Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (48 page)
While the body still lay warm on the pavement, some of the townsfolk of Canterbury smeared their eyes with blood. “Others brought bottles and carried off secretly as much of it as they could. Others cut off shreds of clothing and dipped them in the blood. Later, no one would be satisfied if they had not carried off something from the precious treasure of the martyr’s body. And indeed, with everything in such a state of confusion and tumult, each man could do as he pleased.... Thus the night passed in lamentation and mourning, groans and sighs.”
By New Year’s Day 1171, Henry had dismissed his Christmas court and moved on to Argentan, where he prepared to hold a meeting with his advisers. There he received news of the murder in the cathedral.
At the messenger’s first words, the king burst into loud cries of grief and changed his royal robes for sackcloth and ashes. Indeed he behaved as though he were the friend rather than the king of the dead man. At times he fell into a stupor but then he would begin groaning again and calling out more loudly and bitterly than before. For three whole days he remained shut up in his room and would take neither food nor admit any who wished to comfort him. It began to seem that his grief was so extreme that he had made up his mind to die himself. We began to despair of the king’s life.
For forty days, Henry abstained from all business, exercise, and amusements, remaining alone within the walls of his palace, sighing and groaning and repeating, “What a disaster that this terrible thing should have happened.”
At Winchester, the Young King lamented briefly for the man he had once called father. “What a pity!” he said, raising his eyes to heaven, “but thank God it was kept a secret from me and that no liege-man of mine was involved in it.” One cannot help but read the insensitivity in his words.
To the queen, withdrawn behind her own borders, the assassination and its aftermath must have seemed a nightmare from which she too wished to disassociate herself. The murder of Thomas Becket profoundly shocked Europe. Many people said that it was the most terrible thing to have happened since the Crucifixion, and Archbishop William of Sens, a friend of Becket’s, did not exaggerate public sentiment when he described the deed as surpassing the cruelty of Herod, the perfidy of Julian, and the treachery of Judas. “Almost everyone,” wrote William of Newburgh, “laid the death of the blessed martyr at the king’s door.” Everyone included Eleanor and the children, for who knew better than they the anguish caused by Henry’s insane, self-indulgent rages? The death of Thomas soon proved not an ending but a beginning: unceasing processions of pilgrims coming to Canterbury, the miracles people swore took place at the tomb, the prompt movement for the martyr’s canonization. As if to prove that saints and martyrs rule from the tomb, Becket reached out to taunt Henry more effectively than he had ever done in life. The king became the most hated man in Europe, and even though he had written to the monks of Canterbury and to Pope Alexander declaring that he had never desired Thomas’s death, he had, nevertheless, not seen fit to punish the murderers, and thus few believed in his innocence. His prestige at a record low, the storm of censure blowing without letup, he decided to undertake his long-postponed conquest of Ireland, a remote outpost of the world beyond the reach of papal legates who were threatening to excommunicate him.
At Poitiers, life slumbered along much as it had before. The carved saints adorning the Maubergeonne Tower caught the evening sun, the valley below undulated in waves of violet mist, and later the evenings throbbed with the strains of viol and lute and the aching beauty of the poets’ songs. The night breezes swept into the Great Hall, where the ladies amused themselves with petitions to their court of love, and in the gardens and foyers the gilded youth talked of love and tournaments. They laughed and danced as if tomorrow would never dawn, and in fact, there seemed to be no good reason why their days would not drift on forever in this same joyous way. With so much evil afoot in the world, when an archbishop could be hacked to death before the altar of his own cathedral, how fortunate the children of Henry Plantagenet felt to be sheltered in their mother’s domains, a silken cocoon of civility and sanity.
Life at the ducal palace moved slowly, and why not? There was no hurry. A high value was placed on amenities, especially on the art of conversation—intellectual, philosophical, and, of course, political. They spoke of Becket as a great man, a saint, and they discussed in clinical detail the aberrations of Henry Plantagenet. And they also talked of Louis Capet, whose defects now seemed delightful idiosyncrasies compared to the glaring irregularities in the character of the king of England. Time had done much to heal Eleanor’s rancor toward her first husband; that desolate year in Jerusalem, the death of Raymond of Antioch, that dreadful, helpful smile of Pope Eugenius’s at Tusculum-all these anguished memories had become mere silt in some far corner of her mind where they no longer had the power to hurt and humiliate. Louis, she was told, had grown mellow and wonderfully childlike. He played chess, dined frugally with the monks, and fell asleep in unlikely places. Once Marie’s husband had found him dozing under a tree on a summer’s day with only two servants nearby, and when the count had reproved him, Louis had only smiled serenely and replied, “Although I’m alone, I sleep free from danger for no one wishes to harm me.” To those at Poitiers, the remark seemed pregnant with significance, especially when they tried to imagine Henry making such a statement. In fact, Louis had been known to compare himself with the English king. To Gerald of Wales he had remarked, “Thy master, the king of England, lacks nothing. To him belong men, horses, gold, silk, gems, fruits, wild beasts and all things else. As for us in France, all we have is bread, wine and joy.” Bread, wine, joy and, for the moment at least, the psychological upper hand over Henry.
