Eleanor Of Aquitaine (32 page)

Not for the first time Henry faced the specter of crusade. It was a nightmare that not only the young Plantagenets but all the aggrieved scions of feudal houses had learned to conjure up as a last resort against parental tyranny. But what might be expected with the crowned heir of the Plantagenets on that freebooter's highway, or in confederation with factions in Jerusalem where the Angevin dynasty was plainly tottering to its fall? On balance it seemed better to pay the living for a seditious following for the young king in Europe. Henry dipped into his treasure to appease the prince. He promised him £100 Angevin a day with £10 additional for Marguerite, agreed to give him residence in Argentan (with sensible Matilda of Saxony) and to maintain one hundred soldiers for his service for a year. For this limited and recoverable grant, the young king solemnly pledged himself to remain in the king's allegiance and to make no additional demands.

As Advent approached Henry was impatient to cross to England, but the young king's desperation and the disorders in the queen's provinces kept him abroad. He deemed it politic to hold in Normandy a Christmas court that should signally reaffirm the prestige of the Angevins; an occasion for the young king to exploit his newly won ascendancy; for bringing his sons to a fraternal amity in the eyes of the world; for hunting the barons out of their aeries on both sides of the Loire and bringing their intrigues to light. Philip Augustus was holding his first plenary court in Paris, and Henry had no idea of leaving his sons and his feudatories free to resort to the palace on the Seine.

For rendezvous Henry chose the city of Caen,
¹⁴
with its newly rebuilt castle of the Norman exchequer, its massive great hall, and its formidable dungeons; Caen with its century-old memorials of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, its evidences, in flourishing markets and ample hostelries, of strength and prosperity. All baronial courts were forbidden in the provinces. Nobles and prelates were summoned to renew their homage in presence of a cloud of witnesses.

In the short and lowering days of late December 1182, one thousand knights from Aix to Finisterre, from the Rhine to the Garonne, from Saint Gilles to Cologne, clattered over the cobbles past the Abbaye-aux-Dames and the Abbaye-aux-Hommes to their lord's hall, where cheer and plenty defied the dreary mizzle of the Norman winter. To the foyer of their forebears came the young Plantagenets. As chatelaine, in Ileu of the imprisoned queen, shone Marguerite in the flower of her youth, and the Duchess of Saxony, in the pride of her young matronly beauty. With Matilda came her lord, Henry the Lion, lately returned from his pilgrimage, their children, their household, imposing as befitted the lords of sixty-seven castles and forty towns in Germany; Count Geoffrey with his proud wrangling Bretons; Count Richard, accompanied by kinsinen and vassels of the absent queen; the young king, resplendent in the recent spoils of Rouen, trailing those gallants whose exploits on the jousting fields were the talk of the world. Bishops and nobles,
dames choisies
, the toasts of the troubadours, thronged the king's great hall. There shone vair and gris and ermine, wrought leather and brocade, linen from the looms of Tripoli, gold work of Cologne. In the streets the bleariest-eyed yokel in Normandy might stare at horses from Lombardy and Spain caparisoned with oriental silks and mounted by the fabled knights of war, tournament, crusade, tossing their plumes, spreading their pennants, and, in bursts of pale sunlight, flashing the armor of Blaye and Limoges, Damascus and Toledo. The hostelries and the burghers' houses in Caen overflowed with menials and with the factions that had brought axes to grind at the great assize. Guillaume le Maréchal , alone among the
preux chevaliers
, did not arrive in the train of the young king.

*

Foul cup, evil drink ,
(Mauvais vase, mauvais boire.)

Guillaume le Maréchal
, III, 65-66

The court at Caen might have been what the chroniclers declare it — the most splendid ever seen in Normandy, even by ancients who remembered the days of Henry Beauclerc, but for the rancor and intrigue that were rife among the princes and their followmgs. Unhappily, the design of Henry to engage the young king in delusions of grandeur was contravened by a special malice that put the prince out of humor with his role. Though recently appeased with the outward trappings of a king, he arrived in Caen in a mood that no regal display could conceal. Everyone, and especially those lordlings who looked to a Christmas largess, saw that he was by no means his genial and convivial self. He was gloomy, testy, inaccessible, short of speech; he stood off from his intimates, shunned praises of the marshal's exploits, avoided the circle of the gay young queen. His spleen gave substance to the scandal that spread among the thousand elect knights and the ladies who had been bred in the courts of love. From the great hall of the castle to the dingiest pothouse in the town, it was noised abroad that Guillaume, the trusted marshal, master of the young king's household, had dared to lift his eyes Poitiers-fashion to the young Queen Marguerite.

