Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (44 page)
Long before Henry met Rosamond, the ancient manor of Woodstock had been a favorite royal palace. At the time of the Norman Conquest, a Saxon manor stood on the site, and later Henry’s grandfather had built a hunting lodge in the middle of the great forest and surrounded it with a deer park that he then encircled with a stone wall seven miles long. Henry I had had a passion for rare animals, and behind his great wall he collected a menagerie of lions, leopards, lynxes, and even camels. His grandson used Woodstock as a meeting place for sessions of the Great Council, but mainly it was a hunting lodge. One can imagine that such an extraordinary place delighted the Plantagenet children, and perhaps Eleanor too had a special affection for Woodstock with its exotic animals and its treetops arching in vast shadowy caverns.
During those months in 1166 and 1167 when Eleanor struggled with the Breton and Poitevin insurgents at Angers, insistent tales must have drifted across the Channel to be repeated by the courtiers as the choice gossip of the moment. Judging from Gerald of Wales’s remarks, “vain and foolish people” may already have dubbed the new mistress Rose of the World and described her as a fairy princess who had enchanted a king. Eleanor’s extreme reaction to Rosamond Clifford is a continuing mystery to which there are few clues; nothing in her background easily accounts for it. From the outset, Henry’s whoring had been an established part of her marriage, and by that time she would have taken it for granted that none of her household maids were safe with him and that his vassals locked up their wives and daughters when the king entered their neighborhoods. Neither should it be forgotten that Eleanor was a sophisticated woman who came from a region where adultery was not only tolerated but distilled into the wine of troubadour poetry and quaffed regularly to the tune of lute and drum. Her own grandmother, the viscountess of Châtellerault, had been one of the most notorious adulteresses of her generation, whose extramarital escapades had provided young Eleanor with romantic bedtime stories. At any event, no highborn lady of the twelfth century complained very strenuously about her lord’s philandering, no matter how much she may have fumed in private. Lust, a man’s nature, was accepted and ignored. For fifteen years Eleanor had looked the other way, indeed in the case of Henry’s natural son, Geoffrey, she had done more than that, accepting him as a member of the family.
There is no proof at all that she suffered inordinate pangs of sexual jealousy. Granted, it could be true that she suddenly turned into a possessive termagant as she grew older and less desirable to Henry, but on the other hand, long practice had taught her to hide her inward feelings. And, if she had weathered his all-consuming passion for Thomas Becket, she certainly might have overlooked a provincial girl from the Welsh marches. There had been many, many women, too many to count, and luckily the affairs had always blown over quickly. Perhaps that was the trouble: Henry’s feelings for Rosamond were special, like none he had felt before for any woman, Eleanor included, and somehow she became aware of this.
But that was less than half the story. What must have turned her against Henry so irrevocably was his public flaunting of Rosamond. Sometime during his stay in England after the Welsh campaign, he brought Rosamond to Woodstock and installed her with regal honors in Eleanor’s apartments. Apprised of these developments by friends or informers, Eleanor lost no time in making her way toward the vicinity of Oxford once she reached England in 1166. There must have been a compelling reason why a woman whose pregnancy was nearly at term and who might have retired to her comfortable palaces at Westminster or Winchester would prefer to seek instead the spartan atmosphere of Beaumont. One can only guess that Eleanor, determined to investigate firsthand Henry’s latest amour, found Rosamond living like a queen at Woodstock. Evidently reluctant to eject Henry’s sweetheart from the palace, unwilling to remain under the same roof for her lying-in, exhausted and outraged, she must have withdrawn a few miles to the nearest royal sanctuary, which happened to be Beaumont Palace in Oxford.