Slowly, Eleanor was edging out of the Plantagenet orbit and moving back toward the Capets. There was nothing definite about this, no meetings or letters that informers might report to Henry, perhaps nothing that even Eleanor herself could have recognized as a specific turning. If there was a conspiracy at that point, it was more a meeting of minds, at one in their contempt for Henry, a feeling shared by most of Europe. Not surprisingly, Eleanor’s three older boys had been deeply affected by the events at Canterbury, but not in the way one might imagine. Only to young Henry had Becket meant anything personal; to Richard and Geoffrey, their father’s great friendship was only a story people told. They themselves had been too young to remember. It was, rather, the universal condemnation heaped upon their father that helped to shatter their image of him. If he had once been a hero for them, this had not been true for several years, and by 1171, being the son of the king of England did not hold the prestige of former days. The chronicles give the impression that Henry’s sons turned against him overnight and suddenly began to hate the father they had once adored. It is doubtful, in the first place, whether they had ever adored him. Feared and respected, undoubtedly, but loved, no. He was a remote figure, a larger-than-life apparition who would roar into their lives at Christmas or Easter after an absence of months or sometimes years to suddenly announce some honor he had arranged on their behalf; he would pluck them from their nurseries and tiltyards to receive the homage of a king or prince and then seemingly forget them again. But they could not forget him, his terrifying rages, his incomprehensible quarrels with the queen, his love for the woman at Woodstock.
As Eleanor moved about her court, hearing Richard recite a poem he had written or watching the pleasure on young Henry’s face as he prepared for a tournament, she must have known that they spoke of their father with fierce disrespect, that soon after Montmirail they were quarreling among themselves over their prospective inheritances, bragging and sniping like little boys trying to divide a too-small sweet. Possibly she accepted their quarrels philosophically and laughed about them, as Geoffrey would do later when he said, “Don’t you know that it is our nature to quarrel, our heritage that none of us should love the other?” Richard, too, was fond of joking about their demon Angevin ancestors, and he often repeated Abbot Bernard’s famous words when he first met their father, “From the devil they came, to the devil they will go.”
By 1172, the three oldest Plantagenet boys were no longer children who could be trotted out to perform on ceremonial occasions. Now seventeen, fifteen, and fourteen, they were young men of distinct but diverse personalities. The Young King was every twelfth-century woman’s idea of a fairy-tale prince: “The most handsome prince in all the world, whether Saracen or Christian.” Apparently, he had inherited the good looks of his grandfather, Geoffrey Anjou, and the chroniclers take great pains to describe his superficial attractions. “He was beautiful above all others in both form and face,” declared Walter Map, “most blessed in breathing courtesy, most happy in the love of men and in their grace and favour ... he was a man of unprecedented skill in arms.” There is no doubt that his affability and his reputation for being a “fountain of largesse” helped him to attract a large following among his own generation. Like his mother, he had a taste for splendor, and he also prided himself on being the epitome of generosity and hospitality. Stories of his munificence flew about Europe, eventually finding their way into the contemporary histories. Once, he and his friends came to a spring after a tiring day of hunting. When he found that his servants had brought only one skin of wine, he emptied the skin into the water so that his companions might share what little he had. On another occasion, Christmas Day 1172, he invited all the knights in Normandy who bore the name William to share his dinner. One hundred and ten knights, we are told, sat down to a banquet of unprecedented extravagance. This was the public side of young Henry, and if that had been all of him, Eleanor might have had cause to rejoice. But there was more, and the rest of him she must have deplored. He may have been “noble, lovable, eloquent, beautiful, valiant, in every way charming, a little lower than the angels,” but he was also weak, vain, shallow, empty-headed, and irresponsible—traits that his beauty made it easy to overlook, even by those who knew him well and especially by his father, who did not know him at all. He had a talent for saying the wrong thing, the exquisite manners he had learned in the households of Eleanor and Thomas Becket alternating with the most outrageous insensitivity and cruelty.
At the lavish banquet following his coronation in 1170, his father had insisted on serving the Young King himself, as a token of respect for his new exalted rank. Appearing before the boy with a mighty boar’s head, he had smiled and joked, “It is surely unusual to see a king wait upon table.”
“Ah,” retorted the Young King, “but it is not unusual to find the son of a count waiting on the son of a king.”
Henry’s reply to his favorite son, if there was one, has not been recorded.
“Baseness of temper” is how Walter Map describes Eleanor’s eldest son. “Foolishly liberal and spendthrift,” adds Robert of Torigni. “He was a restless youth born for many men’s undoing,” sums up William of Newburgh.
