Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (33 page)
While Henry and Matilda put their heads together over the embarrassing problem of Geoffrey, Eleanor was far from supine. If she could not establish her authority as a sovereign in England, at least she might reap some of the benefits of queenship by having an income of her own. To this end, she used this meeting of the exchequer to declare her financial independence from her husband and introduce an innovation, the payment of queen’s gold. No consort before Eleanor, or after her for that matter, had access to her own financial resources. Although Eleanor received an allowance for her expenses from the treasury, and the pipe rolls are full of entries documenting such payments, she now instituted a method by which all payments to the king must be accompanied by a further payment to the queen. “Whoever promises a hundred or two hundred marks to the King is thereby indebted to the Queen in one mark of gold for 100 marks of silver, and so on.” It is obvious that Eleanor carefully thought out her ingenious idea before proposing it. For instance, she had no intention of leaving her income to chance, nor would she rely on her husband or Richard of Luci to collect her queen’s gold: at future meetings of the exchequer. she would send her own specially appointed officers to handle her collections. “Observe too,” commented the chronicler, “that though the King may refund part or all of a debt owed the crown, it will be for the Queen to decide about her share, and without her consent nothing owing to her can be refunded.”
With Matilda’s departure, Henry and Eleanor lingered at Winchester throughout the autumn and remained there to celebrate Christmas. These months were a period of inactivity. Eleanor had become pregnant again, and Henry, lacking battles to fight in England, brooded about his menacing brother. In the end, he decided that after the holiday he would cross the Channel to deal personally with Geoffrey. This would have been an ideal opportunity for Eleanor to visit Aquitaine, but such a trip did not, evidently, accord with Henry’s plans. During his absence, England would be officially governed by Richard of Luci, but at the same time he promised Eleanor an active part in the government, even though he was unwilling to appoint her regent. These dollops of executive responsibility that Henry would dole out on occasion were not so much done to assuage Eleanor’s desire for authority but rather for reasons of his own self-interest. His empire, too large to supervise personally, could not have been ruled without some delegation of authority. Never fully trusting his hired assistants during the early part of his reign, Henry much preferred to leave a member of his family on the scene. Eleanor he trusted, Eleanor was industrious, and he must have been aware that she knew how to rule as well as any man he had appointed to office.
The second year of the reign opened with the queen in full command. In retrospect, it would prove to be a tranquil year, one without history, because the chroniclers do not record a single event of any consequence. For the first time, Eleanor had an opportunity to travel about on her own, and she began to develop a grudging kind of affection for the land, so different from her beloved Aquitaine. In the twelfth century, England was still covered with mile upon mile of dense forest, where wolves and wild boars could be hunted, but there were also huge open spaces of moor and fenland, unpunctuated save for the muddy tracks that passed for roads. The queen’s retinue could be seen toiling over the green hills, through valleys where sheep and cattle grazed and where rye, barley, and wheat were cultivated in strips, through roofed and spired cities surrounded by their thick walls, past slumbering villages with thatched huts and, in the distance, a monastery or grim castle frowning down on the countryside. During the winter and spring Eleanor traveled extensively and lived on a more than comfortable scale, running up expenditures of more than £350, a considerable sum for the age. Normally, only Richard of Luci had authority to order payments from the exchequer in Henry’s absence, but many of the writs authorizing payment during this period were signed by the queen herself, an indication of Henry’s trust in her.
Although the English tended to be suspicious of foreigners, especially a foreigner with a reputation like Eleanor’s, they discovered that the Eagle was more than a glamorous personality. Actually, the sight of the queen dispensing justice and conducting the affairs of the realm surprised no one, for England was full of competent women who spent their time running estates, fighting lawsuits, even standing sieges when their husbands were absent. There was a constantly recurring need for wives to take their husbands’ places, and when a man was called away on business or on a military expedition, it was the wife who managed the manor or fief. A goodly share of the business Eleanor did during her travels was no doubt with members of her own sex. Working with Richard of Luci and her own chancellor, Matthew, she dispensed justice through a stream of writs, some of which still survive:
Eleanor, queen of the English, etc. to John fitz Ralf, sheriff of London, greeting. The monks of Reading have complained to me that they have been unjustly disseised of certain lands in London.... I therefore order that you enquire without delay whether this is so and if you find out that it is true, reseise the monks. Unless you do this, the king’s justice shall do it for we will in no way suffer that the monks lose unjustly anything that belongs to them. Farewell.
