Eleanor of Aquitaine (59 page)
Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Richard also addressed correspondence to his captor, Henry Hohenstaufen: As a king, he had no need to account for his actions to anyone but God, but nevertheless, he wished to set the emperor straight. What were his crimes that he should be held against his will like a common highroad robber? “It is said that I have not taken Jerusalem. I should have taken it, if time had been given me; this is the fault of my enemies, not mine, and I believe no just man could blame me for having deferred an enterprise (which can always be undertaken) in order to afford my people a succour which they could no longer wait for. There, sire, these are my crimes.”
As for Philip Capet’s calumnies upon the king’s good name, “I know of nothing that ought to have brought on me his ill-humour, except for my having been more successful than he.”
Like his mother during her imprisonment, Richard never allowed his spirit to be broken. He was “always cheery and full of jest in talk. ... He would tease his warders with rough jokes and enjoy the sport of making them drunk and of trying his own strength against that of their big bodies.” Deeper feelings were expressed, however, in a
sirventès
that he composed for his half sister Marie of Champagne and that must have sorrowed Eleanor to the quick.
sirventès
that he composed for his half sister Marie of Champagne and that must have sorrowed Eleanor to the quick.
Feeble the words and faltering the tongue
Wherewith a prisoner moans his doleful plight;
Yet for his comfort he may make a song.
Friends I have many, but their gifts are slight;
Shame to them if unransomed I, poor wight,
Two winters languish here!And they, my knights of Anjou and Touraine—
Well know they, who now sit at home at ease,
That I, their lord, in far-off Allemaine
Am captive. They should help to my release;
But now their swords are sheathed, and rust in peace,
While I am prisoner here.
Eleanor, sixteen years in confinement, read the despair behind those lines of verse. It is said that in her anguish she addressed three letters to Pope Celestine III imploring his assistance in securing Richard’s release and in her salutation addressed the pontiff as “Eleanor, by the wrath of God, Queen of England.” One of the letters reads:
I am defiled with grief, and my bones cleave to my skin, for my flesh it is wasted away. My years pass away in groanings, and I would they were altogether passed away.... I have lost the light of my eyes, the staff of my old age.My bowels are torn away, my very race is destroyed and passing away from me. The Young King and the earl of Brittany sleep in the dust, and their most unhappy mother is compelled to live that she may be ever tortured with the memory of the dead. Two sons yet survived to my solace, who now survive only to distress me, a miserable and condemned creature: King Richard is detained in bonds and John, his brother, depopulates the captive’s kingdom with the sword and lays it waste with fire. In all things the Lord is become cruel towards me and opposes me with a heavy hand.... I long for death, I am weary of life; and though I thus die incessantly, I yet desire to die more fully; I am reluctantly compelled to live, that my life may be the food of death and a means of torture.
Why, she demands, does the sword of Saint Peter slumber in its scabbard when her son, a “most delicate youth,” the anointed of the Lord, lies in chains? Why does the pope, a “negligent,” “cruel” prevaricator and sluggard, do nothing?
These letters, supposedly written for her by Peter of Blois, are so improbable that it is surprising that many modern historians have accepted them as authentic. While preserved among the letters of Peter of Blois, who is undoubtedly their author—they are characteristic of his style and use his favorite expressions—there is no evidence that they were written for Eleanor or that they were ever sent. Most likely they were rhetorical exercises. No contemporary of Eleanor’s mentioned that she wrote to the pope, and not until the seventeenth century were the letters attributed to her. From a diplomatic point of view, they are too fanciful to be genuine; Eleanor, clearheaded and statesmanlike, was never a querulous old woman complaining of age, infirmities, and weariness of life. On the contrary, her contemporaries unanimously credit her with the utmost courage, industry, and political skill. A second point to notice is that the details of the letters misrepresent the facts of Richard’s imprisonment. He was never “detained in bonds,” and as both she and the pope knew, Celestine had instantly, upon receiving news of Richard’s capture, excommunicated Duke Leopold for laying violent hands on a brother Crusader; he had threatened Philip Augustus with an interdict if he trespassed upon Plantagenet territories; and he had menaced the English with interdict should they fail to collect the ransom. Under the circumstances, Celestine had done all he could. In the last analysis, the letters must be viewed as Peter of Blois’s perception of Eleanor’s feelings, a view that may or may not be accurate.
