Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (55 page)
The will to live had faded. He lapsed into delirium, sometimes appearing to sleep, occasionally breaking into wild moans of grief and pain. His son Geoffrey cradled his head and fanned away the flies. In the final hours, Henry was heard to cry over and over, “Shame, shame on a vanquished king.” Crying shame, he died on Thursday, the sixth of July, 1189, in the thirty-fifth year of his reign.
Because servants had ransacked the corpse for clothes and jewels, his friends had difficulty laying out the king’s body properly, and they collected makeshift trappings from wherever they could: a ring for his finger, an ersatz scepter for his hand, and for his crown a band of tattered gold embroidery donated by an obliging woman. The next morning, his body was borne on the shoulders of his few remaining faithful barons, down from the castle on the rock of Chinon, across a viaduct above the swampy meadows, and then northward along the left bank of the Vienne to the abbey church of Fontevrault, where the veiled sisters gathered to keep watch over the bier. William Marshal had sent word to Richard, but not until nightfall did he finally appear, slipping quietly into the church to stand and gaze down at his father. “One could not tell from his expression whether he felt joy or sorrow, grief, anger, or satisfaction.” Then he knelt to pray, remaining on his knees “scarcely longer than the space of a Paternoster.” At that moment, “blood began to flow from the dead king’s nostrils and ceased not so long as his son remained there.” It was, a chronicler said, “as if his spirit were moved with indignation,” the fiery king still venting his famous Angevin temper from beyond God’s other door.
In July of 1189, Eleanor of Aquitaine was sixty-seven years old. She had been her husband’s prisoner for sixteen years.
Autumn and After
When William Marshal arrived at Winchester in mid-July with instructions to unlock Eleanor’s prison gates, he found the lady already at liberty, no one having dared detain her a single hour after news of the king’s death had reached England. To William’s astonishment, the sixty-seven-year-old woman advanced to greet him with all the grace and civility he remembered from her court in Poitiers. Even though the years that should have been filled with contentment and enjoyment of the honors due great queens had been stolen from her, she had somehow managed to preserve herself, physically as well as mentally. If Marshal had anticipated a frail, doddering relic warped with bitterness and grief, he did not find it. It seemed as if she had used her enforced tranquility to purge her spirit of imprudence and self-indulgence, to broaden her understanding of politics and sharpen her instincts about the affairs of humankind. For sixteen years she had looked deeply into her soul to glean eternal truths, and now that her hour of liberation had come, she was ready.
William carried with him letters from Richard giving his mother full command of the realm until he had settled his affairs in Normandy and would be able to join her. But Eleanor, perhaps using that clairvoyance credited her by the archdeacon of Wells, had already taken the first steps toward assumption of the regency, and to Winchester subjects were flocking, eager to pay homage at the court of “Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England.” After Marshal’s arrival, she immediately gathered up her household and set off for London, where she convened her court at Westminster and summoned the barons and prelates of the realm to make their oaths of allegiance to the new king. All the while, she evidently felt that this act was not sufficient to secure for her son the love of the English. Although born in Oxford, he had never considered his birthplace any more than an easily rectified accident. Since childhood, he had made only brief visits to the island; he neither spoke English nor did he have more than a vague familiarity with the terrain of the kingdom. Aquitaine was his home, and from infancy Eleanor had been instrumental in directing her heir’s eyes away from the island kingdom, the feudal prerogative of her eldest son, and toward her own provinces, where one day he would be master. Circumstances having overturned a lifetime of careful planning, she now saw that the situation must be remedied as quickly as possible. At this late date there was, obviously, little that she might do to instill in her son a belated affection for England, but she could do something to promote the island’s enthusiasm for the foreigner whom they called “Richard the Poitevin.”
With a sagacity that recalls her introduction of Richard to her southern vassals in the late sixties, she abandoned London after a few days in favor of a tour of England, “moving her royal court from city to city and from castle to castle, just as she thought proper.” There is no doubt that the sight of the Eagle in her new incarnation helped to reassure the English and, to a great extent, dulled the memories of those who a few weeks earlier had been shaking their heads in alarm over the unnatural conduct of King Henry’s disobedient son. As Eleanor well knew, it would take more than a royal
chevauchée
to blot out fifteen years of family brawling and implant in her subjects’ minds the idea that a new reign was beginning. In a frank appeal for popularity, she sent messengers to every county in England ordering that all captives be liberated from prison because “she had learnt by experience that imprisonment is distasteful to mankind and that it is a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be liberated therefrom.” Opening the dungeons “for the good of King Henry’s soul,” surely a barely veiled sarcasm, she issued a general pardon to all those who had trespassed against Henry’s forest laws, who had been imprisoned “by the will of the king or his justiciar,” and to those who had been jailed for a half dozen other reasons, the principal condition of release being a promise to support the new government in preserving the peace. Within days, the smallest village in the realm teemed with liberated jailbirds singing the praises of the liberal Richard Plantagenet. Only William of Newburgh had an acid word to say about this: “At that time the gaols were crowded with criminals awaiting trial or punishment but through Richard’s clemency these pests came forth from prison, perhaps to become bolder thieves in the future.”
