April Queen (38 page)

Among his father’s spies in his entourage was Adam Chirchedune, the Young King’s vice-chancellor. An intercepted letter resulted in him being judged for treason
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and escaping summary execution only because the bishop of Poitiers argued that Adam was a cleric in the service of the archbishop of York, and should therefore be given benefit of clergy. Stripped naked and flogged through the streets of Poitiers instead, Henry’s spy was dispatched to prison in Argentan with orders that he be flogged through the streets of every town along the way
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as a way of killing him without actually sentencing him to death. However, he survived and was rescued by an embassy sent from England to procure his release.

It was now the turn of Eleanor’s twelve-year-old daughter Joanna to serve the grand design in a marriage designed to outflank the German Emperor in southern Italy. There were close trading links between Sicily and England, where Richard Palmer was bishop of Syracuse and his fellow-Englishman Walter of the Mill was bishop of Palermo. With Henry’s clerk Peter of Blois having been tutor to Sicily’s king during his minority, there was no shortage of channels of communication through which to arrange Princess Joanna’s marriage to William II, the 24-year-old king of Naples and Sicily, duke of Puglia and prince of Capua.

Towards the end of August Eleanor bade farewell at Winchester to her second daughter. Dispatched to her uncertain fate in Sicily laden with presents for her future husband, she was accompanied by Bishop John of Norwich, who had been the go-between. Henry ordered the Young King to escort her from the boat at Barfleur south to Aquitaine in sufficient force to ensure that she was not relieved of her dowry of fine horses, gems and precious metals on the way.

From Poitiers, Richard accompanied his sister to Toulouse across a landscape of misery and famine while his eldest brother returned northwards, devoting himself to tournaments and little else for the next three years. Whatever Joanna’s thoughts about her fate in Sicily, the progress to Toulouse was leisured and elegant. After saying farewell, Richard ‘pacified’ southern Gascony on the pretext that its barons were attacking and robbing pilgrims to Compostela in defiance of the Peace of God. Dismissing his Brabanter mercenaries the moment he had no more money to pay them, he unleashed another spate of misfortune when they turned to pillage and rape on their route home through the county of Limoges, which continued until the locals got together and massacred 2,000 of them on the Thursday before Easter.

The king of Sicily had been a minor of thirteen when his father died. On coming of age, he had decided to impress on his Muslim and Orthodox subjects that he was a
Christian
monarch by building outside Palermo at Monreale the breathtaking cathedral where Joanna, in a bejewelled dress that had cost the enormous sum of £114, was married on 13 February 1177. The cathedral’s intact décor of marble and glittering gold mosaic gives the closest impression now available of the dazzling magnificence of Santa Sophia before the Muslim conquerors of Constantinople hacked off all the Christian decoration in 1453. The floor plan of Monreale combines features of both western and Orthodox basilicas. The styles of its magnificent decoration are, like the island’s population at the time, a mixture of north European Christian, Muslim and Greek Orthodox.

Similarly, William’s seal bore a Latin inscription ‘by the grace of God’, but his coins had an Arabic inscription on the obverse, ‘desirous of being exalted by God’, and on the reverse Greek letters in an abbreviation of ‘Jesus Christ Victorious’. Likewise, William’s court was composed of Christian, Muslim and Greek advisers. As Joanna was shortly to find out, although her husband was known as ‘William the Good’ because he had been the first western monarch to send aid to the beleaguered Latin Kingdom, he also spoke, read and wrote Arabic – and took his sexual pleasures in the harem of beautiful Christian and Muslim girls in his palace.

The marriage was in vain. On 24 July 1177 Henry’s grand design, whose knell had been sounded by Becket’s defiance, was finally undone. Despairing of the king of England ever making his move, the pope signed a treaty in Venice with the German Emperor that ended all hopes of the crown of Lombardy sitting on the head of Henry of Anjou. The 2,000 marks he had paid to the count of Maurienne had had to be written off on the death of the count’s daughter. Eleanor’s two sacrificed daughters – Matilda in Saxony and Joanna in Sicily – had likewise to be written off for the moment.

