Eleanor of Aquitaine (54 page)
Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Such daydreams made Eleanor nervous. Although she could find little to like or trust about the bloodless Philip, it was apparent that her sons did not feel the same way. The Young King had preferred to spend his time in Paris, and now Geoffrey was following in his footsteps. During the year that Eleanor stayed on the Continent, Geoffrey lived with Philip Augustus at the Cite Palace, as close, some said, as a blood brother. Dissatisfied with his inheritance of Brittany, he stood now on this side of the Franco-Norman border, now on that, wavering between loyalty to his father and loyalty to Philip, who had made him seneschal of France. William of Newburgh claimed that “while engaged in active service with the King of France, he made great efforts to annoy his father.” The conspiracy they were hatching—an invasion of Normandy —Eleanor could only guess at. Leaving Geoffrey to his scheming, she returned to England with Henry on April 27, 1186. Three months later, on August 19, Geoffrey and his horse were thrown to the ground in a tournament at Paris. When he refused to yield to the knights who had attacked him, “he was so trodden by the hoofs of the horses and so severely shaken by the blows that he shortly finished life.” His body was laid on the high altar of Notre Dame, and “there he was buried with but few regrets from his father, to whom he had been an unfaithful son, but with sore grief to the French.” Overcome, Philip Augustus had to be forcibly restrained from throwing himself into the tomb, and the Countess Marie of Champagne, who was present at the requiem, demonstrated her abiding affection for her half brother by establishing a Mass for the repose of his soul.
Of the five male children Eleanor had born to her second husband with such relief and pride, only two remained.
In the autumn of 1187 a wave of consternation rippled throughout Europe. Every appalling portent uttered by the astrologers suddenly seemed to be materializing, not in the local spots where most had expected them but far away, in Outremer: Saladin, the most terrible Saracen of all, had wrenched Jerusalem from Christian hands; the citizens had been massacred and the king of Jerusalem taken captive; and, worst of all, the True Cross and the tomb of Christ had fallen into the hands of “infidel dogs.” The news had not been entirely unexpected by Eleanor, for in early 1185, Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, had visited England to warn of approaching disaster and to beg Henry to defend the Holy Land as king of Jerusalem. At the time, Henry had refused to even consider such a notion. Crusades were for the young and romantic, and instead, he had offered Heraclius fifty thousand marks, an offer that the patriarch had literally spat upon with contempt. Now the fever for crusading that had possessed Eleanor and Louis in the 1150s began to envelop the conscience of Christendom once more. The fall of Edessa, however, was as nothing compared to the idea of Jerusalem itself in the hands of Saladin. Young gallants in every castle and village square talked about taking the cross; King William of Sicily, Joanna Plantagenet’s husband, put on sackcloth and retired to mourn; Pope Urban III died, from grief some said. And Richard Plantagenet, receiving the news late one afternoon in early November, took the cross the next morning near Tours.
When Henry heard of his son’s action, he responded with a grief he had shown only upon the deaths of Becket and the Young King; he withdrew to his chamber and suspended all business for four days. At fifty-four, surely an age at which a man might expect peace, crises threatened him on every side. After siring a fine brood of boys, he was left with an eldest son whom he disliked, a boy as obstinate and headstrong as his wife; but even though he privately accepted Richard as his heir, he would not give him the pleasure of recognizing him as such publicly. For how much trouble had he not reaped by prematurely declaring his intention to the Young King? He had meant to discipline Richard by keeping him uncertain, but now the boy had foolishly run off and taken the cross. Not only was there Richard with whom he must contend but Philip Augustus with his embarrassing questions as well. How many times had he not met the Capetian boy under the elm at Gisors only to hear him complain of his half sisters Marguerite and Alais and their dowers? Why, the young Capetian asked repeatedly, was Alais still a maiden at the age of twenty-seven? When would her marriage to Richard take place? Can a man under suspicion of dishonoring a woman tell her kin that they lie, especially when they are not lying? Loath to give up his mistress, he had promised that the girl would be married soon, without of course committing himself to a definite date. Alais and the custody of the Vexin, these were needles with which Philip Augustus regularly prodded him.
