Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online

Authors: Marion Meade

Eleanor of Aquitaine (45 page)

BOOK: Eleanor of Aquitaine
3.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Louis Capet, normally the last to traffic in domestic gossip, was not, nevertheless, so myopic that he could allow these odd rumors and reports to slide by without further investigation, especially since he counted the queen in her capacity as duchess of Aquitaine as one of his vassals and more especially since he had been engaged in a desultory war with Henry for the past year. Throughout 1168 Louis had sent raiding parties into the Vexin, and Henry had burnt villages along the French border; the skirmishes had been interspersed with cease-fires and feeble attempts on Louis’s part to patch up their differences by diplomacy. If neither force nor diplomacy had proved effective in breaking up Henry’s empire, perhaps yet another way remained. Louis was a slow man, and his ideas were never flashy nor executed with the electricity that marked some of Henry’s programs. Louis chewed over imponderables until, sometimes, he was able to devise an inspired course of action. All things were possible if one had the patience to wait, and although Louis at forty-nine could obviously not wait forever, his strivings might not necessarily be in vain if Dieu-Donné could reap the harvest.
To break the diplomatic deadlock and secure peace in France and in Henry’s mainland possessions. Louis proposed that Henry partition his empire among his three oldest sons; he should cede the counties of Anjou and Maine to Prince Henry, not quite fourteen, and then the boy might do homage to Louis for his lands. Likewise Richard should receive the duchy of Aquitaine and Geoffrey the duchy of Brittany on the same basis. To sweeten the pot, Louis offered to give Richard the hand of Alais, his daughter by Constance of Castile and the sister of Princess Marguerite. Although one might imagine that Henry would have seen through this thinly veiled attempt to divide and conquer, he did not. As we have seen, he was prey to intense anxiety that his sons might have to fight for their inheritances as he had. The surest way to provide for an orderly succession would be for them to do homage to the king of France while Henry was still alive. In fact, the more he thought about the idea, the more it appealed to him, and undeniably it fit perfectly into his cherished plan to have Prince Henry annointed king of England during his lifetime. Altogether, the arrangements suggested by Louis would provide him with some desperately needed peace of mind. If it occurred to him that Louis might be attempting to weaken his empire by driving a wedge between father and sons, he surely discounted the notion. He was not in the habit of crediting Louis with guile or even ordinary astuteness, and in any case, he had no intention of hacking up these grants to his sons with any real authority. They were, after all, mere babes.
On the feast of Epiphany, January 6, 1169, Henry and Louis conferred at Montmirail, on the border of Maine near Chartres. Both potentates arrived with imposing retinues, especially Henry, who was accompanied by his three sons, each of them decked out in his finest clothes and surrounded with a household of knights and barons. Obviously glorying in this opportunity to show off his handsome offspring, Henry was in unusually high spirits that day. He opened the parley with a flowery speech of the variety that he rarely bothered to make. “My lord King,” he said to Louis, “on this feast of Epiphany, commemorating the day on which the three kings offered gifts to the King of Kings, I commend my three sons and my lands to your safekeeping.”
Louis swept his gaze over Eleanor’s three sons and made the kind of holier-than-thou rejoinder that always succeeded in annoying Henry. “Since the King who received those gifts from the Magi seems to have inspired your words, may your sons, when they take possession of their lands, do so as in the presence of our Lord.”
Allowing this lesson on the duties of a vassal to pass without comment, Henry proceeded to renew his homage to Louis for his Continental possessions and promised to return castles and lands he had taken from the Aquitainian rebels, many of whom were now refugees in France. Once these formalities had been taken care of, the conference shifted emphasis from the older generation to the younger. The next day, Henry brought forth his namesake, his pride and joy, Prince Henry, and watched proudly as the boy placed his hands in the palm of his father-in-law to render homage for his provinces of Anjou, Brittany, and Maine. (He had already done homage for Normandy in 1160.) To show his regard for the lad, Louis bestowed on him the post of seneschal of France. Then eleven-year-old Richard stepped forward to be confirmed in his inheritance of his mother’s lands, that magnificent dower that had slipped through Louis’s fingers seventeen years earlier, and to Richard he presented his future bride. Nine-year-old Alais Capet, orphaned at birth, was handed over to the Plantagenets to be reared in their court. And finally, Geoffrey, now ten, made his appearance to receive Louis’s consent to his marriage with the heiress of Brittany. It was arranged that later in the year he would do homage to his brother Henry for his patrimony.