No longer needing England’s support, the Pope sent a legate at the request of Louis to say that if Alais Capet was not married to Richard or returned to her father forthwith, England would be placed under interdict.
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Another round of negotiations with Louis then ensued, with both kings announcing that they would take the cross and Henry agreeing to marry Alais to Richard and Louis confirming that the Vexin castles were Marguerite’s dowry. Despite the trickery and deceit, when Henry returned to England in July 1178 he placed all his continental possessions under Louis’ protection as a way of keeping his sons in check.

Richard’s vindictiveness was alienating his vassals one by one, which pleased Henry because it rendered another rebellion less likely of support. Eleanor’s favourite was now aged twenty-two and sufficiently experienced in warfare – he did little else except hunt – to demand the plenary ducal powers. For this, his mother’s consent was necessary, but she still refused to abdicate her own title as duchess. So Henry tried a new tactic in the hope of alienating her from Richard.

She was released from confinement and brought to court, where Richard pleaded his case. To the courtiers it may have looked as though a family reconciliation of some kind was under way, but the queen was there on sufferance and Richard for one purpose only. In vain had a Poitevin troubadour prophesied at the end of the rebellion that Eleanor’s cries of protest at her betrayal would sound loud as the trumpet to summon to her help the valiant sons who would set her free and bring her back in triumph to her own country. Confronting his mother, all Richard cared about was his title. It was this betrayal more than all Henry’s punishment that nearly broke her will, until she saw in it a chance to better her position at little real cost to herself. As a reward for her cooperation in agreeing to pass title to Richard, Henry relaxed the conditions of her captivity.

Eleanor’s first husband was nearing the end of his life. Health failing, Louis planned to crown his son, fifteen-year-old Prince Philip Augustus. Shortly before 15 August 1179, the date set for the coronation, the prince fell into a fever no one could cure after being lost for a day and a night in the forest of Compiègne when separated from his companions on a boar hunt. Convinced that praying at Becket’s tomb would enable his anxious prayers to be heard in Heaven, Louis asked permission to make a pilgrimage to the shrine at Canterbury.

Taking ship for the first time since his nightmarish return voyage with Eleanor from the Holy Land, he was welcomed with open arms at Dover by Henry, who accompanied him to the shrine and treated him like a brother throughout the four days he was on English soil. The thought of her two husbands piously riding through the Kentish countryside on pilgrimage to the tomb of the man Henry had hated so much must have amused Eleanor, wherever she was at this time.

The prayers were heard. Six weeks later three of her sons were at the delayed coronation in Reims – Richard and Geoffrey repre-senting their fiefs held from the French Crown and Young Henry as duke of Normandy acting as seneschal of France and bearing the crown in front of Philip in the procession to the altar.
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The high point of the
festivities was a grand tournament at Lagny on the Marne, east of Paris, where the Young King’s knights were victorious, as so often with William the marshal in the team.

The coronation came not a month too soon. Shortly afterwards, news reached Eleanor that a stroke had paralysed Louis down the right side and deprived him of the power of speech. After his reign of forty-two years, of which more than a third had been shared with her, the Capetian throne was now occupied by a boy of fifteen. In September of the following year, Louis died after bequeathing all his personal property to the poor.
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Eleanor was then fifty-seven and had been a prisoner for six years.

In July 1181 her son Geoffrey was married to Constance of Brittany, after which Henry elevated his bastard son of the same name by appointing him Chancellor instead of having him consecrated bishop of Lincoln. As a sign of displeasure with his legitimate sons for allying themselves with King Philip against the count of Flanders, Henry made Geoffrey the Bastard also archdeacon of Rouen and treasurer of York Minster, to provide him with a more than adequate income.