chevauchée
to blot out fifteen years of family brawling and implant in her subjects’ minds the idea that a new reign was beginning. In a frank appeal for popularity, she sent messengers to every county in England ordering that all captives be liberated from prison because “she had learnt by experience that imprisonment is distasteful to mankind and that it is a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be liberated therefrom.” Opening the dungeons “for the good of King Henry’s soul,” surely a barely veiled sarcasm, she issued a general pardon to all those who had trespassed against Henry’s forest laws, who had been imprisoned “by the will of the king or his justiciar,” and to those who had been jailed for a half dozen other reasons, the principal condition of release being a promise to support the new government in preserving the peace. Within days, the smallest village in the realm teemed with liberated jailbirds singing the praises of the liberal Richard Plantagenet. Only William of Newburgh had an acid word to say about this: “At that time the gaols were crowded with criminals awaiting trial or punishment but through Richard’s clemency these pests came forth from prison, perhaps to become bolder thieves in the future.”
But Eleanor’s largesse extended beyond the kingdom’s malefactors. Henry had been in the habit of stabling his horses in abbeys, the better to undertake his lightning dashes around the country, but a practice that caused no little inconvenience and expense to the chapters; Eleanor promptly relieved the clergy of this burden. She also made plans to introduce a new standard coinage that would be valid anywhere in England, as well as a series of uniform weights and measures for corn, liquids, and lengths of cloth. Roger of Wendover records that “she arranged matters in the kingdom according to her own pleasure and nobles were instructed to obey her in every respect.” In these summer days, the chronicler adds, was fulfilled the prophecy of Merlin, “The Eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third nesting.”
In a few short weeks, so thoroughly did Eleanor prepare the ground that when Richard dropped anchor at Portsmouth on August 13, his previous image as a parricide was quite forgotten in a tide of popular goodwill. In the midst of her journeying, Eleanor had not neglected preparations for his coronation. No doubt remembering those hectic days of December 1154 before her own hasty coronation, she determined to make Richard’s an occasion the English would never forget. It was significant that, on Eleanor’s advice, he was not crowned immediately. There was no need for haste; unlike every other king of England since the Norman Conquest, he had neither enemies nor rivals, and thanks to his mother’s proclamations, he had made a host of new friends. So complete was his security that the next two weeks were spent in a leisurely progress, marked at every stop by scenes of rejoicing and cheering. Briefly, Richard and Eleanor stopped at Salisbury; at Marlborough to witness the wedding of John to Isabelle of Gloucester; at Windsor, where they greeted Richard’s half brother, Geoffrey. On September 1, the royal party made a splendid entry into London, where, in Richard’s honor, the streets had been cleaned and spread with fresh rushes and the house fronts festooned with tapestries and blossoms. The crowning was set for Sunday, September 3, an unlucky day according to the calendar, but Eleanor could not be bothered with superstition. With her superb sense of pageantry, she had devised a ceremony not easily forgotten, and in fact, the coronation of Richard Plantagenet would establish the procedure, still in use today, for crowning a monarch of England. Through the nave of Westminster Abbey wound the royal procession: the taper bearers and censers, the abbots and bishops, the officials bearing Richard’s spurs, scepters, sword, bonnet, and royal vestments. And then came the tall figure of Richard himself, walking under a canopy of silk and and looking like a young god. At the high altar he took three formal oaths, swearing that he would honor the Church and its decrees, grant justice to his subjects, and keep the laws and customs of the kingdom. After he had removed his robes and was dressed in the royal vestments. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury anointed him with the sacred oils and then lifted the crown from the altar and placed it upon his head. With a golden scepter in each hand and the crown on his head, the new king was led to the throne, and the abbey was filled with the sound of the Te Deum. Richard, duke of Aquitaine, had become Richard I of England. Three days of festivities followed, each state banquet as decorous as it was lavish, and the guests “feasted so splendidly that the wine flowed along the pavement and walls of the palace.”
