Eleanor Of Aquitaine (51 page)

The widowhood of the Queen of Sicily, as Joanna continued to style herself, renewed her status as a Plantagenet marriage prize. Her defiance of Richard's projects to dispose of her upon crusade suggests she knew her value. Before the death of King William, Joanna had known only luxury and ease, but afterward a kind of persistent adversity stalked the young queen. Her rich dower had been squandered on the expedition to the Holy Land, so that glory was all the treasure she brought back to endow her lineage. And then, on her way home from Palestine, fate moving injuriously and under her very eyes snatched away a rich but unperceived possibility of recovery.

Berengaria and Joanna returning from Acre had been accompanied not only by their little Cyprian handmaiden, but by a niece of Guy of Lusignan, who had been placed in their custody for a visit to the fiefs of her forebears in Poitou. The party had landed in Calabria shortly before the capture of Coeur-de-Lion and had remained in papal territory under the escort of one of Richard's admirals and the protection of Pope Celestine through the first anxious months of the captivity, not daring to stir for fear of the king's enemies, especially the Hohenstaufen. In the spring of 1193, under escort of a cardinal and with papal safe conduct, they had ventured to Genoa and Marseille. Richard, returning from crusade at the end of 1192, had turned back from the port of Marseille through fear of Raymond of Toulouse. But the house of Toulouse had the dismaying habit of favoring the Capets or the Plantagenets as best suited their own transient interests, and Count Raymond had, at the time of the queens' arrival at his borders, altered his role as enemy of the Plantagenets. He even sent his son and heir to meet the royal ladies in his port of Saint Gilles and to convoy them in safety across his county to Poitou.

When Raymond the younger greeted the travelers in Saint Gilles, he chanced for the moment to be married to Beatrix, the heiress of Béziers But as soon as he laid eyes on the beautiful Bourguigne of Lusignan in the custody of the queens and considered her preciousness as a marriage prize, he directed a summary charge of consanguinity against Beatrix, designated a decent allowance for her maintenance, and relegated her to a nunnery. In the meantime, in defiance of threats of excommunication, he attached Bourguigne before she could come to the end of her journey.

This marriage, executed so peremptorily, offered alarm to the Plantagenets. The union of the heir of Toulouse, who was Philip Capet's cousin, with one of the most broilsome houses of Poitou was a menace that could not be tolerated. The marriage of Raymond to the demoiselle of Lusignan, like two or three of his previous matrimonial exploits, was very brief. Though the chroniclers have nothing to say upon the circumstance of its dissolution, it is hard not to see in it the remedial operation of Eleanor. There appeared in the mercurial nature of Raymond and the fluidity of his policies a chance not only to undo the dangerous misalliance and to reendow Joanna, but at the same time to settle that matter, now two generations in dispute, of the queen's own claims to the inheritance of Toulouse, for which she had embroiled each of her royal spouses in turn.

At Epiphany in 1195 Raymond succeeded to his patrimony. Though still excommunicate for his repudiation of Beatrix, he was presently seen mounting another rung in the ladder of his ascendant career. He repudiated Bourguigne, as he had cast off Beatrix, and contracted a marriage with Joanna Plantagenet.
³¹
The frontiers of Toulouse and Queen Eleanor's provinces, so long uneasy and a prey to Capetian intrigue, were brought by its terms to peace and security. There was one hazard in this otherwise prosperous affair, for Raymond was not only the cousin of Philip Augustus, but he had lately been his friend and ally; and who does not know that a weathercock turns his face to every wind that blows? The Plantagenets checked Raymond's supine surrender to the wind by taking a precise agreement from him to
dower Joanna in Toulouse and make that province the heritage of her issue.