For the witnesses and spectators at Montmirail, it had been a confusing two days, and even afterward, they would have difficulty making sense out of these happenings. Most perplexing was why the acquisitive Henry had agreed to this division of his hard-earned lands to boys who had yet to be knighted. One theory held that he secretly planned to take the cross and depart for the Holy Land, others contended that he had been offered the Holy Roman Empire and therefore could well afford to dispose of his mainland holdings. And why did Eleanor remain sequestered in Poitiers? And why had Henry agreed to Richard’s betrothal to Alais, making it possible for Aquitaine to one day be pulled back into Frankish domains? But there seemed to be no answers to these questions.
Among the spectators at Montmirail sat one man who watched the investitures with ill-concealed impatience. Thomas Becket had not seen Henry since their furious combat at Northampton four years earlier. For the archbishop, those had been years of prayer, study, and harsh, self-administered penances, a life of solitude far from the dazzling arena of kings and courts. As for Henry, time had accomplished what reason could not. Finally, he had succeeded in pushing Becket from the forefront of his concerns; or perhaps more accurately, he had faced more pressing problems in quelling various insurrections in his estates. By now, Becket had become a nuisance and a distraction—in fact, Becket had become an irritant for many people—because if Henry was willing to drop the quarrel, the aggrieved archbishop was not. Victory was his
raison
d’être, and he pursued Henry with all the indefatigable ardor of a rejected mistress. From the Abbey of Pontigny and later Saint Columba’s Abbey near Sens, he pestered Henry with scolding letters urging penance and reflection upon wrongdoings and reminding him that he was the king’s spiritual father. He collected works on canon law and spent his days working up an airtight case against the arrogant Plantagenet. He swamped Europe with a river of self-pitying correspondence in which he pressed for redress of his grievances. No suffering equaled his: There was, he wrote, no grief “like unto my grief.” While Henry ignored the letters, other incidents moved him to fits of blind rage, which Thomas could inspire so successfully. On Whitsunday 1166, Thomas had celebrated Mass at Vézelay. At the conclusion of the service, he had excommunicated all of Henry’s officers who had committed crimes, either against his person or against the see of Canterbury. Exempting Henry, who, he had heard, was ill, he had limited himself to a stiff denunciation and a warning that if the king continued to persecute the Church, he too would soon be bound by the chains of anathema. When reports of these holy thunderbolts had reached Henry at Chinon, he had turned his wrath upon his court, accusing everyone in sight of being a traitor who lacked the courage and enterprise to rid him of the pestilential archbishop. Thomas, he had cried, would not be happy until he had deprived him of body and soul.
Nevertheless, by 1169, the controversy had dragged on too long for the comfort of all parties, especially the papacy, and even Henry grew anxious for Thomas’s return to England, if for no other reason than that he wished the archbishop to crown Prince Henry. Becket was the last item on the agenda at Montmirail. It was late in the afternoon of the second and final day when his tall, gaunt figure crossed the thronged field to where the two kings waited. Approaching Henry, he slumped to his knees and began to weep, but Henry quickly caught him by the hand and raised him to his feet. With burning eyes and a humility that he had not displayed in recent years, he began his capitulation by pleading for Henry’s mercy, both for himself and the Church of England. Finally, he came to the words for which everyone was waiting. “On the whole matter which is in dispute between us, my lord king, in the presence of our lord the King of France and the archbishops, princes, and others who stand around us, I throw myself on your mercy and your pleasure.” But then, to the consternation of all present, he added “saving the honor of God!” At these words, which nullified his capitulation, Henry unleashed a stream of abuse, most of it somewhat irrationally centered on the luxurious life that Becket had lived at his expense while chancellor. Finally, he turned to Louis and said:
My lord, this man foolishly and vainly deserted his church, secretly fleeing by night, although neither I nor anyone else drove him out of the kingdom.... I have always been willing and am now to allow him to rule over his church with as much freedom as any of the saints who preceded him. But take note of this, my lord, that whenever he disapproves of something, he will say it is contrary to God’s honor and so always get the better of me. Let me offer this, so that no one shall think me a despiser of God’s honor.... Let him behave toward me as the most saintly of his predecessors behaved toward the least saintly of mine, and I will be satisfied.
