Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (63 page)
In the summer of 1201 not a cloud marred John’s horizons. His mother’s fears had proved baseless: Philip Augustus had behaved like a lamb; Aquitaine had been secured by John’s friendship with Amaury of Thouars and his new father-in-law Aymer of Angoulême; Constance of Brittany had died, and hopefully there would be no further trouble with Arthur. His future, at last, seemed secure. That summer, too, no more was heard from Eleanor, who seems to have vanished among the shadowy cloisters. Unfortunately, security had the effect of arousing John to further exhibitions of high-handedness, or perhaps it was only a manifestation of his bizarre sense of humor. Instead of giving the Lusignans their day in court, he charged them with treason and invited them to prove their innocence by fighting a duel. The ordeal of battle, while no longer fashionable, was nevertheless still recognized as legally proper. The Lusignans, however, scorned to fight the professional duelists whom John had recruited, insisting that they were answerable only to their peers. Once more, they protested to Philip Augustus that they were being denied justice. Throughout the autumn and winter, the diplomatic farce continued, with John fixing dates for trials and then inventing elaborate excuses why the trials could not take place. Again Philip intervened, and again John promised the Lusignans justice.
Normally an impatient man, Philip Augustus had personal reasons for staying his hand. For the past decade, he had been involved in a distressing scandal with women. In 1192, the widowed Capetian had married Princess Ingeborg, sister of the king of Denmark, and had her crowned queen of France. The day after the wedding, however, he changed his mind and attempted to send her back to Denmark, but the outraged queen retreated only as far as a convent at Soissons, where she sped an appeal to Pope Celestine. While the aged Celestine did little for her restoration, he was succeeded by the more forceful Innocent III, who supported Ingeborg’s claims, and in 1200, lowered an interdict on Philip’s lands, not only for having forsaken Ingeborg but also for contracting an illegal union with a German heiress, Agnes of Meran, who had borne the king a daughter. Overwhelmed by these marital and extramarital problems, Philip spent much of his time negotiating with Rome. In the previous year, he had been forced to take back Ingeborg as his lawful wife, but he imprisoned her and continued to live with Agnes, who had a second child, a son. It was not until July 19, 1201, that “his German adulteress” relieved him of his problems by conveniently dying. Now only one legal entanglement remained—Rome’s recognition of Agnes’s children as legitimate—and until he received a favorable response from Innocent, he dared not make a move against the Plantagenets lest he jeopardize his case.
In March 1202, just as Philip’s patience with John neared its limit, he received word that the papal curia had legitimized his son and daughter as royal heirs of the house of Capet. On April 28, Philip was ready to realize the ambition of his life, the destruction of Plantagenet power. Using the Lusignans as his pretext, he ordered John to answer charges in Paris and to undergo sentence by a court of French barons. John airily replied that, as duke of Normandy and king of England, he could not be summoned to a Parisian court, to which Philip retorted with equal aplomb that he had addressed the summons to John as duke of Aquitaine, count of Poitou, and count of Anjou. It was not his fault that John happened to be duke of Normandy and king of England as well. John, quite understandably, did not appear in Paris on the appointed day, and therefore “the assembled barons of the King of France adjudged the King of England to be deprived of all his land which he and his forefathers had hitherto held of the King of France.” Fifty years earlier, John’s father had treated a similar summons with scorn when he had married without the permission of his overlord—but John was not Henry, and Philip Augustus bore little resemblance to Louis Capet. Philip could hardly be called a man of courage—he would mount only the most docile horses, and he saw assassins behind trees—nor was he a venturesome military tactician. But what he lacked in boldness he made up for in cunning and persistence.
The man born to be a hammer to the king of the English had pounded doggedly but, in the end, impotently upon the shields of Henry Plantagenet and Richard Coeur de Lion, but time had fought on Philip’s side. Finally, there remained only the feckless John, and even though it was common knowledge that he followed his mother’s advice, the eagle-eyed grandam, half dead at Fontevrault, had not been heard from in some time. When John failed to answer his summons, Philip first declared forfeit all John’s lands except Normandy and England and then he fell upon eastern Normandy. Not for Philip Capet any bold conquistadorial sally down the valley of the Loire; instead, he attacked piecemeal, raiding border towns, snatching a county here, besieging a castle there. At Gournay, in July, he knighted Arthur in the presence of the French barons and received the boy’s homage not only for Brittany but for all the Continental lands inherited by John save Normandy, which Philip intended to keep for himself. Furthermore, he betrothed Arthur to his five-year-old daughter by Agnes of Meran and then endowed his prospective son-in-law with two hundred Frankish knights and instructions to take possession of his inheritance. The first target: Poitou.