The case of Alais, which touched the Capets even more nearly than the situation in Toulouse, called for the most cautious forethought. The plight of the princess was one of the many disastrous fruits of the treaty of Montmirail by which the magnates a quarter of a century before had striven to compose the dangerous rivalry of the royal houses. Little could Louis Capet have dreamed, when he committed this one of his "frightening superfluity of daughters" to the Plantagenets as a bride for the Count of Poitou, what vicissitudes she would suffer in the court of his Angevin vassal. It was twenty-four years since she had been delivered to Henry Fitz-Empress for nurture in the palaces of her destiny, and she was now thirty-three and still unwed in a court whence the daughters of Henry and Eleanor had been sped to their matrimonial callings at the age of eleven or twelve. Since Henry had disposed of the embarrassinent of Marguerite's Angevin dowers by securing her marriage to King Bela of Hungary,
³²
Alais had lived in Britain or under surveillance on the Continent without personal ties with the Capets. Denied the marriage contracted at Montmirail, she had become a mere hostage employed to enforce all sorts of terms not stipulated in her bond. Her youth had been wasted, her fame sullied, and, at the end of her sordid experiences, she had fallen at last under the justice of a queen not likely to acquit her of treasonous intrigue. The wheel of fortune to which she and Eleanor had been bound by their relationships had made a complete revolution. As Eleanor once had been, so now was she, a prisoner without hope.

In the gyrations of her fortunes, the value of Alais, even as a hostage, had diminished. The treachery of Philip and John during the captivity had given the Plantagenets the best of reasons for delay in the execution of the compact of Messina; but now that John had been reattached to his own house by the strong bonds of self-interest, the princess had become not only a chattel of little worth, but an encumbrance to the Plantagenets, a perennial theme for scandal, and an indictment of a king's honor in keeping his sworn engagements. The clergy and the nobles were alike urgent for a settlement of her case. Negotiations began for her restoration to the Capets with Gisors and the Norman Vexin in the late summer of 1195.

During the period of Philip's incursions in Normandy, the princess had been removed from the tower of Rouen and held in Caen and other Norman strongholds safe from rescue. Her long duress and all her proud pretensions ended when, late in August, she was brought as a counter for bargaining in one of the recurrent "truces." Near Verneuil on the frontier, the captive, outcast from the house of her adoption and strange to her own kin, was thrust over the marches of her native land. Her history, so obscure in its details, was certainly filled with unrecorded drama. Her annals, if some clerk had set them down, would be precious as illuminating many a dark corridor in the domestic palaces of the Plantagenets.

Philip contracted no throne for his recovered sister. He bestowed her promptly on his vassal, Guillaume de Ponthieu,
³⁴
to whom she was at once married in the city of Mantes. Thus at last she got an honorable name of her own and passed from the palaces and fortresses of the Plantagenets into the release of comparative obscurity. Her marriage to Guillaume was, however, an affair of strategy, for his lands made a little wedge that prevented Richard and Baldwin of Flanders from striking a common frontier on the lower Somme, near its entrance to the Channel. To this extent Alais, even after her deliverance, remained an instrument that could now and then be usefully employed, but henceforth by the Capets.

SOME CHRONICLERS COMMENT upon a mood of blandness that possessed Richard after those first triumphs on the Continent had restored his security and prestige; after his reconciliation with John and his settlement of the compact of Messina. Perhaps the change on which they comment betokened a new ripening phase, which, if time had been his, might presently have revealed more of the sobriety and amplitude of the Angevin genius. He had been, according to Giraldus, a debonair young man, not so much pricked by the ardors of youth as submissive to its desires, more prone to luxury and ease than to hardening disciplines, to self-indulgences than to virtuous effort. In former times he had now and then been subject to onsets of compunction,
¹
but now a genuine catharsis was observed, accompanied by good works and significant reforms. His amenable humor was attributed by some to the sobering effects of his disasters on crusade and gratitude for his deliverance; by others to the operation of clerics on a mind and conscience made tender by an illness that overcame him at Easter time in 1195. But more reasonable it seems to ascribe the lenity the chroniclers remark to the king's release at last from the entanglements that had heretofore boggled all his movements toward realizing his destiny. Against heavy odds he had recovered Angevin prestige and comparative security.

