Eleanor Of Aquitaine (55 page)

Queen, crusader, countess, nun. If Joanna's career had ended early, it had nevertheless offered a vast gamut of experience and had been characterized at every stage by Plantagenet gallantry. The ending of the Sicilian court, the squandering of her rich substance on crusade, the marriage of Toulouse, brought her swiftly, in a nun's garb, to the narrow gate. To worldlings her progress was, in fortune, downward in a swift decline; but to the ministrants who closed her eyes, a swift ascent to glory. Coeur-de-Lion, whom Joanna had idolized, was only five months dead. When the old queen counted her brood again in Rouen, only two of all the ten remained — John at her side, and Eleanor in faraway Castile.

FOR THE REALIZATION of Philip Augustus' aspirations in the west, the death of Coeur de Lion had been premature. The Capetian was not quite ready for a new onslaught on the Plantagenets when the necessity to support Arthur of Brittany's succession confronted him. He had expected more time for the ripening of his plans; time for Arthur to reach his majority and become himself a champion to rally the Bretons; time to secure a more solid adherence among the vassals of the Angevin domains. However, he seized the occasion, while the Plantagenets were establishing John's succession, to ravage the frontiers of Normandy and to take into his custody castles belonging to Arthur on the marches of Anjou. In these operations his zeal for conquest at last aroused the apprehensions of many Angevins who had at first collaborated with him. These barons reflected sagely that they had not abandoned the Plantagenets to be swallowed body and bones by the Capets. Guillaume des Roches, the Angevin who, as surety for Arthur, had at first abetted Philip, protested the manning of certain of Arthur's castles with Frankish garrisons as going beyond the articles of agreement; and Philip in reply advised Guillaume that he would do as he thought best with castles secured by Frankish arms. The answer expressed one of those failures of perception that now and then blurred the clear vision of Dieu Donné. The Angevin magnates thereupon put their heads together, consulted their own interests in the dynastic confusions that prevailed, and waited for events to point their course.

John, presumably escorting his sister's cortege from Rouen to Fontevrault, took shrewd occasion to pass by Le Mans while the barons were in their doubtful state of mind. In the ruins of that city or nearby, the new king achieved a contact with Guillaume des Roches, as the chroniclers declare, by dint of bribes and promises.
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Arthur, in the temporary custody of Constance, was in the neighborhood. In the interview John persuaded Guillaume to renounce Philip Augustus and return to the allegiance of the Plantagenets, and he induced him, as earnest of honest intentions, to transfer the Count of Brittany from the "protection" of Philip to his own custody. The plot was hardly hatched when Constance and the brothers Thouars got wind of it, and they, absconding with Arthur in the night, remanded him to Paris. Again, but by the barest margin, the Count of Brittany slipped from his uncle's grasp.
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For his "treachery" in facilitating the boy's escape, John dismissed Count Amaury of Thouars from the stewardship of Chinon and so from a long loyalty to the house of Poitou.

It was in these altered circumstances that Philip and John met soon after Christmas for reconsideration of the truce, involving the marriage of Louis of France to a princess of Castile, that had been broken off by Richard's death. The recent events in Anjou made Philip a little less arrogant than when the matter of this compact had been broached in August. He relinquished his claims in the name of Arthur to Maine and Anjou and agreed that the Count of Brittany should do homage to John for Brittany alone; but he refused under any terms to surrender custody of the youth. John, on his side, renewed King Richard's agreement to yield up the Norman Vexin, besides the County of Evreux in Normandy proper, and to pay a sum of 30,000 marks of silver. These latter concessions were granted not as an empty forfeit, but as a dower for a princess of Castile, who was by the articles affianced to the heir of the Capets.

The agreement was no sooner reaffirmed than Queen Eleanor, whose
mesine
must have been already mounted, herself set forth on the long pilgrim route to Spain to fetch a granddaughter for the throne of France. This was a mission she could entrust to no one. As she moved with her escort past ford and bridge and town, she must have reviewed in memory the cavalcade of five hundred
preux chevaliers
, the best of France, whom Louis the Fat had sent down to Bordeaux more than sixty years before to lead her to the Capetian throne. The queen's procession moved rapidly, for Eleanor felt the urgency of clinching the bargain with the Capets.