There is no doubt that Rosamond Clifford touched a nerve in Eleanor, but it was a nerve already raw. Of late her relations with the king had grown steadily worse for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual jealousy. In large part her discontentment stemmed from the gradual waning of her influence. Whatever else Eleanor may have loved, she loved to rule best. To her, queenship meant sharing the regal power; queenship to Henry meant, when all was said and done, a woman who bore children and then had the sense to retire and take up pious work, a woman like his mother. Male and female had their assigned places, after all, and the throne of England was only big enough for one. Slowly, irrefutably, Henry had edged Eleanor further and further from the high place where he sat, and now, to add a gratuitous insult, he publicly honored a concubine, installing her in a palace where the queen had been undisputed mistress. Other queens might sit by helplessly and watch themselves relegated to a secondary role, but Eleanor had the resources to spare herself that humiliation. Before she had ever become queen of France or queen of England, she had been duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitou. Her vassals had never been happy under the rule of foreigners, and now a plan began coiling in her mind, a vision that suggested solutions to both her vassals’ problems as well as her own. How she might put these visions into effect was quite another matter, however.
During the entire year of 1167, Eleanor chose to remain in England, ostensibly to prepare for her daughter’s forthcoming wedding. Although the ceremony would take place in Germany, there was much to be done before Matilda’s departure. Since the princess must arrive in her new land in a style that would reflect the power of England, she must be magnificently accoutered. To that end, Eleanor purchased sixty-three pounds worth of clothing, as well as “2 large silken cloths and 2 tapestries and 1 cloth of samite and 12 sable-skins.” Other purchases recorded in the pipe rolls included twenty pairs of saddlebags and twenty chests, seven saddles gilded and covered with scarlet and thirty-four packhorses. To cover these expenses, Henry took advantage of his royal privileges. He had the right to exact a special aid from his barons on certain occasions: for ransom, in case he was captured in war; for the knighting of his eldest son; and for the marriage of his eldest daughter. Now his tenants were assessed accordingly, but he went further than previous kings by extracting a tax from cities, towns, even the tiniest villages. Altogether, the assessment for Matilda’s trousseau brought in a sum of £4,500, almost one-quarter of the kingdom’s total revenue that year. Obviously, the princess’s bridal outfit did not cost anywhere near that figure, which meant that Henry was left with a handsome profit. In July, envoys arrived to escort Matilda to Germany, and in late September, Eleanor accompanied her daughter to Dover, where the enormous collection of chests, bags, and boxes was loaded onto German ships. One account claims that Eleanor embarked with Matilda, but this appears doubtful; if she did cross to Normandy, she must have returned immediately. At Winchester that fall, she behaved suspiciously like a woman who is about to leave her husband; she collected and packed every movable object that she could call her own in England, and when she finally set sail in December, it required seven ships to transport her accumulated belongings.
During Christmas court, celebrated that year at Argentan in Normandy, she informed Henry that she wished to return to her own estates. We do not know how she broke this news to him, only that she left for Poitiers immediately after Christmas. There was little likelihood that she displayed any open hostility, although Henry would not have been blind to her coolness, and she certainly did not mention divorce. What she seems to have had in mind was an unofficial separation in which she would go her way and the king go his. Whenever it came to disengaging herself from unwanted husbands, a situation into which she had now fallen a second time, she rejected personal or domestic arguments, always concentrating on practical reasons sure to carry political weight. Now, carefully avoiding any exhibition of defiance that might be interpreted as disloyalty and bring the sort of repercussions she had seen falling on Becket’s head, she probably engineered her departure by suggesting that her presence in Aquitaine might help to ease the discord between her vassals and the crown. In setting up an administration of her own, she would attempt to restore the goodwill of her people and bring about a peace that had continued to elude Henry.
There is no doubt that Aquitaine stood on the brink of total rebellion by the time Eleanor returned to the Continent, and in fact, the south had occupied much of the king’s time during the previous year. Forced to spend the first six months of 1167 in Eleanor’s estates, Henry had taken an army of mercenaries into the Auvergne, where the local nobility had ideas of offering their allegiance to Louis Capet, a hope that Louis all too eagerly encouraged. Henry found himself in the position of a person trying to extinguish a roaring conflagration with buckets of water; each time he turned his back, a new blaze ignited. In the end, he agreed to Eleanor’s plan simply because he had little choice. Perhaps those proverbially faithless southerners would respond best to their own duchess.