He began now to restore to religious foundations the vessels he had exacted from them for ransom. He fed the poor from the royal treasury through a period of drought.
²
He went to mass every day and, unlike King Henry, who stirred about and scribbled during the offices,
³
he remained reverently quiet from Secret to Communion. At table, says Coggeshall, he was mild and affable with his familiars, subduing his harsher moods with jests and games.
⁴
Like Henry he heard the rebukes of the clergy without losing his Angevin temper. He even enjoyed in the evenings, when darkness had cut off his perambulations, to draw out the hermits and interpreters of visions who pressed their way to his presence and to parry reproaches hidden in their oracular discourse with pungent retort. To covert insinuation, he replied with a caustic humor that revived the memory of Henry's ways of dealing with presumption. To this frame perhaps belongs the incident with which Hoveden spices his chronicle.

On such an occasion the hardy evangelist Foulques de Neuilly brought the medicine of his evangels to the king. In the presence of a group, the preacher, with something of the valor of Daniel at Belshazzar's feast, delivered his blast.

"I warn thee, O King, on behalf of almighty God, to marry at once thy three most shameless daughters."

"Thou liest," said Richard, "for thou well knowest I have no daughters whomsoever."

"Beyond a doubt," replied the priest, "I do not lie, for thou hast three most shameless daughters, whose names are Pride, Avarice, and Sensuality."

"Give ear," retorted Richard, including the circle of bystanders, "to this hypocrite who warns me to marry my shameless daughters. Bear witness, I give my daughter Pride to the Knights Templars, my daughter Avarice to the Cistercians, my daughter Sensuality to the prelates of the church."

*

The treaty of Louviers,
⁶
January 1196, which finally confirmed the compact of Messina and defined the new borders between the Vexin and Normandy, though it briefly pacified the Capets could not delude Coeur-de-Lion with visions of false security. The sacrifice of the strategic Vexin had opened a dangerous gap in his Norman frontiers, and events pointed to Normandy as the field of ultimate decision for the historic enmity between the rival dynasties and the culmination for good or ill of Philip's Carolingian dream. Not only had the ring of outworks on the old marches, built and strengthened by four generations of his forebears, been penetrated by the restoration of the Vexin to the Capets; but the fortresses that remained had been outmoded by new engines of assault. In spite of its arc of guardian castles, Rouen itself was exposed. Philip, at the height of his predatory exploits, had pitched his tents but twelve miles from the capital of the Norman dukes. Richard resolved to establish an impenetrable barrier against future excursions of the Capets in this direction.

On the right bank of the Seine, Coeur-de-Lion fixed his mind upon a peerless height for a fortress that should surpass anything yet seen in Europe, a very mountain of defiance to obstruct the valley of the Seine by river and by road. Two thirds of the distance, as the crow flies, from Paris to the sea, the river described a deep loop, washing the chalky cliffs of an abrupt eminence that offered a panoramic survey of the whole region to its remote horizons. This height, the "Rock of Andelys," had not escaped the appraising eye of Philip, but it loomed a few leagues beyond his reach.

The Angevin genius for building stirred mightily in Coeur-de Lion as he reconnoitered this matchless site. From the days of his earliest memory he had prowled about the massy ancient piles reared by Foulques the Black, William the Conqueror, Henry Beauclerc, Geoffrey the Fair, and Henry Fitz-Empress on the heights of Loches, Falaise, Chinon, and many another dominating lookout. In the Latin Kingdom he had explored with amazement and delight the newest military construction of the Templars and Hospitallers at least in Margab and Acre, Ramleh and Ascalon. For a time the heir of the Angevins fell under the spell of his architect's dream, and everything else was vexation until it could be realized
⁷