Her route
⁴
obliged her to pass through the fief of the brothers Lusignan and over the stretch of road where a quarter of a century before scions of the same broilsome house had waylaid her for a boon; whence Guy of Lusignan, having slain her bodyguard, was exiled to his glorious fate in Palestine; and where Guillaume le Maréchal had won his first knightly laurels in her rescue. The same brigandly tribe, led by Hugues le Brun, cut off her passage now and held her for the forfeit of the County of La Marche, which Henry Fitz-Empress had long ago acquired in a hard bargain with the Lusignans.
⁵
The affair of La Marche was one of the grievances the queen had overlooked in the course of her good-will tour. The county was wide and rich and it lay dangerously on her highway from Poitiers to Bordeaux. To surrender it was to yield a border rallying place for enemies in adjoining provinces. As was her wont when confronted with dilemma, she took the course, however painful, that was remediable. She understood the irony of ransom and the folly of opposing brigandage with dialectic, so she yielded up the county for the freedom to proceed;
⁸
but she marked the brothers Lusignan in her archives for future reference. Beyond the ambush she made her way with incredible speed through Gascony and over the Pyrenees, and arrived in mid January in the opulent courts of Castile.

Queen Eleanor had to go back years to conjure up the memory of her namesake daughter, though she may possibly have laid eyes on her once or twice in an interval of more than three decades. In the midst of administering her own Poitevin court in the gay seventies of the century, the queen had herself accompanied her daughter to Bordeaux, where the envoys of Alfonso of Castile had received the younger Eleanor and led her off to Spain for her brilliant betrothal in Tarragona and her splendid marriage in Burgos.
⁷
Though the little damsel went from the court of Poitiers in the days of its prime, she was perhaps too young to have been polished to the luster of a
dame choisie;
yet some believe that she carried over the Pyrenees as part of her bridal furnishings those Arthurian tales that had so enthralled her mother's court.
⁸
In going to Castile she had gone to one of the fountainheads of those refined rituals which the Countess of Champagne had sought to impose in Poitou. The troubadour Ramon Vidal has preserved a fleeting glimpse of the Princess Eleanor Plantagenet as queen in the elegant court of Alfonso VIII.

And when the King had summoned to his court
Many a 'knight, rich baron, and jongleur,
And the company had assembled
Then came Queen Leonore
Modestly clad in a mantle of rick stuff,
Red, with a silver border wrought
With golden lions
She bows to the King
And near him takes her seat'

The Plantagenets gave their daughters in marriage prudently, and the lot of Eleanor, like that of Joanna in Sicily, had been rosy and prosperous. Now in middle age the Queen of Castile was gracious, pious, learned, wise, still beautiful, the patroness alike of prelates, grandees, and troubadours. Eleanor found in Burgos and Toledo the full flowering of those civilized customs so rudely broken off in Poitiers by Henry's invasion of her palace and her own long captivity. The Spanish days and nights were too short for all the history that had plied up in the epos of the Plantagenets.

Eleven children eventually blessed the house of Castile, and six or eight of them were on hand to greet the venerable grandmother whose vicissitudes had certainly made the substance of their nursery wonder tales. Several comely girls, three of them of marriageable age, confronted the judges who had come to select a queen for France. Among them, if Eleanor had only had the happiness to know it, there were, in spite of Abbé Bernard's certainty that the Angevins would return to Satan whence they came, two princesses destined to become the mothers of saints.
¹⁰
Though this ultimate glory was veiled from her, the old queen had the clairvoyance to choose one of these for France. Berengana, the eldest of the three, being already betrothed to the heir of León, was not available.
¹¹

A late Spanish chronicle
¹²
reports that the next two, Urraca and Blanche, were adorned with royal splendor and brought before the queen and the envoys for performance and audition. Both were beautiful, well taught, distinguished in manner, in every way meet to be queens. But it was generally supposed that Urraca would be chosen on grounds of seniority, and for this reason she was somewhat more richly accoutered and more exploited in the court. However, Eleanor, who, as everyone admitted, was a shrewd judge of people
(admirabtlis astuciae)
, found some undeclared reason for preferring Blanche as a queen for the Capets. Since French history confirms the soundness of her judgment, she cannot be accused of rancor in her choice. The envoys, put to it to justify their curious preference to the Spaniards, explained that the name of Urraca was bound to seem harsh and alien to the Franks, but that Blanche would roll easily in the
langue d'oil
spoken in the Ile. Thereupon Urraca was assuaged by betrothal to the heir of Portugal, and Blanche was made ready for her surprising destiny.