Honest Guillaume did not hide himself from the vengeance to which these reports exposed him, nor did he suffer in silence as the
Tractatus de Amore
recommends. He came straight to Caen and made a scene at the Christmas court. He demanded of the elder king his vassal's right to wipe out the calumny in ordeal by combat. In the presence of all and sundry, he challenged the felons, who out of jealousy for his prowess in the lists had maligned him and aspersed the young queen, to come forth and defend themselves in a three days' tournament. Where all could hear him, he offered, even with the forefinger of his right hand cut off, to fight three successive champions for three successive days without respite- the reward for victory, the simple vindication of his honor; the penalty for failure, to be hanged for the crime in the presence of the company. The slanderers dared not declare themselves, much less take issue with the redoubtable marshal upon the field of honor but the affair poisoned the atmosphere and shed a gloom upon conviviality. Guillaume, the beau ideal of the cavalier, scorning to argue his innocence when combat was denied him, left the assembly more in grief than dudgeon, to seek redress at the shrine of the three Magi in Cologne.

At the Christmas court the prince was otherwise beset. Bertran de Born was one of the noble guests in the following of the Count of Poitou. The pacification, even temporary, of the young king, was not at all what the Seigneur of Hautefort had sought to achieve by taunting the prince as "lord of little land." The troubadour made good use of the king's vast convocation in Caen to undo what Henry had lately accomplished in Rouen with deep misgiving and much expense. Papiol renewed his lampoons in the bailiwicks of the barons of Aquitaine, and music spread their scorching epigrams abroad on the wings of the wind. A certain young king was "the prince of cravens." "It ill beseems a crowned king to live upon a dole and spend but a Norman carter's tax."

Bertran employed his gifts to embroil all the Plantagenets with the Count of Poitou. His jongleur voiced the wish that Geoffrey, Count of Brittany, were Duke of Normandy, for he was "un courtois" and would know how to vindicate his rights. Bertran tried to engage the Duchess of Saxony, and is said to have followed her to Argentan after the Christmas court. With the softer music of the courts of love, he praised her fresh and delicate beauty, her welcoming grace, the liveliness of her talk
¹⁸
But Matilda, whose
education had followed the sensible traditions of her grandmother, Matilda Empress, rather than those of her mother in the court of Poitiers, was apparently not amused. Thereupon Bertran distilled sour grapes in his comments on the comfortless boredom and the frugal fare of Henry's castles "I should feel less than myself in a cheerless palace," he declared. "A court without largess is but a barons' warren."

It was with Bertran's taunts in his ears and with suspicions of Guillaume le Maréchal hot upon his heart that the young king met the Count of Poitou at the Christmas court. There needed only a stave from one of the
sirventés
sung by a careless squire to set them off: "Between Poitiers and Ile Bouchard someone has built a beautiful fortress in the middle of the plain." The young king flew straight to his father with demands for a summary redress of his grievances. But the king, who had lately soothed his transports in Rouen, was now found to be in a contrary disposition. Giraldus relates that for a time Henry let the strife among his sons take its course to prevent their uniting against himself, as in the late rebellion.
²⁰
To the young king's surprise, his father met him with something less than cordiality.

"I gave Richard the right," said the king, "to confiscate the lands of barons who made war upon him."

"But he was attacking high barons who have long been my vassals. I have a right to give aid to my own men," cried the prince.

"Then do so," replied the king, "I do not hinder you."

It was another insinuation that the eldest son might do worse than imitate his junior's hardihood. The heir of England flew into a passion. Unless he were freed once and for all from interference with his affairs and given the powers belonging to his titles, he would renounce the empty honors that only made him ridiculous. He would take the cross and seek a more fitting fortune under some alien prince.

Map relates that the young king never earned any wrath from his father that he could not allay with his first tears, and desired nothing that he could not procure with a few blandishments. The elder king was moved by the outburst. In the threat of crusade he recognized the voice of Philip of Flanders and certain French barons. He resolved again to propitiate his heir. He summoned Richard and Geoffrey to offer homage to the eldest born. For Geoffrey, who had already done homage to his brother for Brittany, a renewal was but an easy gesture. But Richard, who jointly with Henry had done homage to the King of France for his own provinces, revolted. Since when had he been Henry's vassal, and for what? Were not he and his brother of the same stock, alike illustrious? Let Henry attend to his own glittering affairs north of the Loire and keep his men out of Poitou. A demand for feudal submission to the Duke of Normandy aroused Richard's liveliest suspicions.