Shortly afterwards, Philip found a temporary solution to his pressing need for money by banishing all the Jews from Frankish territory, confiscating their houses and taking over their loans, the debtors being discharged on payment to the Crown of one-fifth of the outstanding amounts. Allowed to sell off their furniture, many of the dispossessed crossed the Channel and settled in England. The operation brought in 15,000 marks to the Capetian treasury, some synagogues were converted into churches and the space for the great covered market of Les Halles, latterly Paris’ vegetable market, was found by demolishing houses in the former Jewish quarter.
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In Germany, the emperor’s position of strength decided him to exile for seven years Eleanor’s troublesome and too-powerful son-in-law, the duke of Saxony. Together with his pregnant wife and their children, he sought refuge at the Norman court with an entourage so large that Henry, mean as ever about hospitality,
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induced him to send most of them home and even provided funds for the journey. After persuading the duke to go on pilgrimage to Compostela, Henry gave Matilda the palace of Argentan for her residence, intending her to give birth there, but she eluded him and departed for Paris, producing a son on the Ile de la Cité shortly afterwards.

When the news reached Eleanor that she was a grandmother yet again, Richard was campaigning with various vassals against other
vassals and then retiring to Talmond or another of his favourite hunting forests. The two Henrys, father and son, were constantly falling out and making it up over the issue of whether the Young King had, or had not, a kingdom to rule. Finally he lost patience and withdrew to the court of his brother-in-law in Paris. Understandably, King Philip was out to seduce any disaffected Plantagenet with favours of all kinds until Henry enticed his son back to the fold with a daily allowance of £100 English for himself and £10 for the Young Queen, plus payment of the expenses of a hundred household knights to guarantee him a fitting retinue.

When the Young King joined Richard and Geoffrey at the Christmas court in Caen, also present were Matilda and her family, Henry of Saxony having returned from pilgrimage. The only member of the family not invited was Eleanor,
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the Young Queen taking her place at the festivities. It was not, however, a happy Christmas: Young Henry and Richard demanded the right to hold their own plenary courts, but their father rejected such arrogance.

Something of the backbiting and bitchiness is conveyed by the ease with which gossips had convinced Young Henry that William the Marshal was paying court to Queen Marguerite. To vindicate himself, William challenged three owners of those wagging tongues to single combat, one after the other, himself to be hanged if he lost. He offered to cut a finger off his right hand first, but there were still no takers. Disgusted, he ignored a letter from Baldwin of Béthune confirming the Young King’s pardon, and departed on pilgrimage to Cologne before staying in self-imposed exile in Germany.
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Bored, Richard left the court early. Unfortunately, he had brought with him to Normandy a troubadour who sowed trouble wherever he went. It would have been quite in character for Bertran de Born to be the one who whispered in Young Henry’s ear the accusations against William, in order to cover up his own interest in Marguerite. Gifted poet and brave warrior, Bertran’s other great talent was for causing dissension, partly because his castle of Hautefort near Périgueux was expensive to upkeep and his scant resources obliged him to depend on booty. So long as Richard was on campaign, he was happy.

Bertran’s other passion was women. He set his cap at Matilda, comparing her beauty with that of Helen of Troy in very explicit terms.

Matilda cannot have been disturbed by the explicit verses, for Bertran dared to reveal the identity of his adored, complaining that he would have died of boredom at the court of Argentan …

If he had confined himself to versifying, all would have been well. Instead, he and his
jonglar
Papiol took to fanning the fires of Young Henry’s envy of Richard’s comparative freedom to act as master of his own domains. To massage the Young King’s ego, when the court moved on to Le Mans and Angers Henry ordered Geoffrey and Richard to swear fealty to him for their fiefs. Geoffrey complied, but Richard refused from a distance on the grounds that his title came from Eleanor and had nothing to do with his eldest brother. Moreover, he said, they were siblings of the same bed and therefore equals.
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Encouraged by Bertran, Young Henry retorted that the barons of Aquitaine were begging him to take over the duchy Richard was ruining by his incessant campaigning.