Eleanor of Aquitaine (57 page)
Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Her arrival at Messina on March 30, 1191, created a sensation among the Crusaders, and perhaps it was inevitable that her appearance would call forth those tangled legends that clung like barnacles to her reputation. “Many know what I wish none of us had known,” wrote Richard of Devizes. “The same queen, in the time of her former husband, went to Jerusalem. Let none speak more thereof; I also know well. Be silent.” Even half a lifetime was not enough, evidently, to completely wash away the gossip of her youth, although by this time her contemporaries were compelled, on the basis of her age if nothing else, to view her with a certain degree of awe. “Queen Eleanor, an incomparable woman, beautiful and chaste, powerful and modest, meek and eloquent, which. is rarely to be met with in a woman; still indefatigable in every undertaking, whose power was the admiration of her age.” Eleanor remained in Messina only four days, but this was sufficient to bring her up to date on events of consequence. Meeting in family council, the Plantagenets —Eleanor, Richard, and Joanna, whom the queen had not seen for fifteen years—traded information and reached decisions. Eleanor received the latest news on her son’s continuing quarrel with Philip Augustus over the future of his sister. Declared Philip violently, “If he does put her aside and marries another woman, I will be the enemy of him and his so long as I live.” To which Richard had replied that on no account would he marry Alais “since the King of England, his own father, had been intimate with her and had had a son by her.” Before a convocation of the crusading barons and prelates, Philip had been compelled to release Richard from his oath, and Richard had promised to return Alais’s dower. But despite the settlement of this old question, Philip’s wrath for the Plantagenets had not abated, in fact so anxious was he to avoid his father’s first wife that he set sail for the Holy Land on the morning of her arrival.
At Messina, problems confronted the queen on every side. Her daughter Joanna, widowed only four months earlier, twenty-five and childless, had lost her throne after King William’s death and it was only with the greatest difficulty that Richard had been able to secure her property from William’s illegitimate nephew, Tancred, who had seized the throne. Joanna’s bed, her gilded table twelve feet long, her dinner service of twenty-four gold and silver plates and cups had been returned, but what to do now with a throneless daughter and with the Princess Berengaria were questions Eleanor pondered and then resolved quickly. Since it was Lent and Richard could not be married immediately, she remanded the maid of Navarre into the custody of her experienced daughter and, ignoring the crusading ban on women, directed that the two ladies accompany Richard to the Holy Land, where the marriage could be celebrated at the end of Lent. In Eleanor’s view, the wedding could take place none too soon, for at Messina she doubtless heard the disturbing tale of how a few weeks before her arrival, Richard had presented himself, in only his breeches, at the door of a local church and had made a public confession of his homosexuality. Such an immoderate spectacle of penance would not have convinced her that her son would mend his pederastic ways, nor would she have been reassured by the news that he had recently referred to his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, as heir if he himself died without issue.
At this meeting, Eleanor reported the news from England: John’s perambulations around the country as though he were king, his outrageous announcement that Richard would not return from the Crusade, his collusions with Geoffrey of York. And as if all this did not forebode enough trouble, Eleanor already had her suspicions about Richard’s chancellor, William Longchamp, who, said a chronicler, “acted entirely in such a way that he seemed to strive to put himself on a level with God.” Already the mistakes of both Eleanor and Richard were being brought - home: Eleanor’s error in convincing Richard that John would do less harm in England than on the Continent, Richard’s foolish choice of William Longchamp as a regent. At any rate, Eleanor took steps to deal with any and all eventualities, and before she left Messina on April 2, she had secured the necessary royal permissions to curb Longchamp or, for that matter, anyone who required curbing. Her homeward journey took her first to Rome, where she conferred with Pope Celestine III, whom she had known as an archdeacon twenty years earlier, and where she straightened out the matter of Henry’s illegitimate son. Against the opposition of the suffragans of York, she secured the pope’s approval of Geoffrey to the see of York and then, remaining in the Eternal City only long enough to borrow eight hundred marks from a moneylender, she struck off for the Alps. By the end of June, she was back in Rouen, where she settled down with one watchful eye trained on the Continent and the other on developments across the Channel.