With Henry and Becket away, Eleanor found herself in a position where she could do much as she liked. Significantly, we hear no reports of her court resembling any that she had presided over in the past; there were no poets, no troubadours, no sumptuous feasts a la Becket, in fact no gaiety to speak of, only sobriety and hard work. The pipe rolls show, however, that her personal standard of living remained high, her elegant tastes unchanged, and her family well cared for. There are expenditures for candles and incense, allowances for her two children, even an entry for the purchase of a baby carriage. With her she had Petronilla and her two brothers, all of whom she supported in generous style. During her first four years in England, the rolls show thirty-six entries indicating exchequer payments to her half brother William alone, as well as liberal allowances for Petronilla’s wine. Neither did Eleanor care for the forebears of Courage, Watney’s, and Whitbread; she disdained ale as an uncivilized beverage, much preferring the full-bodied wines of her homeland, and thus began the ever increasing importation of the wines of Bordeaux. Perhaps at this time she had built along Thames Street her own dock, Queenhithe, where the ships of Aquitaine tied up. Queenhithe, adjoining Vintners’ quay, was a curved basin that cut deeply into the riverbank. Guarding the entrance to this prominent wharfing space was a gate that could be closed when necessary and a gatehouse tower. Years later, visitors would still consider it one of the most interesting sights in London.
While Eleanor was proving herself a highly efficient sovereign, Henry was having more difficulty than he had anticipated in handling his brother. Geoffrey’s claims to Anjou and Maine were excellent, but what he failed to consider was that Henry never gave up any land he once acquired, and the loss of this territory, lying between Normandy and Aquitaine, would cut the two duchies off from each other. After a stormy meeting at which they failed to come to terms, Geoffrey sped back to his castle of Chinon with Henry and his army in hot pursuit. In the end, “now humbled and penitent,” he was stripped of his castles and forced to forfeit all claims to Anjou and Maine and content himself intead with a promise of an annuity amounting to one thousand pounds sterling and two thousand pounds Angevin (one Angevin pound was worth about one-fourth of an English pound). At the time, this settlement may have sounded generous to Geoffrey, but he had no way of knowing the worthlessness of Henry’s promises. In the two following years he received a total of only eighty pounds.
While Henry was fighting his brother in Anjou, Eleanor was fighting for the life of their two-year-old son, William, in England. Whether the child had been in poor health for some time or whether he succumbed to a passing fever is unknown. Poor sanitary conditions, combined with a primitive state of medicine, were sufficient cause for sudden death, and the lives of children, especially vulnerable, were often ended by smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and dysentery. The death of the young was part of the natural order of life, and even in the case of a prince, no cause of death was given, none requested. Although people of the twelfth century felt an immense resignation in the face of death, they were by no means indifferent to the loss of their children. The pain of losing their firstborn son would have deeply hurt both Eleanor and Henry. The little prince was buried in Reading Abbey, at the feet of his great-grandfather Henry I.
In June, still mourning for her son, Eleanor gave birth to her third child by Henry, a girl whom she named Matilda in honor of her mother-in-law. That summer she lost all interest in remaining in England; the reins of power had grown burdensome, and she wanted nothing better than to return to her homeland. In July, within weeks of Matilda’s birth, Eleanor packed up her children and household, withdrew funds from the exchequer and, whether or not Henry approved, crossed the Channel to Normandy. By August 29 she was reunited with her husband at Saumur, in Anjou, and in October the entire family traveled back to Aquitaine. Henry agreed to this southern progress more to please Eleanor and mitigate her bereavement than from any inclination of his own. Moreover, it was becoming increasingly clear to the queen that, far from sharing her love of the south, he regarded it as a source of irritation and wished to spend as little time there as possible. In England, “swords were beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks, and none now girded himself to battle” but none of his policies, none of his carefully devised instruments of government, worked with Eleanor’s vassals. The region’s natural anarchy, comparable to the disorders that had beset France 150 years earlier under Hugh Capet, offended Henry’s every instinct for law and order. Louis Capet had been unable to rule it—his officials could not keep even a modicum of order—and if Henry had wondered whether he could do better, he was not long left in doubt. The ducal authority of Eleanor’s forebears, that long line of Williams, had been acceptable to the southern counts and viscounts only so long as it remained ineffective, as fortunately or unfortunately it nearly always was. In Poitiers and Bordeaux, the Williams had maintained estates and fortresses, but in the rest of the vast region, authority rested in the hands of the local lords, whose word stood for law in their respective neighborhoods. The various subdivisions of the duchy professed to have nothing in common, save a long tradition of mutual enmity—the Gascons mistrusted the Poitevins, the Poitevins despised the people of Limoges. For that matter, in 1156 about the one thing Eleanor’s vassals could agree upon was their dislike of Henry Plantagenet and his annoying attempts to introduce centralized government.
