Eleanor Of Aquitaine (56 page)

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King John was doomed by some mysterious judgment of heaven to make enemies of all his friends and to gather the withes for his own chastisement.

Philippide, IV, 155

When John was crowned King of England, Isabelle of Gloucester, to whom he had been married twelve years before at the time of Richard's accession, had not been crowned with him. The childless marriage, which had been arranged by Henry to secure for Lackland Isabelle's rich estates, had grown odious to both spouses; yet no English prelates had been found to dissolve it on grounds of consanguinity, inasmuch as a papal dispensation had been required to authorize it in the first place John at thirty three, like Richard at his accession, lacked an heir. That the Count of Brittany's claim to inheritance would soon be pressed anew was made certain by the fact that his mother Constance was now known to be a leper who could not long survive. A second marriage for John became a matter of first urgency for the Plantagenets. When the matter was pressed in these circumstances, prelates were found on the Continent to dissolve the union with Isabelle, who, for her part, made no resistance to their edict.

Eleanor had no doubt revolved this concern of her dynasty in the course of her match making journey to Spain. In northern Europe there was still a dearth of eligible princesses free from consanguinity or from suspicious alliances. In recent years the Plantagenets had turned southward to seek new relations. Henry had looked afield in the marriage of his two younger daughters to Mediterranean outposts; and Eleanor had gone to Navarre for Berengana. Queen Eleanor, an important part of whose business it was to tutor and dispense marriage prizes, had certainly in the course of her journey, and with John's requirements in mind, reviewed the roster of Galician princesses; and since little Urraca of Castile, whose name had failed to please the Franks, had been forthwith affianced to the heir of Portugal, Eleanor had certainly made notes on the desirable princesses of that house, if they had not indeed passed in review before her.

After the peace had been concluded by the marriage of Louis Capet and Blanche of Castile, John, secure for a time in his relations with Philip Augustus, turned away from the Rock of Andelys to look after disorders in more distant quarters. But first he made a visit to Eleanor, who was still ill at Fontevrault. He had no sooner come to conclusions with her than he sent an embassy of bishops and knights to Galicia to bespeak one of the Portuguese paragons for the crown of England. This cavalcade set forth to cross the Pyrenees in July 12oo.

While the envoys were on their way, John warily visited Poitou with the object of getting the queen's vassals in hand before the return of his embassy. The first important stage of his progress took him to the castle of the Lusignans. The brothers of that numerous tribe, appeased by their possession of the County of La Marche as a consequence of their ambush of Queen Eleanor, and impatient for royal confirmation of it, were now eager to make peace with the house of Poitou and even undertook to mediate a truce between John and the Counts of Limoges and Angoulême, with whom Richard had been at war in his last days; and these latter, having been comprehended in the general peace between John and Philip, were now prepared for reconciliation.
¹⁸
Hugues le Brun of Lusignan, who had so featly become Count of La Marche, had ties with Angoulême, for he was affianced to the heiress of Count Adémar. The grand accord at Lusignan, where all the parties gathered, was the occasion of a fete in the hospitable tradition of Poitou. Isabella of Angoulême, as Hugues's betrothed, was the
dame choisie
of the entertainments, a fair young marriage prize without a peer in all the Poitevin domains.

John, who was at the hour in a matrimonial humor, was violently attracted by the excellent beauty of Isabella, and various considerations arose in his mind as he surveyed her charms.
¹⁹
It at once occurred to him that her marriage to Hugues le Brun must at all hazards be averted, since it would link two of the most powerful houses in Poitou in a potential alliance against the Plantagenets; and that Hugues, in view of the rape of La Marche, was getting altogether more than his deserts. Briefly he rued having sent envoys to Portugal. Without sleeping much over the project that boiled up and took shape in his brain, he sought a parley with the Count of Angoulême, of which Isabella was the object. Before the count's lustful and astonished eyes, he hung up visions of a much more ambitious destiny for Isabella than that offered by Hugues le Brun. It was agreed, however, because of'the certain wrath and known violence of the brothers Lusignan, to postpone execution to another more propitious time and place, and meantime to disarm their vengeance.

The far-reaching tribe of Lusignans, as old time vassals of the Poitevins and the Plantagenets, held widely dispersed estates in England and Normandy, as well as in Poitou. John found pretexts for sending the brothers off on scattered missions to remote quarters, while Isabella, in the interval of their absence, made a prenuptial visit to her own home in Angoulême to prepare for her marriage to Hugues le Brun.