 
The field rang with an approving chorus of “Hear! Hear! Fair offer! The king has humbled himself!” Even Louis seemed impressed. Turning to the archbishop, who had remained silent, he said: “My lord archbishop, the peace you desire has been offered. Why do you hesitate? Do you wish to be more than a saint?”
It was a question that only time would answer.
One hundred and twenty-five miles to the south, in her high tower above the rivers encircling Poitiers, the duchess of Aquitaine observed the feudal world of kings and archbishops with a skeptical eye, especially the pledges that her husband had made in the presence of that august assembly at Montmirail. Never having known Henry to willingly relinquish power, at least no more of it than was absolutely necessary, she, too, may have pondered the implications of his actions. He was thirty-five; obviously he did not mean to give up his titles or lands in favor of his sons until his death, an eventuality that still lay some distance in the future. And, yet, the acts of homage rendered by their sons were not merely prospective but immediate. They made Prince Henry and Richard the legal count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, respectively, not under the suzerainty of their father but under the direct overlordship of Louis Capet. In the case of Aquitaine, the practical result of Montmirail was that the duchy now had two dukes. At best, it was a complicated state of affairs, in which Henry’s anxieties had triumphed over common sense and in which the only advantages could accrue to their sons—and to the French crown. If Henry did not see through Louis’s scheming, Eleanor did, and for once she may have felt a grudging respect for her ex-husband. At that point, however, she was much too busy to allow herself to be drawn into any controversy with Henry over these matters.
When Eleanor had returned to Poitiers in 1168, she came with the intention of restoring peace to her domains. That she was not immediately permitted a free hand we know from the presence of Earl Patrick and the fact that Henry himself spent the spring and summer of 1169 in Poitou and Gascony, presumably for the purpose of restoring order. But after his departure in August 1169, he seems to have maintained a hands-off policy. Some historians give the impression that Eleanor kept continuous court at Poitiers for the next five-year period, never stirring from behind the city walls. The fact is, she traveled extensively in her own lands and from time to time in Henry’s mainland provinces. During those years, her name crops up in the chronicles as being present at Falaise, Chinon, and other Plantagenet castles, nearly always on some occasion involving the children.
Just as her contemporaries were mystified by the private arrangements she had made with Henry, neither is it easy from the distance of eight hundred years to understand either her personal or her political relationship with the king of England. On the face of it there seems to have been, as we would say today, an amicable separation in which each observed a live-and-let-live policy. But this certainly fails to paint a complete picture. From everything we know of Henry, he was too much the autocrat to allow Eleanor total freedom in ruling a duchy he considered nominally his. On the other hand, curiously enough, he appears to have done precisely that. As long as Eleanor did nothing to jeopardize his interests, as long as she cooperated in matters concerning the children and pretended to be his loyal wife, then he did not interfere. Actually, in the short run, there were undeniable advantages; not only was he able to save face and avoid an open acknowledgment that he could not rule Aquitaine, but furthermore—and no doubt this was a consideration—he neatly rid himself of a wife he no longer desired.
By 1169, Eleanor could not have dodged an incontrovertible reality: She was no longer young. In fact, at forty-seven, she was at an age that the twelfth century considered rather past middle age and somewhat into the realm of the elderly. Life expectancy varied. If a man survived childhood, he could expect to live to his thirties; if he survived his thirties, then he had a good chance of living until the fifties. A woman’s life was far more hazardous. If she survived her child-bearing years—and many women did not—she might live perhaps a few years longer than her husband. In the opinion of one chronicler, life beyond the age of fifty was undesirable, the afflictions of the elderly arousing more horror than pity. While still a stunning woman, Eleanor was no longer the young belle who had dazzled the world from Bordeaux to Antioch, not even the mature beauty whose perfect ripeness had lured young Henry Plantagenet and inspired sweet rhymes from Bernard of Ventadour. Called the flower of the world so often that she had come to believe it, she was now forced to acknowledge the deadly passage of time and the fact that a fresher blossom, the girl that people called Rosa Mundi, had taken her place. What remained to her at forty-seven were her children, especially her heir, Richard, and her heritage, and to these she gave herself wholesale. Their cause became hers.
BOOK: Eleanor of Aquitaine
3.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Vampires Need Not...Apply? by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff
Doll by Nicky Singer
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
A Shroud for Jesso by Peter Rabe
Deceptive Nights by Sylvia Hubbard