Though the site lay in the episcopal domain of the Archbishop of Rouen, neither the prelate's remonstrances nor the interdict he laid on Normandy for its seizure delayed the king's project. In defiance even of an ill-omened "shower of blood" that was said to have rained upon his masons, Richard pushed the work forward.
⁸
His skillful engineers altered the face of nature, rerouting nearby streams tributary to the Seine, and taking advantage of the precipitousness of the cliffs, so that the Rock was not only marooned by waterways but islanded aloft in the air. Only one narrow and easily defensible ridge linked it with the plateau of which it was the crown. On Andelys Richard laid out his masterpiece and overlooked the laying of its stones. Its complicated outer defenses, the unconquerable strength of its walls, its gigantic bastions, its intricate communications, and, above all, its unassailable site were designed to mock the puny engines of the Franks and deride their petty maneuvers in the river valley. Richard drove his builders with all his Angevin energy, and the work filled every respite of his warfare for three years and more.

"Behold," exclaimed the architect king to his amazed liege men at the end of 1196, "how fair my daughter has grown in a single year."

With raillery he named the pile
Château Gaillard
Saucy Castle, or Petulant Castle, it has been called, though the English hardly renders the mocking challenge of the French.

Philip surveyed the mass of Gaillard looming on his path with a dismay that was not concealed by his defiant bluster.

"If its walls were made of solid iron," he cried, "yet would I take them."

And over the ramparts Richard shouted back, "By the throat of God, if its walls were made of butter, yet would I hold them. "

The Rock became the seat of Richard's councils and of such court as he maintained. Here he convened his magnates, barons and bishops, castellans and seneschals; here he received the emissaries of other potentates Within its dungeons he gathered the prisoners he took in war. No doubt jongleurs bandied
sirventés
in the hall, but conversation certainly did not turn upon the
Tractatus de Amore
. The talk at Gaillard was of battles and hostages, taxes and levies, of ransom, of the famine and hard times that war had brought to the provinces of the Angevins, and, more than all, of the persistent treachery and menace of the Franks As the castle uplifted its mass against the sky, Plantagenet policy with respect to this menace took shape and became mamfest. It was seen that Richard's experience in the Holy Roman Empire had given him insight into the political strategy that underlies an ultimate resort to arms between two powerful enemies. Whereas once his pride and confidence had led him to spurn and offend his potential allies, he now was seen to cultivate friends near and far and to appreciate their uses.

Two fortuitous events outside his own domains presently gave him opportunity to employ the weapons of diplomacy: the death of Henry of Hohenstaufen before the prime of his age, and the succession of Innocent III to the papal throne. The Holy Roman Emperor had remained excommunicate
¹²
until the moment of his deathbed repentance for his violation of the Truce of God in holding Richard captive. His sudden death in Messina
¹³
in September 1197 left only the infant son of Constance of Sicily as heir to the Empire. Important German magnates rejected this child, for whom a long regency would have multiplied disorders. The emperor's brother, Philip of Swabia, was unacceptable to the great lords of the church. Those German magnates whom Coeur-de-Lion had so impressed during his captivity summoned Richard himself to counsel the choice for the imperial crown, perhaps to assume it himself.

It was said that the same destiny had once beckoned Henry to cross the Alps of Maurienne and descend to the Lombard plain, but that his domestic embarrassinents with his sons, or perhaps the sound Angevin instinct that warned him to reach for those gains only that were certainly attainable, had restrained him from adding the knotty dilemmas of the Empire to his problems at home. At any rate, he had contented himself with the consolidation of his Angevin provinces and the addition of such marginal lands as chance placed at his mercy. The experiences of Richard and Eleanor in Speyer and Mainz had made them wary. As Henry was said to have done before him, Richard now renounced the honors proffered him. A ripening judgment rose to curb the sudden impulse that in the first years of his reign had led him to seize fortune recklessly without regard for consequence. But in order not to sacrifice imperial prospects unconditionally, Coeur-de-Lion proposed for the emperor's crown his nephew, Otto of Brunswick, a son of Matilda Plantagenet and Henry the Lion of Saxony. Otto had grown up for the greater part of his life in Plantagenet courts because of the long exile of his father and the early death of his mother in 1189.
¹⁵
He was a valiant and personable knight in his early twenties, in good odor with the church, and he had recently had some administrative training under Eleanor's supervision as bailiff in Poitou.
¹⁸
Otto's destiny was arranged at Gaillard and thence, resplendent with trappings and retinue, the young man proceeded to Speyer. In January 1198 he was married to the infant daughter of the Duke of Louvain, who had befriended Richard in his captivity. On the following day in Aachen, with a bride beside him who was too small to wear her crown, he put on the imperial diadem and was acclaimed by this powerful party of German magnates as the Holy Roman Emperor.