Hearing of these events, Eleanor took violent exception to Philip’s disposition of her domains. At eighty, she could not deny that her end was drawing near, but duty, pride, and no doubt anger would not allow her to lie in her abbey bed while Louis Capet’s hated son dismembered the Plantagenet empire. She must have acknowledged the likelihood that someday Philip and Arthur would seize Anjou and Maine, but one humiliation she would not tolerate: She would not permit them to have Aquitaine while she possessed life enough to stop them. Accompanied by a small escort, she left the safety of Fontevrault toward the end of July and set out for Poitiers, where perhaps she believed that her presence alone might stiffen her vassals’ resistance to Arthur’s onslaught. We do not know the precise state of her health that summer; it is conceivable that during her convalescence she had regained some of her strength, but even so, it is not hard to imagine her weakened condition. For this reason, she was compelled to travel slowly and break the fifty-mile journey now and then. In the last week of July, she was at the castle of Mirebeau on the border of Anjou and Poitou.
During that same week, John was in the vicinity of Le Mans. Ever since his peace treaty with Philip two years earlier, English barons had taunted him with a new nickname, John “Softsword,” but at this stage of the crisis he was behaving with remarkable capability. In the hope of diverting those Bretons intending to join Arthur, he had sent part of his forces to harass eastern Brittany, and his Norman garrisons he left to fend off Philip’s attacks. He himself rode south with a hastily recruited army of mercenaries to protect Maine and Anjou, the vulnerable heart-land of the empire.
In the meantime, Arthur, flushed with confidence and “marching forth with a pompous noise,” had arrived in Tours with his force of borrowed French knights. While waiting there for the arrival of his Breton barons and making preparations for the assault on Poitou, he was joined by three of the Lusignans. Impatient and full of strategies of their own, the brothers disdained to wait for the Bretons and instead urged an immediate attack on Poitou: indeed, they proposed an even bolder plan. Intelligence had come to their ears that the old queen was stopping at the castle of Mirebeau.
For fifty years, the Lusignan family seems to have been obsessed with the idea of kidnaping Eleanor. Twice before they had made attempts, the most recent of which had worked out with unexpected success. In this situation, her worth as a hostage would be considerable, for it would enable them to wrest from John any concession they liked. The loss of his mother would rob the king of his most sagacious counselor; furthermore, as duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, it was in Eleanor’s power to make Philip’s declaration of forfeiture null and void in Aquitaine so long as she lived to assert her claims. While Arthur had no feelings of loyalty or affection for his grandmother, he hesitated on the grounds that he wished to wait for reinforcements from Brittany. But in the end, the impetuous Lusignans prevailed. It would be an easy matter to take Mirebeau: The queen’s escort was insignificant, the risks minimal, and her capture would bring the soft-sworded Plantagenet king to his knees. In the closing days of July, the boy duke of Brittany and his Frankish knights followed the Lusignans down the back roads toward Mirebeau.
Of all the places that Eleanor might have stopped to rest, Mirebeau was the least secure. A half century earlier it had been a formidable castle; Geoffrey Anjou had bequeathed it to his younger son, and when the young Geoffrey planned his uprising against Henry in 1155, he had added fortifications to make it impregnable. By the summer of 1202, however, the walled castle encircled by a walled town had become as invincible as a child’s sand castle. Not only did it totter on the brink of collapse, but it was not stocked to resist a siege.
Arthur’s arrival did not catch the queen unprepared. She, too, had her sources of information, and before the first thud of hoofbeats reached her ears, she had already sent a messenger riding hard toward Le Mans in search of her son. It is generally believed that this was an urgent plea for rescue, but since John was not known for speed or military prowess, it seems equally likely that she dispatched the messenger only as a means of informing the king of his enemies’ movements. In any case, she knew that she could not hold out long. Few details of the siege have been preserved, but it seems that Arthur coolly opened negotiations with his grandmother by demanding her surrender and offering a promise of release if she would confirm Philip Augustus’s arrangements for her inheritance. In no position to disdain parley, Eleanor pretended to bargain, but she took care to play for time by drawing out the negotiations as long as possible.