In December 1193, Eleanor set sail with an imposing retinue of clerks, chaplains, earls, bishops, hostages, and chests containing the ransom. By January 17, 1194, the day scheduled for Richard’s release, she had presented herself and the money at Speyer, but no sooner had they arrived than, to her amazement, Henry Hohenstaufen announced a further delay. He had received letters that placed an entirely new light on the matter of the king’s liberation. As the gist of the problem emerged, it seemed Philip Augustus and John Plantagenet had offered the emperor an equivalent amount of silver if he could hold Coeur de Lion in custody another nine months, or deliver him up to them. These disclosures, and Henry’s serious consideration of the counteroffer, provoked horror from the emperor’s own vassals, and after two days of argument, Henry relented. He would liberate Richard as promised if the king of England would do homage to him for all his possessions, including the kingdom of England. This request, a calculated humiliation, would have made Richard a vassal of the Holy Roman emperor, a degradation that the Plantagenets were hard put to accept. Quick to realize the meaninglessness, as well as the illegality, of the required act, Eleanor made an on-the-spot decision. According to Roger of Hovedon, Richard, “by advice of his mother Eleanor, abdicated the throne of the kingdom of England and delivered it to the emperor as the lord of all.” On February 4, the king was released “into the hands of his mother” after a captivity of one year six weeks and three days.
Seven weeks later, on March 12, the king’s party landed at Sandwich and proceeded directly to Canterbury, where they gave thanks at the tomb of Saint Thomas. By the time they reached London, the city had been decorated, the bells were clanging furiously, and the Londoners ready to give a rapturous welcome to their hero and champion. Her eldest son “hailed with joy upon the Strand,” Eleanor looked in vain for the remaining male member of her family, but the youngest Plantagenet was nowhere to be found. Once Richard’s release had been confirmed, he had fled to Paris upon Philip Augustus’s warning that “beware, the devil is loose.” Despite a certain anxiety about her son’s whereabouts, the next six weeks were to be ones of great happiness for Eleanor. It was spring in England, the air opaque and moist, the budding earth exhaling aromas of ineffable sweetness. With Richard, she made a relaxed progress to Nottingham, to the forests of Sherwood “which the king had never seen before and which pleased him greatly,” to Northampton, where they celebrated Easter, and finally to Winchester, where Richard was crowned a second time. Despite the holiday atmosphere, Richard was impatient to sail for Normandy. On April 25, he and Eleanor went to Portsmouth, but their crossing was delayed by bad weather for more than three weeks. Not until May 12 were they able to reach Barfleur, where the Normans greeted Richard with the same enthusiasm as had the English. Their progress took them to Caen, Bayeux, and around mid-May, to the city of Lisieux, where they spent a few days in the home of John of Alençon, a trusted friend and the city’s archdeacon. It was here that the junior Plantagenet, fearful and trembling, appeared one evening at dinnertime asking to see his mother. It is clear from the reception John received that Eleanor had already discussed him with the king. Neither of them took seriously the boy’s antics; he was, after all, their kin. If he had played the fool, they would not reproach him; rather they would deal later with those who had led him astray. The important matter was to bring him back into the family and convince him that his future interests lay with them rather than with Philip Capet.
When John was brought into the king’s room, he threw himself at Richard’s feet and let loose with a flood of tears. But Richard pulled him up and kissed him. “Think no more of it, John,” he said gently. “You are but a child and were left to evil counselors. Your advisers shall pay for this. Now come and have something to eat.” He ordered that a fresh salmon, which had just been brought in as a gift, should be cooked for his brother.
According to the chronicles, “the king and John became reconciled through the mediation of Queen Eleanor, their mother.” In the circumstances, it seemed the safest course as well as the wisest. There was no doubt in Eleanor’s mind that the boy, now twenty-eight, could not be held responsible for his actions, that he was, as Richard of Devizes termed him, “light-minded.” But at that moment, he was the last of the Plantagenets. With luck, Richard might reign another twenty-five years or more. Who was to say that he would not produce an heir of his own? Thus the queen must have reasoned in the spring of 1194 when her son, after so many adversities, had come home to her.