While Eleanor’s liege men joyously received their duchess with troubadours and pretty speeches, they treated Henry, at best, as if he were merely a titular consort, at worst an object of contempt. As he had demonstrated at Limoges only a few months after their marriage, nothing could work him into a rage faster than the Aquitainian nobles, whose insolence and intractability he believed proverbial.
Henry’s legendary tantrums were generally attributed to his demon ancestors, that is, they were excused as falling beyond the range of his control. But people do not get into rages in which they scream and bite the furniture because they can’t help it. Under certain conditions, such as delirium due to illness or extreme intoxication, a person may lose all control, but these are exceptional instances. In a normal state, people are responsible for their behavior, and Henry, normally, was a responsible person. His fits of anger were nearly always a form of blackmail in that he performed in the presence of an audience for the purpose of gaining some goal. In early childhood he had perfected his act in hate-filled castles, where his mother and father had quarreled and screamed. His outbursts, done for effect, relieved him, but they also allowed him to get his way. It had worked in the nursery, and it continued to work when he grew up.
Even in the first months of her marriage, then, Eleanor had been aware of the spectacularly poor beginning her husband had made with her subjects, and she knew her people well enough to predict that Henry could look forward to a difficult task in introducing Anglo-Norman concepts of government.
In her assessment of the situation, Eleanor had been right. Even minor barons refused their feudal duties to Henry, and the oaths of homage he forced from them were of little practical value. That fall, however, as they made their progress through Poitou, Henry seemed determined to show them that he would tolerate no further defiance. In Limoges, he exercised his feudal rights by making the young heir to the viscountship his ward and then turning over the government to two Normans. In Poitou he unceremoniously ejected the viscount of Thouars from his lands and destroyed his castle, ostensibly for having aided Geoffrey Plantagenet in his recent rebellion but in truth because he found the viscount a troublesome vassal. He wished to leave no doubts in the minds of the southern nobles that he would assert his ducal rights, no matter how many castles he must raze, and in this he appeared to be successful. As the royal family traveled south to hold their Christmas court in Bordeaux, Eleanor’s vassals came forth to offer homage to Henry as well as the two children, but an indication of how little he trusted their word is evident from the fact that he took hostages to ensure their fidelity.
In this depressing and unstable atmosphere, it may have seemed to Eleanor that she had lost Aquitaine forever. In some ways. her marriage to Henry and her ever-growing family (she had become pregnant again in December) had been made at a great price; the political realities of the situation were now coming home to her as she acknowledged Aquitaine as a place where she might never live again, at least not with Henry Plantagenet. Beyond that, her domains were a source of friction between them, for she did not completely agree with Henry’s policies. In theory, she heartily approved of the concepts of centralized government, which she had seen operate successfully in England, Normandy, and Anjou, but in practice, she had little hope of their acceptance in her own land, where the autonomy of the barons was traditional. Moreover, Henry’s policy of appointing foreigners to key government posts only exacerbated opposition. Eleanor had complete trust in her uncle, Ralph de Faye, and felt content for him to remain her deputy, but Henry viewed Ralph’s supervision as ineffective, and by Henry’s standards, it undoubtedly was. Eleanor must have suspected that the only way in which Henry could maintain his policies was by incessant war with her vassals or the constant presence of either Henry or herself. Henry had no intention of relocating in Aquitaine, nor would he permit Eleanor to return on a permanent basis. And by December he was already agitating for her return to England, where he had more urgent need of her services.
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