By Monday, July 31, Arthur’s army had taken possession of the town as well as the castle, forcing Eleanor to withdraw into the keep with a few soldiers. Only the portcullis stood between her and capture. That evening she could stare down upon the comings and goings of her besiegers. Having barricaded all the town gates except one, which they left open to receive supplies, the soldiers began to settle themselves for the night. It was a warm evening with a sky full of magnificent stars. With their quarry at their mercy, the men seemed to be in a casual, almost festive mood. Putting aside their armor, they made their beds in the streets and in the inner enclosure of the castle under the open sky, and they fell asleep knowing that in the morning they could storm the keep without losing a man.
While Mirebeau slumbered, John and his forces were approaching the outskirts of the town. Traveling by day and night in an eighty-mile forced march from Le Mans, he had covered the distance in less than forty-eight hours with a suddenness reminiscent of Henry’s astounding ability to pop up in unexpected places as if carried effortlessly by the wind. With John came William des Roches, the seneschal of Anjou, who offered to lead the attack on the understanding that John would not put to death Arthur or any of the rebels, that captives would not be removed from the county until a truce had been established, and that des Roches would have a chief say in Arthur’s future. John agreed. Dawn was breaking on Tuesday, August 1, as des Roches and his men crept up to the one open gate. When they rushed in with drawn swords, Hugh le Brun and his brothers were having an early breakfast of roast pigeons, but most of the besiegers were still snoring or were slumped half-dressed. By the time that the sun broke through the clouds, the whole of Arthur’s forces had been either slain or captured; not a man escaped. Exultant over his victory, John himself described the feat in a letter to his English barons:
Know that by the grace of God we are safe and well and God’s grace has worked wonderfully with us, for on Tuesday before the feast of Saint Peter ad Vincula, when we were on the road to Chinon, we heard that our lady mother was closely besieged at Mirebeau and we hurried there as fast as we could. And there we captured our nephew Arthur, Geoffrey de Lusignan, Hugh le Brun, Andrew de Chauvigni, the viscount of Châtellerault, Raymond Thouars, Savary de Mauleon, Hugh Bauge, and all our other Poitevin enemies who were there, being upwards of two hundred knights, and not one escaped. Praise God for our victory.
Undoubtedly it was an astounding achievement for in a few hours, John had succeeded in capturing the most important of his rebel enemies. Some said that his demon ancestry had carried him to Mirebeau so swiftly, others called it a miracle, and Eleanor, continuing safely on her journey, may have felt for the first time in thirty-five years that her youngest son might be a great king after all. In Normandy, where the king of the Franks was occupied with the siege of Arques, the news of John’s incredible exploit cast the Capetian into a fit of depression. Dismantling his siege engines, he hurried south to see if anything might be retrieved from the disaster, but he was too late. His dream of reviving Charlemagne’s empire had been shattered by the stupidity of the Lusignans: Arthur captured, his best knights in chains, his Poitevin allies dispersed, the incompetent Lackland in control, and all for the sake of capturing an eighty-year-old woman whom the world would soon forget. Venting his frustration by setting fire to Tours, Philip Augustus could do nothing ultimately but smolder, and “at length he retreated to Paris and remained inactive there for the rest of the year.”
Meanwhile, John was making a leisurely progress through Anjou and Normandy, parading his manacled prisoners as a warning to those considering sedition. The spectacle of the leading barons and knights of France, Brittany, and Poitou in chains was not witnessed by Eleanor, who had reached Poitiers, but the wretched sight would be remembered by others and detailed with sad astonishment by the chroniclers. “Having secured his prisoners in fetters and shackles and having placed them in cars, a new and unusual mode of conveyance, the king sent some of them to Normandy and some to England to be imprisoned in strong castles.” Hugh le Brun, securely fettered, was consigned to a special tower at Caen, while less important prisoners were shipped to Corfe Castle and other strongholds in England, where some died of starvation and a very few managed to escape. As for the prize captive, the duke of Brittany was placed in a dungeon at Falaise on August 10.
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