Eleanor had done her best to personally inaugurate her son’s reign with memorable splendor, but despite her exertions to ingratiate her son with his subjects, she could not disguise the fact that Richard regarded the island as little more than a milk cow for the sustenance of his most important concern, the Crusade to rescue Jerusalem. His dilemma was clear. He had committed himself to a military expedition that would require enormous sums of money; at the same time, the royal treasury at Winchester, which had been quickly canvassed the moment he had arrived, proved to be virtually empty, and after the Saladin tithe that Henry had levied before his death, the pockets of the new king’s subjects were equally empty. Unfortunately. Henry’s levy for the Crusade had already been handed over to the Templars. Now. perhaps to Eleanor’s astonishment, her son demonstrated an ingenious talent for extracting money where none seemingly existed. Two days after the coronation feasts had ended, he put up for sale everything that he owned—castles, towns, manors, lordships, public offices, favors of all kinds. Every sheriff in England found himself removed from office until such time as he could redeem his position with hard cash. William Longchamp, one of Richard’s favorite attendants, paid three thousand pounds for the office of chancellor. Cities discovered that they might obtain new and more liberal charters in return for sizable payments. Monasteries whose privileges were abruptly revoked were able to buy them back for a consideration. When Abbot Samson of Bury Saint Edmunds offered five hundred marks, the assessed value, for the royal manor of Mildenhall, Richard had the temerity to reply, “My Lord Abbot, the amount you offer is absurd. Either you shall give me a thousand marks or you shall not have the manor.” The chronicler goes on to note that Samson also paid Eleanor her queen’s gold in the form of a golden cup worth one hundred marks, but that she returned the cup “on behalf of the soul of her Lord King Henry.” Eleanor’s attempts to ameliorate the effects of the great national auction did not prevent the entire business from degenerating into a most undignified and jocular spectacle. Suddenly nearly everything in the kingdom could be had, if the price was right, and even those who had taken Crusader’s vows were able to find release. The king, people said, was most obliging in relieving all those whose money had been a burden, and Richard himself joked, “I would sell London itself if I could find a buyer.”
Once the money began flowing in at a reassuring rate, Richard departed for the Continent; Eleanor, however, remained behind in a state of uneasiness. The popularity she had so energetically drummed up for him was already wearing thin as many dismayed subjects, reviewing objectively the new king’s actions during the first four months of his reign, declared that he must be unbalanced. Contrary to their expectation that he would be a more liberal sovereign than his father, he had multiplied their taxes until the kingdom had been squeezed dry, and he had recklessly overturned Henry’s government by firing experienced officials and giving their jobs to the highest bidders. No amount of public relations on Eleanor’s part could stifle these denunciations, nor could she scotch the persistent rumor that Richard never intended to return. How did it happen that a king would sell his income-producing property? It was said that he planned to turn over the kingdom to John and return to Aquitaine. It was said that he would mount the throne of Jerusalem. And it was said that he suffered from some secret malady and would never live through the Crusade. His arrangements for the administration of England during his absence struck many as dubious, and even Eleanor, who could find little fault with her son, would have recognized that he had inherited little of her political acumen and none of Henry’s knack for judging people’s characters. As regents, he had appointed two fairly sober and experienced men: William de Mandeville, a trusted friend of his father’s; and Bishop Hugh of Durham, a kinsman of the royal house and a man long experienced in politics, who nevertheless had been compelled to buy his appointment for ten thousand pounds. Unfortunately, de Mandeville died that autumn, and in his place Richard had substituted his chancellor, William Longchamp, a Norman making his first visit to England. Although Gerald of Wales’s description makes Longchamp seem like a repulsive, misshapen dwarf, no amount of tact could disguise his physical infirmities. He was short, lame, and unprepossessing; he spoke no English and, further, had an aversion to the country. On the positive side, he was unscrupulous in defending his master’s interests. Between the two regents, Richard left his mother as a balance wheel. Although some chroniclers and even historians of later periods have claimed that Eleanor was regent, this does not seem to have been the case. The most that can be said is that even though Richard gave her no formal appointment, he did regard her as an unofficial super-regent with full power to step in whenever circumstances warranted. Totally preoccupied with preparations for the Crusade, he must have felt that his mother, the most experienced sovereign in Europe, would guard his realm if the appointed officials failed in their duties.
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