In England, disorders soon began to mount. Geoffrey of York, banished from England during Richard’s absence, now felt secure enough after Eleanor’s negotiations on his behalf to ignore the prohibition. As soon as he stepped ashore at Dover, however, he was not only prevented from taking possession of his see but also arrested by Longchamp and thrown into a Dover dungeon, where he was treated in a manner most people believed grossly inappropriate for an archbishop. John, loath to pass up a profitable opportunity, now saw the chance to rid himself of the arrogant chancellor whom he regarded as his chief enemy. Calling together the bishops and justiciars at Reading, he convinced them that Longchamp, a man who “moved pompously along bearing a sneer in his nostrils,” had overstepped his authority and should be called to account, but when this message reached the chancellor, he pleaded illness and retired to the security of the Tower of London. Soon after, however, an assembly convened at Saint Paul’s Cathedral stripped Longchamp of his authority and banished him from England. Thrown into a panic and doubtless in fear of his life, Longchamp apparently believed it safest to leave the island in disguise. “Pretending to be a woman, a sex which he always despised, he changed his priest’s robe into a harlot’s dress” and made for Dover, where he hoped to find transport. Sitting on a rock near the shore, his green gown and cloak attracted the attention of a sailor “who wished for some sport with the women” and began to embrace him. In the course of their colloquy, the sailor discovered that Longchamp was a fake. “Come here, all of you,” he shouted to his companions. “Come here and look at a man in a woman’s dress!”
After this humiliating adventure, the deposed chancellor finally managed to reach the Continent and headed straight for Paris, where he made contact with two cardinals and managed to rouse their concern for his plight, even persuading them to plead his cause with Eleanor. That lady, however, only too happy at Longchamp’s expulsion, had no intention of negotiating with the cardinals. When they attempted to cross the border at Gisors without first asking her for right of passage, they found the drawbridge hastily raised and the seneschal of Normandy on hand to explain the necessity of safe-conduct letters to two foreigners who perhaps were not familiar with local customs. A gale of excommunications resulted from this incident, but the queen stood firm. In December, she was holding her modest Christmas court at Bonneville-sur-Touques when she got word of an altogether more alarming piece of information: Philip Augustus had just arrived in Paris to be greeted as a hero by an overwhelmed citizenry, and he had repaired to Fontainebleau for his Christmas court. Philip’s arrival brought the first eyewitness accounts of the war, although, to be sure, they were from the Capetian’s point of view and totally unreliable in Eleanor’s eyes. According to Philip, the capture of Acre on July 12 had been the doing of his heroic Franks, and as for his sudden abandonment of the Crusade, that was due to the treachery of Richard Plantagenet, his sworn ally, who had forced him to request release from his Crusader’s vow and flee from the Holy Land lest he be murdered. It was true that Philip had suffered at Acre: the oppressive Syrian climate, the mosquitoes, the pestilential trenches where his soldiers had died like flies, the nightmarish mountains of unburied corpses—all had filled him with disgust. He had fallen ill, and although God had mercifully granted his recovery, he had to his horror, lost his hair and the nails of his fingers and toes. Suspicious of plots against his life, he recklessly charged that his illness had resulted from a poisoned drink. In truth, Philip suffered from other maladies that, in the end, proved far more critical.
On Saturday, June 8, he had stood on the shore at Acre when Richard and his great-sailed ships, pennants streaming from the masts, had sailed into the harbor to be greeted by a fanfare that might have roused a greater man than Philip to the most intense jealousy. Even though Philip had been at Acre for six weeks and had enjoyed a certain prestige, he counted for nothing from the moment of Coeur de Lion’s arrival. That day the crusading camp went delirious with jubilation. Those who were guarding the camp deserted their posts and rushed down to the strand; knights and squires jumped into the water and swam to Richard’s ship; the frantic shouts of acclaim from the shore drowned out all other sounds; there was not a man in the Holy Army who that day was not in love with Richard, king of England, the deliverer of the Promised Land. Walking among the masses of soldiers, towering a head above Philip, Richard grasped the hands outstretched to him in love and adoration. That night, there was singing and the music of horns, drums, and lutes. Wine cups were filled over and over. So many candles were lit that the whole valley became a sea of lights, and Saladin, watching from his headquarters ten miles southeast of the besieged city, feared that the Christians had set the plain on fire.
