’s background to gain the see of St Peter.