Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (34 page)
However reluctant to leave the south, Eleanor was back in London by February 1157. Henry had not accompanied her and the children, partly because he remained unsatisfied as to the security of his Continental possessions, partly because he still did not trust Geoffrey. When he finally joined her after Easter, it was not for long, because immediately he began planning an expedition against the Welsh.
Owain Gwynedd, prince of North Wales and a perennial trouble-maker, had taken advantage of King Stephen’s laxity to push his way steadily eastward into England until, by 1157, he was threatening to capture the city of Chester. As far as Henry was concerned, the Welsh were a minor nuisance whom he had been able to place at the bottom of his priorities list; now, with both England and the mainland at peace, he was no longer content to leave the Welsh situation in this unsatisfactory state. While Eleanor supervised the routine business of government, Henry assembled an army and a fleet, hired archers from Shropshire, and ordered supplies of grain, cheese, and sixty casks of wine from Poitou.
Toward the end of July, he started out from Chester, working his way along the river Dee toward Rhuddlan, where he intended to join forces with his fleet. Before he had proceeded many miles, however, he realized that the Welsh might be more than he had bargained for. Despite his considerable experience in warfare, he had never before encountered fighters like the men of North Wales, who, evidently, had not heard of chivalry or rules of war. Essentially guerrillas, they never fought on level ground if there were forests or mountains about; they disdained niceties such as armor and the etiquette of capturing and ransoming knights. Instead, they cut off their enemies’ heads. Owain’s forces fell upon the English with such ferocity that the royal standard toppled to the ground, and Henry himself was believed dead. In the end, after sustaining heavy losses, Henry only just escaped with his life and managed to reach Rhuddlan and his navy. At that point, the king had had enough of the Welsh. Even though North Wales was by no means subdued, he established a truce with Owain and, Welsh encroachment into his kingdom checked for the moment, hurried back to Chester.
Immediately, Henry embarked on the next project on his agenda—a tour of England that would take him into every corner of his kingdom. Without returning to London, he summoned his entire court to join him at Chester. Becket, Richard of Luci, Robert of Leicester, and a host of minor officials hurried north, but Eleanor, eight months pregnant, remained behind at Westminster. In the last week of August, Henry began moving south through Warwickshire to Malmesbury, Windsor, Woodstock, and Oxford. Eleanor may have been feeling neglected, and no doubt she had been thoroughly frightened by Henry’s near death, for suddenly, with the birth of her child imminent, she left the palace and hastened to Oxford, where she joined the court caravan. Her husband’s conscientiousness in visiting every hamlet in England was all very well, but there must have been times when she was not content to languish, alone and pregnant. On September 8, at Beaumont Palace, just within the city gates of Oxford, she gave birth to another son, and the pipe rolls recorded an expenditure of twenty shillings for the lying-in. The child was christened Richard, although why this particular name was selected is not clear, since there had been no Richards in either the queen’s or the king’s immediate families. Perhaps the boy was named for Richard of Luci, whom both of them respected. A woman of Saint Albans, Hodierna, was chosen as nurse, and she cared for him together with her own son, who had been born on the same day. Hodierna and the infants may possibly have joined the royal progress, but it is more likely that Eleanor, so fearfully conscious of the high risks of infancy after William’s death, may have felt reluctant to expose Richard to the ardors of travel at so tender an age.
There is no question that she had a special feeling about this son from the outset, making it quite clear to Henry that Richard would be her heir and designating him as the future duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou as she had done with her dead son. A prophecy attributed to Merlin the Magician, whose anonymous predictions were generally regarded as a foreshadowing of the destinies of Henry II and his family, focused pointedly on this powerfully close relationship between Eleanor and her third-born son: “The eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third nesting.” Those who made it their business to interpret prophecies declared that the eagle could only be divorced Eleanor “because she spread out her wings over two realms, France and England” and that her third nesting must be Richard, who “strove in all things to bring glory to his mother’s name.” Bending the facts to fit, the chroniclers conveniently overlooked one thing: While Richard was indeed Eleanor’s third son, he was her sixth child. Daughters, evidently, did not count, either with the wizards or their interpreters.