After this outbreak neither the prodigal liberality of the king, nor all the good offices of the Duchess of Saxony, nor the entreaties of the magnates, availed to persuade the young king and the Count of Poitou to sit down together at the bountiful table of their father. As the quarrel spread to the rival vassalages, the reunion in Caen to affirm the unity of the Plantagenets became an imbroglio that signalized for the whole malignant world the fractures in the structure of the Angevin empire.

Aroused at last to the need of once more conciliating the young king, Henry abridged his Christmas court and before the first of January drew off his sons from the corroding atmosphere of intrigue and counterplot in Caen to the capital of Maine. In Le Mans, by dint of threats and promises, he brought Richard to acknowledge, in the presence of certain of Henry's vassals, his aggressions against Anjou. The young king, mollified again by the elder king's indulgence, then eased his rancor and his conscience. Of his own free will, as Benedict relates, and with his hands upon the Gospels, he swore, in the presence of many witnesses, that he would remain all his life long his father's liege man and show him honor and service due. Furthermore, he confessed that, provoked by the fortification of Clairvaux, he had conspired with the barons of Poitou against his brother, but declared that, if the king would take Clairvaux into his own custody, he would be reconciled with Richard. A few days later, in Angers, Richard, in the presence of Angevin barons, was constrained to repeat the homage of Le Mans; but his concessions were so qualified and so ungracious that, when he withdrew "uttering nothing but curses," the young king declined to receive them, and the brothers were more estranged than ever.

Do you not know that it is our inheritance from remote times that no one of us loves another, but that always, brother against brother, and son against father, we try our utmost to injure one another?

Geoffrey of Brittany

IN THE MEANTIME, Geoffrey had been dispatched to report the new "accord" to the barons of Aquitaine and to disperse the forces they had mustered on the marches near Mirebeau awaiting the expected arrival of the young king to lead them. But the seigneurs of the Limousin were not prepared to dissolve their movement for liberation from the Count of Poitou on the report of an "accord" between the brothers Plantagenet. They had already given too many hostages to the fortunes of war, and they strongly suspected the oaths of fealty exchanged in Maine and Anjou. Whatever Geoffrey's intentions may have been when he quitted Angers, on the marches of Poitou he betrayed his mission. Instead of fulfilling the mandate of the king, he joined the rebels with a horde of mercenaries already rallied in Brittany, ravaged everything he could reach in Poitou, and pushed on as fast as he could to the Limousin to make juncture with the enemies of his house.
²
These he found abundantly among the victims of Richard's tyranny; among vassals from Maine and Anjou, resurgent from the last rebellion; among French barons streaming from Burgundy and the Ile de France. Frugal Dieu-Donne, more interested in injury to the elder king than in assistance to any of his sons, sent down his "infernal legions," a rabble of recently disbanded
routiers
, who knew how to support themselves without his pay by rapine in the land. From the four quarters the mutineers gathered to the banners, as they supposed, of the young king.

Richard, well apprised of the inpouring of insurgents from every direction, set forth from the borders of Poitou with a force of mercenaries in furious pursuit of Geoffrey and the barons, who had gathered under the leadership of Count Aymar of Limoges near Mirebeau. He drove them before him to the Limousin and, but for the foundering of his horses and the exhaustion of his men, he would have captured those seigneurs upon whom the uprising chiefly depended.

When it was learned in Angers that Geoffrey had betrayed his mission, the young king was sent after him to call off the insurrection. Some instinct of clairvoyance led him before setting out to send the young queen "for safety" to Paris, and to recall Guillaume le from exile. He then went southward to find the rebels organizing their positions in Limoges under Count Aymar and Geoffrey of Brittany. As soon as the young king arrived, one castle after another was opened to him.

The chroniclers who record the ensuing events in most detail charge the young king with treason and perfidy. But might it have been indecision rather than wanton falseness that marked his now incredible behavior? There are evidences that, even in the midst of fatal vacillations, compunction stirred in the devious windings of his mind. Inconstancy had already involved him so deeply that he found no way to withdraw from a situation that left him, in any direction, hopelessly compromised He was torn between affection for his father and jealous hatred for Richard, between his recent sacred pledges to the king and his previous oaths to the barons. In his school of chivalry and his role of patron, he had never learned to withstand appeals to his magnanimity, and his habit of migratiation left him always the victim of the last advocate and led him to justify himself first to one faction, then to the other. Since he found no position to which he could retreat, he played for time to put off the tragic decision, the fateful end of which no man could foresee. In this course he fell at first into the strange role of mediator. In playing this part, the chroniclers find him disingenuous, maneuvering for time in which the rebels could gather their resources.