Shortly after Richard’s arrival, both he and Philip were stricken with a kind of malarial fever that raged in epidemic proportions throughout the Crusaders’ camp. Although Richard’s bout with the fever seems to have been more severe than Philip’s, he was anxious to get on with the business of capturing Acre and had himself carried in a silken litter to the walls of the besieged city, where he supervised the crews operating the latest in war machinery: the great crossbows mounted on platforms; the spring-loaded espringals, which loosed spearlike missiles powerful enough to impale a horse; the wheeled mangonels, which catapulted rocks and bundles of tar-soaked straw over the walls; the massive trebuchets for hurling showers of flint; the assault towers sixty feet high; the ladders, grappling hooks, and battering rams. Day and night the army rained missiles on the beleaguered city, while its defenders retaliated with burning pitch and the explosive Greek fire. On Friday July 12, after a month of ceaseless fighting, the Moslem garrison had no choice but to raise the white flag, and then the Crusaders had poured into the city, their standards soon fluttering from buildings and walls. Richard, along with his sister and wife, took up residence in the royal palace. On the day of his entry into Acre he noticed another banner flying from the royal palace and, upon inquiry, was told that it belonged to Duke Leopold of Austria. Grossly offended that the duke should dare to infringe on his glory, Richard ordered his men to pull down the Austrian banner and fling it into the filth of the moat; Richard himself, apparently in the grip of an Angevin fury, personally addressed a number of insults to Leopold. That very night, the duke of Austria and his followers withdrew from the Crusade amid vows of vengeance on the arrogant Plantagenet.
Ten days after the fall of Acre, Philip Augustus sent a delegation of magnates to Richard’s palace. The Franks, weeping, could barely deliver their message. Richard, however, had no trouble guessing the nature of the mission.
“Cease your weeping,” he told them, “for I know what you have come to say. Your lord, the King of France, wishes to go home and you have come to secure my consent to this breach of our compact as brothers-in-arms.”
“Sire,” said Philip’s spokesman, “you have divined what is in our minds. We are compelled to ask your consent for our lord king will surely die if he does not quickly leave this land.”
There followed a rendition of Philip’s physical symptoms, from most of which Richard also suffered. His reply barely concealed contempt:
“If he leaves undone the work for which he came here, he will bring shame and everlasting contempt upon the Franks. I will not give my consent but of course if his life is in the balance, let him do as he sees fit.”
Back in Paris, Philip did not wait long before he came banging on Eleanor’s door. On January 20, 1192, he appeared below the walls at Gisors, and “producing the charter of the king of England which had been executed at Messina, he demanded of William Fitz-Ralph, the seneschal of Normandy, his sister Alais whom the king was to have taken to wife; the seneschal, however, refused to give her up.” On Eleanor’s instructions, Fitz-Ralph explained that he had no such orders from the king, at the same time reminding Philip that it was a clear breach of the Truce of God to lay hands on a Crusader’s property. Having foiled the Capetian, Eleanor strengthened her border defenses, reinforced garrisons, and continued to uneasily scan the frontier for Philip’s invasion forces. Within days, however, it became apparent that she had been facing the wrong direction: Trouble came from across the Channel with word that John was assembling a fleet and recruiting mercenaries at Southampton. “Fearing that the light-minded youth might be going to attempt something, by the counsels of the French, against his lord and brother, with an anxious mind she tried in every way to prevent her son’s proposed journey. With all her strength she wanted to make sure that faith would be kept between her youngest sons at least, so that their mother might die more happily than had their father.”
Even at the age of seventy, Eleanor was able to move faster than John. Unmindful of winter storms, she arrived at Portsmouth on February 11 and, ignoring her son, went straight to the kingdom’s barons. “All the great men of the realm were called together, at Windsor, at Oxford, at London and at Winchester. Through her own tears and the prayers of the nobles she was with difficulty able to obtain a promise that John would not cross over for the time being.” Without opposing her son directly, she shrewdly engineered the collapse of his foreign expedition, thus preventing him from offering his homage to Philip and handing over Gisors in exchange for Capetian recognition of his claims to the duchy of Normandy. Although John retreated sullenly to his manor at Wallingford, Eleanor was under no illusion that his retirement was anything but temporary. About this time, she began sending to the Holy Land messengers who described to the king the disorders in England as a result of John’s seditious plotting with Philip Augustus. Richard must, she urged, abandon the Holy War and come home, lest he lose his kingdom.
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