During the next year, Eleanor and Henry would travel, at a conservative estimate, over 3,500 miles, and even though the medieval nobility took for granted a peripatetic mode of life, with frequent moves from castle to castle, this distance was beyond the ordinary. On the orderly, well-disciplined chevauchees of Eleanor’s father and ex-husband, everything proceeded according to rule. The itinerary was planned in advance, its stages duly announced and strictly adhered to so that every subject who had business with the king knew exactly when and where to find him. Every member of the royal party, from the chancellor and chaplain to the porters and laundresses, knew when the retinue would arrive and depart. Eleanor’s own chevauchées through England and Aquitaine hewed to a precise schedule, with the early part of the day devoted to business meetings and audiences, the later to socializing. A progress, no matter the country, had always been an exciting experience for Eleanor, and some of her happiest memories were her childhood travels. Touring with Henry, however, proved to be an entirely different matter and one that her contemporaries likened to a passage through the underworld.
When Henry promised to spend the day in a certain place, even if he had ordered his herald to publicly proclaim his intention, Eleanor could be quite sure that he would suddenly change his mind and decide to leave the town at daybreak. Then pandemonium would break out, with people rushing about as if they were insane, beating their packhorses and driving mulecarts into one another. Those who had been bled the previous night or who had taken a laxative were compelled to join the exodus regardless of their physical distress or be left behind. In vain did the courtiers protest their discomfort, for the word consideration did not exist in Henry’s vocabulary, at least not on business trips. If, on the other hand, he announced that he would set out early the next morning, Eleanor took it for granted that he would sleep until noon, while the loaded sumpter horses stood waiting with their burdens and the court prostitutes and the vintners took advantage of the delay to do a bit of business. Finally, the enormous royal train, numbering over 250 persons, would straggle down the highroad, but where it might stop next, no one ever knew. “When our courtiers had gone ahead almost the whole day’s ride,” wrote the royal clerk Peter of Blois,
the king would turn aside to some other place which had perhaps one single dwelling with accommodation for himself and no one else. I hardly dare say it, but I believe that in truth he took a delight in seeing what a fix he put us in. After wandering some three or four miles in an unknown wood, and often in the dark, we thought ourselves lucky if we stumbled upon some filthy hovel. There were often a sharp and bitter argument about a mere hut, and swords were drawn for possession of lodgings which pigs would have shunned.
Henry’s way of conducting the government by fits and starts bewildered his courtiers and vexed his queen, even though she must have understood that his unpredictable movements did not always spring from mere caprice or perversity. He always had a reason, usually known only to himself, but nonetheless there was method to his disorganization. When he dragged them in one day over a distance that should have taken three or four, Eleanor saw that it was to forestall some bureaucratic disaster; when he made unscheduled stops, it was to catch his officials unawares and check if they were attending properly to their duties. Still, his management of everyday business was not terribly efficient. “He was slow in settling the business of subjects, whence it happened that many, before their affairs were settled, died or departed from him dejected and empty-handed.”
Physical comforts were unimportant to Henry. But even though “the discomforts of dust and mud he suffered patiently.” others cursed and complained about “the miseries of court life” throughout the entire tour. For Eleanor, the racket and disorder, the weariness of constant travel, were bad enough, but the meals were the worst trial of all. The bread was half-baked, the fish four days old, the wine sour or thick or greasy and always reeking of pitch from the cask. There were nights when she was served wine so muddy that she had to close her eyes and filter the liquid through clenched teeth. The meat, half-cooked, was tainted and foul, and, as Peter of Blois vividly remarks, they had to “fill our bellies with carrion and become graves for sundry corpses.” There was nothing, evidently, that Eleanor could do to improve the court’s incredibly low standard of living. Despite her capacity for roughing it, she was very particular in her domestic habits. Nevertheless, everyone, the fastidious queen included, resigned himself sooner or later.