Henry himself arrived before Limoges late in February with a small force of mercenaries. After his efforts in Angers to pacify the young king, he now appeared in the defense of Richard who, deprived of his normal levies by the defection of his barons, stood starkly in peril of losing not merely his patrimony but his very life. The conflict, grown beyond the scope of original plans, had become nothing less than a fratricidal war between the young king and the Count of Poitou for the succession to the Angevin empire, a ghastly struggle in which Henry was obliged to take a living share, abetting first one and then the other of his furious sons.
8
The king's movements, in which he exposed himself freely to foul play, reveal that he still kept confidence in feudal pledges, in the efficacy of negotiation, the potency of law. He came into the Limousin near the beginning of Lent, seeking parley with the renegades.

The river Vienne, flowing through the midst of Limoges, divided it into two separate bourgs, the Château and the Cité In the Cité was the cathedral of Saint Etienne with the bishop's domain; in the Château, the y of Saint Martial with the richest treasury of the Limousin and the castle of the counts. Into the strongly fortified Chateau Count Aymar brought the insurgent barons. The elder king established his camp in the more open Cité. Six weeks before in Angers the brothers Plantagenet had sworn to keep the peace among themselves and to preserve their allegiance to the king their father.
¹⁰
To his dismay Henry now learned that his sudden defense of Richard had driven the young king to join the insurgents in the castle.

Upon the king's approach to Limoges with his mercenaries, the young king, from the stronghold of the rebels, appealed to his father to seek a negotiated peace with the barons. Under this reassurance, Henry, with a small escort, advanced to the Château to treat with them. To the horror and astonishment of his following, an arrow, launched from the barbicans, sang in the air and its head lodged in the King's tunic, striking his coat of mail. At this untoward reception, under a pledge of truce, Henry withdrew with Richard to the nearby castle of Aix for greater security.

There in the evening the young king visited him to explain that the arrow was unauthorized, the random shot of a panic-stricken burgher keeping the watch upon the wall. Here the rebellion might have ended with another burst of tears and a renewal of indulgence; but a fatal madness possessed the prince. "War," quotes Map, "was in his heart."
¹²
He came into his father's presence armed cap-a-pie, as if against the suspicion of treachery. Invited to lay off his trappings and dine with the king, he refused to disarm or to break bread. The elder king, deeply hurt by the attack upon his person and the failure of the old affectionate appeals, rejected the prince's excuses for his castellans and sent him off in dudgeon.

Henry did, however, make a second attempt to negotiate with the rebels, himself going again to the Château as a rendezvous. Again, as he approached, an arrow sped from the barbican seeking out the king. By a mere chance his horse, rearing at that very moment, received the shaft in its neck and so prevented its striking the king's breast.

After this second felony, the young king went once more to his father, protesting again his innocence of evil intention. He even declared that, unless the barons accepted the king's offer for peace, he would utterly abandon them. To dispel suspicion of treachery, he gave into his father's custody his horse and arms. For some days he remained quietly with the elder king, keeping his company and dipping from the same dish at table. In the meantime Henry had cut off the young man's stipends, which might be used to pay the clamorous
routiers
in the Château. He knew how certainly want begets humility. He could afford to wait for that eventuality. But the barons' financiers were not so near their wits' end as the elder king supposed. The chroniclers declare that the young king's peaceful sojourn with his father during Lent was designed merely to give the rebels the respite they needed. In this interval they made their exit from Limoges to ravage the countryside. Pouring out from the Château, they spread desolation as far as Angoulême. Thenceforth the pious Limousin, traversed by its immemorial pilgrim routes, enriched with famous shrines, witnessed a general sacrliege. Under the leadership of Geoffrey of Brittany, the brigands looted the shrine of Saint Leonard, that patron of the earliest crusaders. They pillaged Saint Martin in Brive, dispersed the monks, held some for ransom at "eighteen
sols
a pair."
¹³
They visited the monastery of Saint Etienne de Muret in Grammont. Here in the y which the elder king had nobly endowed and where he had designated a place for his own burial, the pillagers weighed up as bullion the altar vessels, even a precious golden dove which Henry had dedicated as a repository for the sacred host.