On January 22, 1188, Henry and Philip drew up their retinues under the elm once more. They had scarcely settled down to business, those wearying topics of Alais and the Vexin, when the archbishop of Tyre arrived, having lately traveled across the Mediterranean and over the Alps for the express purpose of stirring Europe to action. By chance he found his way to the elm of Gisors, and so powerful were his exhortations that within a day both Henry and Philip Augustus had taken the cross. It was, people said, a miracle. To others, Eleanor perhaps, Henry’s sudden reversal suggested less lofty motives. A Crusade would, at the very least, distract Philip from his perennial harping about Alais; it would rid Henry of his two main irritants, his son and Louis Capet’s son; and in the end, there might be a way of wriggling out of his Crusader’s vow before the expedition set out, some fifteen months hence.
Back in England in 1188, Henry abruptly sent Eleanor into close confinement again at either Winchester or Salisbury while he solaced himself with Alais Capet and tried to forget Philip’s persistent attempts to harass him. By July, however, it was clear that Philip could be restrained by no other means than force. Despite Henry’s age, corpulence, and increasing ill health, he resolved to tolerate the impudent king of the Franks no longer, even blaspheming before his horrified prelates, “Why should I worship Christ? Why should I deign to honour Him who takes my earthly honour and allows me to be ignominiously confounded by a mere boy?” On August 16, he met with the “mere boy” under the Gisors elm, and for three days listened to Philip’s demands for the retrocession of the Vexin and the marriage of his aging sister. Henry, sitting in the shade, hardly bothered to give his attention. In his opinion, the Norman Vexin rightfully belonged to him. To treat it as the dower of a Capetian bride was wholly beside the point. To Philip, however, the Vexin and Alais were merely proofs of Henry’s bad faith. At some undetermined point in the negotiations, the Franks, who had been sweltering on the sunny side of the elm, suddenly rushed at Henry’s entourage with drawn swords, sending the English to the shelter of the nearby castle. Infuriated, Philip ordered the elm cut down so that no parley might ever take place there again with the treacherous Plantagenets. Seeing the mutilated stump, Henry calmly declared war, but although subsequently he plunged into France to ravage a few castles near Mantes, in truth he had no appetite for fighting.
During the winter of 1188-89, Henry, ill and depressed, stayed at Le Mans in the castle where he had been born. He had developed an anal fistula, and by March it had grown badly abcessed. With him were his illegitimate son, Geoffrey, William Marshal, and perhaps, John. Richard he preferred not to think about. When he had last met with Philip in November, he had been shocked to see Richard among the retinue of the Capetian king. In the hearing of the courtiers, Richard had asked Henry to recognize him as his heir. Henry had refused. “Now,” cried Richard, “at last I believe what heretofore has seemed incredible!” And throwing himself on his knees before Dieu-Donné, he had done homage for all the lands to which he claimed inheritance and had sworn fealty to him as his liege man. Henry’s thirty-one-year-old son had ridden away with Philip, and soon curious reports were drifting back to Le Mans: The Capetian so honored his son that every day they ate from the same dish and at night they slept in the same bed. Such brotherhood was too remarkable not to be widely commented upon; gossip was rife, and people whispered of the sin of Sodom. Henry, ignoring the sexual innuendoes, mourned because he wanted his son back.
After a series of fruitless conferences with Philip in the spring of 1189. Henry returned to Le Mans, even though his bishops and barons warned him that Philip and Richard were leading an army through Maine, taking every castle in their path. It was not until Sunday, June 11, when Philip’s army appeared before the walls of Le Mans, that he was forced to acknowledge the danger. To avoid a battle, Henry ordered one of the suburbs set afire in the hope that he could drive the French away. Suddenly, however, the wind changed, and flames began to suck the walls of the city. In the blaze that followed, the French poured through the gates, while Henry had no choice but to rally his seven hundred knights and flee. On a hill two miles north of the city, he drew rein and turned for a last look at the inferno raging in his birthplace. The bitterness poured out. “O God,” he cried, “Thou hast vilely taken away the city I loved best on earth, the city where I was born and bred, the city where my father is buried. I will pay Thee back as best I can. I will rob Thee of the thing Thou lovest best in me, my soul!” According to Gerald of Wales, he said a great deal more, which the chronicler thought safer not to record.