While the Lusignans were occupied abroad and Isabella was snugly in retirement, John went forward with his own itinerary, which took him by way of Bordeaux to Agen, where he arranged for the interest of Joanna's son in the properties of Toulouse.
²⁰
Somewhere on the way his
mesnie
unobtrusively picked up the Archbishop of Bordeaux. On the rd of August, a little more than a month from the visit to Lusignan, he arrived without fanfare in Angoulême. On the following day, a Sunday, on the date and in the place originally agreed upon for Isabella's marriage to Hugues le Brun, Archbishop Hélie of Bordeaux married the demoiselle to the King of England.
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News of this master stroke of policy, which suddenly reshuffled the alliances of the south, took swift wing along the roads and river courses of Poitou. John hastened with his bride to the safety of Chinon. The envoys from Portugal, returning from their mission beyond the Pyrenees with encouraging tidings from the king of that country, encountered the report on their way northward from Bordeaux.

There were contemporary annalists who saw evil portents in this coup for the King of the English. The biographer of Guillaume le Maréchal goes so far as to say that it was the cause of the war in which John lost his lands;
²²
but the exhilaration of his exploit, the sweet vengeance on the Lusignans, the charms of Isabella, bemused John, and the ramparts of Chinon sheltered him for a time from acute anxiety. From Chinon it is probable that he convoyed Isabella to Fontevrault for a visit to the queen, who was too old and sick to stir abroad in such unsettled times. Isabella had not at first appeared in the horoscope that Eleanor had cast for John, but her shadow must have crossed it before the marriage in Angoulême, for the Gascon Archbishop of Bordeaux would hardly, without the old queen's consent, have taken a step upsetting the alliances among her vassals and disposing of her richest marriage prize. The interval of six weeks between the fete at Lusignan and the bridal in Angoulême had given plenty of time to get her suffrage, if not her joyful assent. As evidence of her good will in the face of a
fait accompli
, she at once dowered Isabella with two of the best cities in her gift, Niort and Saintes.

While news of the marriage of the King of England reverberated in the capitals of Europe, John hastily put things in order in the region of the Loire. The treasure castle of Chinon he placed in charge of Guillaume des Roches, whose recent defection from Philip Augustus made him especially reliable. He took the precaution of placing in the custody of his own bailiffs various properties belonging to the brothers Lusignan. To thwart treachery and break incipient conspiracy among his own following, he shifted the castellans in many of his fortresses.

In the meantime, with a stout escort, but no abject haste, he himself escorted Isabella across Normandy, taking the occasion to examine his garrisons on the way. In the first week in October he crossed to Portsmouth. On the eighth of the month, Isabella was crowned in Westminster, and John appeared with her wearing his royal diadem.

In England the issue of the Lusignans burned less hotly, and the sovereigns lingered in the comparative tranquility of the island to attend to accumulated business. For eight months John, in the constant company of Isabella, made wide circuits of the realm, receiving in his principal cities the homage of his vassals, adjusting grievances, descending with vengeance on nodding functionaries, looking sharply after harvest and shearing, the gleaning of tithes and revenues. The magnates of England thought they saw in the king some of the Angevin energy and dispatch that had characterized Henry Fitz-Empress; an overlord who, unlike Richard, had been bred in England, learned its speech, willingly stayed among its people. For a time John's diligence disarmed those who at his coronation had demurred over his ungovernable folly and his treason. The king and queen convened their Christmas court in Guildford, and at Easter made their pilgrimage to the shrine of Becket, where they were nobly entertained by the archbishop and wore their crowns in the presence of their magnates.

WHILE THE SOVEREIGNS TARRIED in Britain, Queen Eleanor kept her watch on the frontiers of Anjou and scanned with rising dread the horizons where the Lusignans were stirring. They had of course appealed to Philip Augustus as their super-overlord for the redress of their wrongs, and were marshaling their partisans in Poitou and concocting heaven knew what conspiracies with the faithless vassals of the Plantagenets. Constance of Brittany neared her end, and her death would signal new uprisings. The queen added her urgency to that of the Norman barons, beseeching John with ever increasing stress, to return for the defense of the empire with all he could command of insular resource. While waiting for his coming, she did everything she could to stay the tide of defections in the valley of the Loire and to recover some of the friends that John had alienated. She writes to her son of her diplomatic triumph with the Count of Thouars, whom John had relieved of the wardship of Chinon. The letter provides a glimpse of the situation she surveyed.