At some stage in these events the young king returned from his father's side to the Chateau, ostensibly to try again to make peace with the rebels. Failing in this, or perhaps having tried only languidly, he went off to Dorat, as if wishing to escape the whole situation. During these impious forays, which Geoffrey led without a qualm, the young king wavered in a turmoil of emotion between a mood of abandonment to the sacrliege and one of pious revulsion. He was now half of a mind to yield anything for peace, now resolute for the bitter end. On one day he would lead a band of
routiers;
on the next he might be found, quiet and withdrawn, among the monks of Uzerche, absorbed in reading the life of their patron. Saint Yrieix.
¹⁰
The rebellion, as exemplified by the fickle prince, hung by a hair.

As the conflict proceeded, Peter of Blois exerted his epistolary talents to restrain the young king:

You make yourself an enemy of God and Justice and a transgressor of all laws if you do not obey your father to whom you owe all that you are… For who provides for your material existence? Your father. Who educated you? Your father. Who bred you to arms? Your father. Who put himself aside to make you king? Your father. Who labored in every way that you might possess all things in peace? Your father. You can accuse him of nothing but an excess of grace, devotion, munificence, and prodigal liberality… We cannot conceal our grief that you pursue your father and give over his lands, which you ought to keep from bloodshed, to rapine and plunder. Wherefore have you become a leader of mercenaries, and wherefore do you consort with the lost and excommunicate? In what has your father, to whom you owe gratitude, offended you? Never has he shown himself overmastering… but as a most serviceable administrator of your affairs. He lives not for himself, but for you. Yours is his power, his knowledge, his action, his wealth — all he has. Where is your filial affection? Where is your reverence? Where is the law of nature? Where your fear of God?

When Henry recalled the young king from Dorat to account for the continuance of the pillaging, he returned, not to his father, but to the Chateau, and there, taking his vow solemnly on the body of Saint Martial, he swore to take the cross, knowing full well that the elder king's concern over this act would extinguish his recriminations. On the vigils of Easter he visited his father again. He blamed Geoffrey for the horrible desolation of the Limousin. Then he made known his vow and his resolution. The king was confounded. On his knees and with tears Henry besought the prince to retract the rash vow taken without the royal leave. But the young king was fixed by an irrevocable oath sworn on the holiest of relics. He explained that he had that day taken communion, and it had been revealed to him in the sacred host that he ought long ago to have assumed the cross. He declared gravely that this purpose had been for some time in his mind, but he had waited to reveal it because he hoped that he might set out at a happier moment with his father's blessing, without which he could not expect to prosper.
¹⁷
The young man's sadness smote the king. Was it indeed pure piety that had moved him to this course? Had rancor or poverty perhaps anything to do with his decision? The young king declared that he had dedicated himself of his own free will for the remission of his sins, and that, if obstacles were laid in his way, he would end his wretched life with his own hand. After a deep silence Henry spoke.

"God's will and yours be done. And I myself, with God's help, will so provide you that no one of whom I have heard shall have gone to Jerusalem with such abundant resource."
¹⁸

The hearts of the two kings melted to each other. The young king, in gratitude, promised to bring hostages from the Château to sue for peace. When brought, these proved, however, to be only a few burghers, and when Henry sent to collect others that were promised, his envoys were set upon, wounded, cast into the moat.

*

During Lent Henry forbore to disturb the Truce of God. He remained piously quiet and collected, hoping the lack of resource would presently bring a collapse of the rebellion. But the continuance of the sacrilegious pillaging and the failure of the young king to end the ravages obliged him to act. Before Easter he invested the Château.

The burghers of the citadel, confused by the situation in which the king and his vicegerent sons were at war with one another, fell under the direction of their own Count Aymar. Under his compulsion they razed whatever encumbered the circuit of their bastion, destroying churches, dwellings, towers, even the house of Saint Valerie and the orchards of Saint Martial. Consternation spread within the walls. The monks, carrying the magnificent golden casket containing the head of Saint Martial, the most precious relic of the Limousin, went in procession about the ambit of the barbicans, invoking divine protection. The women meanwhile spun a hempen strand with which they encircled the outposts of the citadel. This they then cut into candle wicks and hastily dedicated them in their churches, calling upon all the venerable saints of the Limousin, and especially their patron Saint Martial, to defend them from the perils of a siege. A sodden winter rain washed the ruins of the bourg, droned through broken roofs, and cascaded in the gutters of the narrow streets.