In her seventh decade, Eleanor grew impatient with wars and politics. It was as if Richard’s capture and ransom had drained her emotionally, and now she sought surcease from the confusions of courts and councils. She had preserved his kingdom from wolves, she had expended her dwindling energies to rescue him from his enemies, she had served her people as peacemaker. If she did not go quite as far as Henry when he had said, “Now let the rest go as it will, I care no more,” at least she was beginning to remember her age. In 1194, she put between herself and a demanding world the plain high walls of Fontevrault, not as the abbess that Henry had attempted to make of her twenty years earlier but as a royal guest accompanied by a modest household. There on the border of Poitou and Anjou, where the river Vienne wound its silvery path through valley and forest, she made herself comfortable among the devout and learned sisters. In addition to the convent, Fontevrault included a residence for penitent harlots, a monastery for monks and lay brothers, a hospital for lepers, and an old-age home for monks and nuns. There was a vast complex of halls and refectories connected by cloisters and an elaborate octagonal kitchen with five fireplaces and twenty chimneys. For a woman who had always believed in the superiority of her own sex, Fontevrault, where the monks and nuns were ruled by a woman, provided a refuge much to Eleanor’s taste. Then, too, she must have felt as though she had come home to rest among familiar surroundings—her grandmother Philippa was buried there, and in the nun’s choir of the domed abbey church slept Henry Plantagenet, his hands calmly folded upon his breast.
Protected against life’s burdens and annoyances, Eleanor could pick and choose her activities just as she liked, and from now on her name figures rarely in the official records. We know that on one occasion she supported the archbishop of Rouen in requesting that the king remit part of a fine due from Reading Abbey and that on another she aided the abbot of Bourgueil, who was having difficulty paying a local wine tax. Also during these years, she was instrumental in arranging for the marriage of her widowed daughter, Joanna, to Raymond VI of Toulouse, a settlement that no doubt gave her wry satisfaction after two husbands had failed to reclaim her inheritance.
The years passed in comparative quiet, although those interminable struggles between the Plantagenets and the Capets continued. Alais Capet, finally returned to her kin at the age of thirty-five, had been promptly married to one of Philip’s vassals, Guillaume de Ponthieu, and stepped forever from the glare of history. In 1196, Richard had been compelled to return the Vexin, a disaster that boded ill as far as Eleanor was concerned, for Normandy now lay open to possible incursions by Philip. But far more worrisome than the loss of the Vexin was Richard’s lack of an heir. Although he had married to please her, he had done nothing more. He had ignored Berengaria at Messina, he had married her at Cyprus and ridden off within hours of the wedding, and during the war in Palestine, he had treated her like a leper who must keep its distance. Berengaria, queen of England, had not yet laid eyes on her kingdom, and the marriage that Eleanor had been so anxious to arrange remained a mockery, if in fact it had ever been consummated. Since Richard and Berengaria had parted in the Holy Land, she had lived in seclusion, virtually a widow, on her dower lands in Maine, while the king satisfied his sexual needs with men. In 1195, a hermit visiting the king took the occasion to warn of God’s vengeance if he persisted in the sin of Sodom, a sermon that Richard did not accept kindly. Soon afterward, however, he fell seriously ill and suddenly recalled the hermit’s warning. Calling his confessors, he spilled out the details of his misdeeds and received absolution; Berengaria was summoned to join him, but their reconciliation did not result in a pregnancy.
Despite the Treaty of Louviers, which had restored the Norman Vexin to Philip, neither he nor Richard regarded the agreement as definitive, and desultory warfare continued on their frontiers. In the summer of 1196, Richard began to construct a fortress that he hoped would act as a deterrent to any future moves that Philip might be considering in the direction of Normandy. At Les Andelys, on the right bank of the Seine, stood a mighty rock that offered a panoramic view of the entire river valley, and on this promontory Richard laid out an imposing stronghold that he christened Château Gaillard. His Saucy Castle, with its impregnable walls and powerful bastions, took three years to build, and when it had been completed, Richard, who had personally supervised its construction, could barely contain his pleasure. It was, he crowed, his daughter. From its lofty eminence he could look down in derision upon the king of the Franks and his schemes for the conquest of Normandy. When finally Philip got his first glimpse of the Saucy Castle, he could only bluster, “If its walls were made of solid iron, yet would I take them!”
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