After Christmas court, Henry and his army personally escorted Eleanor to Poitiers so that on the face of it her return appeared to be part of Plantagenet policy for Aquitaine rather than any personal break between king and queen. By the time Eleanor arrived in her ancestral city, nearly all the land south of the Loire had broken into open rebellion under the leadership of the counts of Angoulême and La Marche, the Lusignan family, and Hugh and Robert of Silly. Girding himself for action, Henry wasted no time in mounting an attack on the fortress of Lusignan, and after capturing and garrisoning the castle, he razed its walls and ravaged the neighboring lands. Most of the ringleaders escaped, although Robert of Silly, who made the mistake of surrendering, was imprisoned and starved to death, Henry probably intending to make an example of him. By March 1168, some of the most noble families of Aquitaine were wandering the roads, homeless, hungry, and reduced to brigandage. Some found their way to the Île-de-France, where Louis’s new foreign policy extended asylum to all Plantagenet enemies.
Aquitaine secure for the present, Henry left Poitiers before Easter and headed for the Norman frontier to attend a peace conference with the king of France. Ever since the birth of Philip Augustus, Louis had been sticking his fingers into Henry’s affairs whenever the opportunity arose, an obvious means of keeping the Plantagenet uneasy. Now war between France and England appeared imminent, although at this point Henry was so beset by enemies that he barely knew in which direction to turn.
Although Eleanor had been left behind in the captured castle at Lusignan, she had not been abandoned to her own devices. Even though Aquitaine seemed quiet, sedition was the southerners’ daily bread, and Henry, aware of Eleanor’s trust in Ralph de Faye, took precautions lest she turn to the wrong person for advice. Rather than appoint her regent, he placed her under the protective custody of Earl Patrick, his military commander for the region, and in view of the unsettled conditions Eleanor may have been content with the arrangement. She soon discovered that Henry’s security had been a mirage.
On March 27, just a few days after Henry’s departure, Eleanor and Earl Patrick were riding near the castle with a small bodyguard. Since the men wore no armor, perhaps the party was hawking. Suddenly, there burst from an ambush a strong force led by two surly Lusignans, who, with the recklessness of those who have nothing more to lose, had decided to capture Eleanor and Earl Patrick and hold them for ransom. Accustomed to dealing with ruffians, Eleanor was off and riding toward the castle once she realized what Geoffrey and Guy de Lusignan had in mind. Earl Patrick called for his war-horse but before he could don his hauberk, he was slain from behind, the Lusignans not being sufficiently chivalrous to wait until their foes armed. As a result of this grievous incident, Eleanor’s attention had been drawn to Earl Patrick’s nephew, a young knight who fought “like a wild boar besieged by hounds” but who had, nevertheless, been captured. Twenty-two-year-old William Marshal was one of those landless younger sons, in fact the son of that same John Marshal whose complaints had brought Becket to Northampton. Knighted only a few months earlier, he had already distinguished himself in several tournaments, and Eleanor was not the first to remark upon his skill with sword and lance. Not only did she arrange for his ransom and release, she “bestowed upon him horses, gold and rich garments, and more than all opened her palace gates and fostered his ambition.” Seeing something special in the young man, those virtues of courtesy, generosity, and perfect loyalty that always touched her, she brought him into her family as tutor, guardian, friend, and companion for Prince Henry, thus paving the way for Marshal’s rise from knight-errant to, five decades later, regent of England.
With the death of Earl Patrick, Henry was too embroiled with other problems during the remainder of 1168 to pay much attention to Aquitaine. For the time being at least, Eleanor was on her own.
In Paris, in Rouen, and in London, there were whispers about the domestic affairs of the Plantagenets. It was noted that the king of England had kept Christmas court at Argentan in 1168, but the queen was nowhere to be seen. She had presided over her own Christmas court in Poitiers with her favorite son, Richard, and several of her younger children. Just as if she had no lord, she administered her duchy with a steady hand, no doubt putting to good use the lessons she had learned while serving her apprenticeship in the English law courts. She was, of course, closely supervised, for no one believed that Henry would cut adrift either his queen or her domains, no matter how troublesome Aquitaine had grown in recent years. There was more to this than met the eye, but exactly what lay behind these unusual arrangements within the English royal family no one could say for certain. Since no enlightenment was forthcoming from either of the principals, the nature of the breach between them—if there was one—remained a mystery to those who made it their business to keep abreast of international happenings.
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