With Philip and Richard hard on his heels, he pressed furiously north, while William Marshal covered his retreat. Out of a cloud of dust came the vanguard of the French army, with Richard in the lead. Marshal turned and leveled his lance.
“By God’s legs, Marshal,” shouted Richard in his only recorded instance of fear, “do not kill me. I wear no hauberk.”
“May the Devil kill you,” cried Marshal, “for I will not.” With that, he plunged his lance into Richard’s horse.
The day was extremely hot, the road narrow, the retreat confused, and many of Henry’s knights died from heat and fatigue or fell prostrate along the roadside. His advisers counseled him to strike northward to the heart of Normandy, where he could find reinforcements for his army or send to England for help. Although he agreed to send his troops on to Alencon, he himself turned south into Anjou. For two weeks he traversed the backroads that he knew so well, twisting and turning over nearly two hundred miles of trails, somehow evading Philip’s army, which had overrun the province. The killing ride combined with the heat opened his wound, and by the time he reached his great fortress of Chinon, the poison in his blood had virtually robbed him of the use of his legs, and he could neither sit nor stand comfortably. Aware that the roads were infested with Franks, that castle after castle had fallen to them, he clung feebly to Geoffrey and William Marshal. Somehow, in the melee, he had lost his youngest son. Where was John?
At dawn on the morning of Monday, July 3, Philip’s soldiers set up their scaling ladders against the walls of Tours, and by midmorning, the city had fallen. The following day, he summoned Henry to a conference at Ballan, a few miles southwest of the captured city. Racked by intense pain, Henry nevertheless set out from Chinon with William Marshal and a small party of knights to meet his victorious enemy. When they reached the house of the Knights Templar in Ballan, he was so exhausted that he fell upon a cot. “Marshal, sweet gentle sir,” Henry said, “a cruel pain has seized my toes and feet and is piercing my legs. My whole body is on fire.” Some of his knights rode off to the conference site to inform Philip that the king was ill, but Richard warned that his father was feigning; no doubt he had another trick up his sleeve. Stung when he learned of his son’s taunt, Henry made a supreme effort to rise and ordered his knights to seat him on his horse.
It was a clear sultry day, the sky cloudless and the air still. As Henry advanced toward Philip and Richard, a clap of thunder was heard and then another. At the sight of Henry’s ashen face, Philip, moved to pity, hurriedly ordered a cloak to be folded and placed on the ground so that Henry might sit. He had not come to sit, Henry replied, but to learn the price he must pay for peace. Remaining on his horse, his men holding him upright, he listened as the humiliating terms were read. He was to do homage to the king of France for all his Continental possessions. He was to place himself wholly at Philip’s will and pay an indemnity of twenty thousand marks. He must give up Alais Capet so that Richard might marry her on his return from Jerusalem. He must agree to Richard receiving the fealty of his father’s subjects on both sides of the sea as lawful heir to the Plantagenet lands. As a pledge of his good faith, he must surrender three major castles in Anjou or the Vexin, and to prevent him from taking revenge on any of his barons who had deserted to the Frankish camp, it was stipulated that they would not return to the king’s service until a month before the start of the Crusade.
Rolls of thunder rent the afternoon sky as Henry murmured his assent and motioned his knights for departure. Philip stopped him. He must give his son the kiss of peace. As Richard advanced for the embrace, Henry drew back and whispered fiercely, “God grant that I may not die until I have had a fitting revenge on you.”
An ailing lion savaged by jackals, he was carried back to Chinon on a litter, cursing the day he was born and calling down Heaven’s wrath on his son. In his fortress high above the Vienne, physicians were summoned, but the king, groaning on his couch, lay far beyond the reach of their potions. He had left behind one of his men, Roger Malchael, to secure from Philip a list of those who had deserted him and who were to be exempt from punishment. When Roger returned with the parchment and began to read, his voice suddenly failed. “Sire, may Jesus Christ help me!” he exclaimed. “The first name written here is Count John, your son.”
The king gave an anguished cry. “Is it true that John, my heart, John whom I loved more than all my sons and for whose sake I have suffered all these evils, has forsaken me?” Turning his face to the wall, he motioned Roger away. “Say no more. Now let the rest go as it will. I care no more for myself nor for aught in this world.”
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