Easter was at hand and the marriage designed to compose the enmity between the Capets and the Plantagenets was set for the end of Lent. At this season the roads of Galicia swarmed with pilgrims, horse and foot, thronging to Saint James of Compostella, and Eleanor's thoughts must have turned with them to the shrine where her father lay in his palmer's grave before the altar. But she was already behind time and there was no possibility of joining their procession. Breasting the tide of pilgrims flowing westward, she pressed forward toward the storied pass of Roncevaux and soon brought her convoy down to the Gascon plains. In Bordeaux, safe within the moats and bastions of her own citadel, she rested from the fatigues of her journey, and her
mesnie
celebrated Easter with the Bordelais. Here from the galleries of the Ombirére, she could point out to Blanche the low hills of Larmont on the far side of the Garonne, where the magnates of France had pitched their gilded tents when they had come so long ago to fetch Eleanor herself for the throne of France.

While resting in Bordeaux and tutoring her grandchild betimes for the destiny to which she had been called, the queen suffered an untimely loss that the Plantagenets were much to rue. The joy and solemnity of Easter were broken by cries of alarm in the streets, and out of the sudden melee in the public square there rose the news that Mercadier, the captain of the
routters
, was slain in some personal quarrel.
¹³
He had come from a vacation in his castle of Périgord to pay his respects to his liege lady, and probably to guard her
mesnie
as it ventured again into the valley of the Charente among the craggy lairs of seditious vassals. The devotion of this old campaigner went far back to Henry's time, and his loss left Eleanor with more than a sense of personal bereavement. Mercadier had been, since Richard's death, the best strategist devoted to her cause, a disciplined and capable commander of the
routiers
upon whom now, since the good faith of so many vassals was in question, the Plantagenets more and more relied.

After this calamity the queen somehow reached the blessed haven of Fontevrault. But here her strength failed and she was unable to finish her journey to Normandy. Blanche, in custody of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, was dispatched to John, who entertained her with her escort at Gaillard until the Capets could be satisfied of Plantagenet good faith and affirm their acceptance of the princess that Eleanor had fetched from beyond the Pyrenees. The articles of the marriage were quickly certified. Philip, who at the moment was at odds with Rome over his private concerns, was awkwardly restrained from attending the marriage of his heir and the Princess of Castile, but he provided handsomely for the entertainment. The town of Piramor, just inside Normandy and so outside the bounds of interdict, was chosen as offering both fit ecclesiastical setting and a field for tournaments. The Archbishop of Bordeaux, who was untouched by the fulminations of Rome, performed the rites, and when these were over, the young cavaliers of Normandy and France vied in
belles passes d'armes
upon the lists. Arthur of Brittany, a youth of fourteen, still in the wardship of Philip and not yet knighted, disported himself upon the field before the pavilions of the royal spouses and the
dames choisies
. On the same day, with the French king's consent, he did homage to John for Brittany.

Soon after the event, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, on one of his episcopal peregrinations, passed through Paris. Philip Augustus was restrained by his alienation from the church from paying his respects to Hugh, but in his royal stead, Prince Louis and the Count of Brittany called upon the bishop in the house where he was lodged. Hugh embraced them both joyfully, and then, as his custom was with princes, bestowed upon each appropriate advice. Louis Capet, says the chronicler, received his admonitions deferentially, as his grandfather would have done; but Count Arthur manifested a deep rancor that burned in his breast when Hugh counseled him to keep peace and friendship with the King of England. Louis then besought Hugh to visit the young wife he had taken from the Plantagenets, because, as he explained, she had for days been cast down by "some recent occurrence" and the anxious bridegroom could hit upon nothing to raise her spirits. Such missions were precious to Hugh. He dealt so tenderly with the little bride that she "put off the sorrow that had oppressed her and put on a more cheerful countenance."
¹⁵
Had she too, when she had dismounted in the parvis royal by the ancient olive tree and ascended the long flight of hollow stairs leading to the palace of the Capets, felt dismay as she fronted her solemn spouse and as her memory flew back to sunny southern towns and the familiar children of her native palaces?