By December, the royal progress was back in the north of England, and Christmas court was held in Lincoln. The new year of 1158 opened in the far northern reaches of the country, where Henry insisted on inspecting the garrisons of castles he had taken from the Scots. In mid-January, they began to perambulate down through the center of the island, through Yorkshire, then into Nottinghamshire, where Eleanor and Henry stopped at their royal residences of Blyth and Nottingham, and finally into Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. By Easter they were in Worcester, where Henry devised a novel idea: He decided that he and the queen would renounce their crowns. The trappings of royalty had always meant a great deal to Eleanor; the elaborate pageants at Christmas and Easter, the solemn placing of the crown upon her head, the formal processions into church, and the ceremonies surrounding the king and queen’s offering and communion were highly gratifying. Nevertheless, at the offertory after Easter Mass, she and Henry laid their crowns upon the altar, vowing never to wear them again. Henry was pleased by the gesture, Eleanor no doubt less so. That year of touring with her husband must have been a disheartening, although enlightening, experience. Nothing had turned out as she expected. Long accustomed to luxury, she who had doted on gracious living, fine wines, and exquisite victuals had now spent eight months under conditions so vile that a peasant would have balked, and now she no longer had even a crown to show for it. Her feelings of discomfort were no doubt maximized during this period, because after Christmas she found herself pregnant again, for the fifth time in six years.
In the following months the court toured through Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Carlisle. Toward the end of July, they reached Winchester, where, fatigued and nervous after their long months of the road, they disbanded. When Henry departed for the Continent in the second week of August, Eleanor could not have been terribly sorry to see him go. She was eight months pregnant, and if she had planned on a rest, it was not forthcoming. Back at Westminster, which now must have appeared the most magnificent palace in the world, she immersed herself in work again. A writ issued in favor of Malmesbury Abbey and dated at this period reveals her as having viceregal powers, meaning that she was serving as coregent with Richard of Luci. On September 23, 1158, without fuss or fanfare and almost seeming to be an afterthought, she gave birth to another son, Geoffrey, and immediately went back to work. According to the pipe rolls, a considerable amount of business was conducted in the queen’s court that autumn, some of it, evidently, requiring her to leave London. She traveled through Hampshire, Kent, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Devonshire, and we know that on November 29 she was in the south of England, at Salisbury, because she issued a judgment on behalf of Matilda, countess dowager of Chester, as well as a certificate confirming a quit-claim. There was no time to think of troubadours or poetry, only trials to be concluded and orders to be dispatched “by writ of the king from Overseas.” By this time she had proved herself capable of replacing her husband in every way, and she had accomplished more than he was capable of; she had peopled Westminster with three male heirs.
In later years it would be suggested that every unpleasant trait exhibited by her sons must have been due to the manner in which she raised them. To establish the unfairness in such a charge, one only has to look at Eleanor’s activities during her childrens’ infancies to understand that she had small role in their upbringing. There were nurses to feed her children, comfort them when they cried, teach them how to speak, dose them with medicines when necessary, even chew their meat before they had teeth. If Eleanor was a remote figure, Henry was even worse in this respect, for he was rarely at home, and when he was, he had little time or inclination for romping with toddlers. The discipline, which was a medieval father’s primary duty, the scoldings, beatings, and admonitions to show “no glad cheer lest the child wax proud,” he largely ignored. At the same time, however, his children were never far from his thoughts, which may have been what Gerald of Wales meant when he wrote that “on his legitimate children he lavished in their childhood more than a father’s affection but in their more advanced years he looked askance at them after the manner of a stepfather.” It is true that he and Eleanor spoiled their children in their formative years, but not necessarily with physical affection or attention. Henry, especially, dreamed immense dreams on behalf of his offspring, planning for them glorious futures that would reflect on the family and, not so incidentally, extend the power of the Angevin empire. Family, empire, children—these three were all that mattered to Henry and, as time passed, to Eleanor as well. Between them, they had created an empire as well as a dynasty to accompany it; their children would be the most fortunate youngsters in the world. Even as early as 1158, politics for Eleanor and Henry had come to mean a family affair and the children a means of extending their political influence.
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