In 1198 the aged Pope Celestine, whose supineness Eleanor had so bitterly berated during the captivity, was succeeded by the young and energetic Innocent III; and the new successor to Saint Peter made it at once apparent that the church would not regard as an inevitable and perennial curse the strife among the potentates of Europe that postponed from month to month and year to year the promised succor of the Latin Kingdom in Palestine. In the papal survey, when once the compact of Messina, which the church had endorsed, had been given effect, Richard's record was much fairer than Philip Augustus' had been. The Plantagenets did not let it be forgotten that Philip had violated the Truce of God by invading the lands of his fellow crusader and by contributing to the captivity; that he had suborned John and spread false rumors with evil intent. Furthermore, Philip was not only under interdict for his stubborn resistance in the matter of the Princess Ingeborg, who still abode with the nuns of Soissons while Danish emissaries labored at the
curia
for her restoration to the throne of France, but he had contracted an unblessed union with a German heiress, Agnes of Meranie, who with her "bastards" flourished in his palaces with all the semblance of legitimacy.

As the century drew toward its close, Gaillard overlooked the valley of the Seine saucily indeed. It was the most impregnable fortress on the Continent, and the alliances issuing from it were seen to forge a ring about the French domain. Philip saw his potential allies drawn one by one into the camp of the enemy: John Plantagenet, the Danes, the Counts of Flanders and Boulogne, the barons palatinate of the Rhine, the Count of Toulouse. The Rock was properly dreaded in the Ile as breeding disaster for the Franks.

*

Stir not the embers with the sword.
Hoveden

While in the latter nineties the Plantagenets' fortification of their boundaries progressed, the warfare on the marches of Normandy and other frontiers proceeded without much regard for the seasonal truces contrived by prelates and castellans to bring about a permanent accord. The restoration of the Princess Alais and the Norman Vexin by the treaty of Louviers (1196) had for a brief time seemed to anxious vassals to mark a cessation of the interminable struggle. But, in spite of the treaties, the Vexin remained the indispensable defense of either king against the other, and so a perennial bone of contention between the rival dynasties.

Confronted by the menace of the Rock, Philip could not regard the treaty of Louviers as definitive. His suspicions were further aroused by Richard's issuing a levy for the mustering of troops in England. He weighed measures to secure the advantages he had gained through the restoration of the Vexin, and considered how he might extend its boundary northward to the Channel on the borders of the region held by Count Guillaume de Ponthieu, to whom he had assigned his sister Alais as a marriage prize. The Plantagenets had recovered Aumale, which protected Rouen from short-range attack from the north and east. Philip made a sudden onset on Aumale. Richard, though unprepared for assault in that quarter, set forth from Gaillard with boldness and all speed. With Guillaume le Maréchal and Mercadier commanding detachments of his forces, he drove Philip in a rout out of the Norman Vexin into the French domain. Through the gateway of Gisors the French king's flight was so precipitate that the bridge over the Epte gave way, twenty of his knights weighted by their armor were drowned, and Philip himself plunged into the stream and was narrowly rescued from death. Richard wrote exultantly to the Bishop of Durham: "The King of the Franks had river water for his drink that day, and nearly a hundred knights were captured."