Richard was Eleanor’s favorite, which may have been one reason Henry disliked him. “He was tall in stature, graceful in figure; his hair between red and auburn, his limbs were straight and flexible; his arms rather long, and not to be matched for wielding the sword or for striking with it, and his long legs suited the rest of his frame.” Physically, except for his height, Richard owed his looks to Henry: the reddish hair, ruddy complexion, his athletic prowess, and bold expression. In all other ways, he was Eleanor’s son. Indeed, he was everything she had always sought in a man: a born warrior, a handsome chivalrous knight, a poet and musician, an intellectual. From his mother and his half sister Marie, he had learned to please a woman, and already he could compose delicate, sensuous verse and pay compliments in song to a lady. Blooming in the soil of Aquitaine as though he had been born there, he spoke the langue d’oc whenever possible, and despite his early years in England, cared nothing for the kingdom. He thought it no great honor that his brother would someday wear a king’s crown; all Richard wanted was Aquitaine.
Neither Eleanor nor Henry seemed overly fond of Geoffrey. Considerably shorter than his two brothers, he also lacked their good looks and grace. Even though he possessed intelligence and accomplishments in knightly skills, probably more natural ability in tournaments than young Henry, he was a young man who inspired neither love nor confidence. Gerald of Wales described him as “overflowing with words, soft as oil, possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the seeming indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler.” Roger of Hovedon disposes of Geoffrey in a few words: “Geoffrey, that son of perdition.”
By twelfth-century standards, Eleanor and Henry’s sons were adults. Looking at a world full of exciting opportunities, they grew restless and ambitious, eager to be their own men and take their rightful places in society, but instead, Henry forced them to remain helpless dependents. He had seen fit to honor them with titles, but he still viewed them as children; the authority and revenues accompanying those titles he clutched tightly. One reason, of course, was his inability to relinquish anything that belonged to him, but at the same time, he could never quite accept the fact that his sons had grown up. This is difficult to understand, because at his eldest son’s present age Henry himself was leading armies and planning invasions, and moreover, his own father had already turned over to him the duchy of Normandy. In his youth he had worked hard and played little; life was serious, and crowns had to be won. The younger generation baffled him because he could see no resemblance between himself as a youth and his frivolous sons, especially young Henry, whom he had raised to a station so lofty that no child would have cause to complain. Had he not turned his chancellor into an archbishop so that the boy might be anointed and had he not suffered from that decision as no king had ever suffered? He had given his beloved boy a title, and surely no son had a right to expect more. But now, to his astonishment, the boy actually expected Henry to step down from the throne of England, and others supported his incredible demand:
Afterwards between you and your son a deadly hatred sprung up
Whence many a gentle knight has since lost his life,
Many a man has been unhorsed, many a saddle emptied,
Many a good bucklet pierced, many a hauberk broken.
After his coronation and after his investiture
You filched from your son something of his lordship,
You took away from him his will; he could not get possession.Another reason that Henry had difficulty transferring authority to his sons was that he himself, carefully groomed for kingship since birth, was long accustomed to being the center of attention. As an adult, he continued to expect this kind of special consideration from everyone, his children included. Not having realized emotional maturity himself, he could not comprehend his sons’ attitudes. Eleanor, on the other hand, recognized their immaturity, but she was also capable of understanding their impatience, and she must have strongly identified with them. There was no doubt that their ambitions outran their abilities at that point, but at the same time, deep resentments were building rapidly. She believed there would be no peace in the empire until Henry invested them with power and responsibility in some gradual recognition of their rightful claims. That he would agree to any such system she could never have seriously believed. She knew him too well. When had he ever allowed any member of his family to possess even a morsel of real authority? His voice must always reign supreme.For those who kept track of prophecies and omens, the conflict between Henry Plantagenet and his sons had already been predicted by Merlin. “The cubs shall awake and shall roar aloud and, leaving the woods, shall seek their prey within the walls of the cities; among those who shall be in their way they shall make great carnage and shall tear out the tongues of bulls. The necks of them as they roar aloud they shall load with chains and shall thus renew the times of their forefathers.” As dire prophecies go, this one would turn out to be fairly accurate, save in one detail: The awakened Plantagenet cubs would be led by their mother.
Other books
Amo del espacio by Fredric Brown
What the Heart Keeps by Rosalind Laker
The Untouchable by Rossi, Gina
Thread and Gone by Lea Wait
In Plain Sight by Mike Knowles
Eternal by Cynthia Leitich Smith
The Minstrel's Melody by Eleanora E. Tate
Fifty Shades of Gatsby by Jacobs, Lillian
Attracted to Fire by DiAnn Mills
[Samuel Barbara] The Black Angel(Book4You) by Barbara Samuel