I want to tell you, my very dear son, that I summoned our cousin Amaury of Thouars to visit me during my illness, and the pleasure of his visit did me good, for he alone of your Poitevin barons has wrought us no injury nor seized unjustly any of your lands. I made him see how wrong and shameful it was for him to stand by and let other barons rend your heritage asunder, and he has promised to do everything he can to bring back to your obedience the lands and castles that some of his friends have seized.
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Soon after Pentecost John and Isabella at last arrived in Barfleur and went straightway to the Rock.
²
Presently there was observed a pantomime engaging the two kings that the chroniclers were at a loss to explain, for it corresponded to none of the realities. The puzzling shadow play did not, however, encourage them to believe that a genuine peace was in prospect. Hoveden reports that for three days Philip Augustus was the "guest" of John and Isabella near the island of Andelys. The King of the Franks appeared amazingly affable toward the Plantagenets considering the fact that he had already welcomed the appeal of the Lusignans and promised them redress. The annalist, recording the bare fact of the parley, says only that "the kings came to a full agreement, no one but themselves being aware of what passed between them."

A few days later John and Isabella with a noble escort made a visit to Paris and there, to the infinite amazement of those not privileged to share the royal counsels, they were "honorably entertained" through most of July in the palace of the Capets on the Seine.
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Philip, cut off from the solace of Christian society by his altercations with Rome, vacated his royal residence for the Plantagenets and himself retired to Fontainebleau. In Paris the Franks showered the English with rich presents — horses, armor, stuffs — and all but drowned them with champagne. Through a succession of fetes the young brides, Blanche of Castile and Isabella of Angoulême, vied as the
dames choisies
. The Frankish chronicler noted, with bilious eye, the curious show of mutual esteem between the kings. He remarks sourly that, though the royal cellars yielded up the best vintages of the Ile, the English thirst for beer blunted their appreciation of the finer flavors. It is not said whether Arthur of Brittany shared the reunions in Paris. Constance was very near her end, down in Brittany, and the uncertainty of his destiny brooded like a sultry cloud over those midsummer days.

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Philip Augustus had not been ready when Richard died to seize his opportunity for undoing the Plantagenets; but he intended not to be caught again if fortune should favor him a second time. But even now in the summer of 1201 he was unprepared for the impending succession of Arthur to Brittany. From the time of his abandonment of crusade, the King of the Franks had traveled unchecked a long way on the path of the transgressor; but justice had at length caught up with him. Pope Celestine III, in the matter of the captivity, had not taken the extreme measures against him demanded by Queen Eleanor in her famous correspondence with the pontiff. But Pope Innocent III proved more downright. With a long career and a new crusade in prospect, he undertook at once to purge the courts of Europe of the moldy scandals that divided Christian princes and balked the enterprise of Rome. What finally brought Philip up short in his evil courses and trammeled his freedom to avenge himself on the Plantagenets was the wretched affair of the Danish Princess Ingeborg.

In the twelfth century women were not yet persons; but Ingeborg gave unmistakable evidence of personality. It did not occur to her valorous soul to go home to Denmark when, on the day after her marriage, Philip gave her leave to do so. She planted her foot firmly on the Ile and, grasping with one hand, as it were, the door knocker of sanctuary and with the other the irised crown of France, she cried out incessantly to heaven and holy church to avenge her wrongs. From the shelter of the nuns of Beaurepaire in Soissons, she dispatched envoys to Rome, paying out her bridal finery and her gems to compass the expense; and in these embassies she was abetted in the
curia
by the Danes, who also had contingents for crusade. Philip's comparatively easy experience with Celestine had tempted him to flout the mandates of Rome in those matters he regarded as affecting his political rather than his ecclesiastical concerns. In 1199, under the auspices of his uncle of Champagne, the Archbishop of Reims, he had had his marriage with Ingeborg "annulled," and thereupon had rested the crown of France on Agnes of Meranie. And thenceforward, without regard for the outcries of the Danes or the fulminations of Rome, he had stood obstinately for Agnes and the "bastards" she had borne him. The stiff-necked behavior of Philip Augustus offered not only an unwholesome spectacle, but a dangerous example of disobedience to the kings and emperors of Christendom, who, by self-evident law, received their glaives from the church universal in the first place.

In the interest of justice to the Danes, Pope Innocent sent legates to France, but nothing was accomplished by argument, in which the weapons of dialectic collided with futile violence. In October 1199 Innocent issued a fiat. Philip was to restore Ingeborg, and was given an interval of grace in which to make up his mind, at the expiration of which interdict was threatened. To papal envoys bringing this decree, Philip closed his palace gates, declaring that he had himself appealed to Rome for inquiry into the legality of his marriage to Agnes, which had been sanctioned by no less an authority than the Archbishop of Reims, and that he could take no steps before hearing from his envoys. Thereupon the legate, as a warning, darkened the altars of Dijon where the inquiry had been held. When the period assigned for repentance had passed, and results were seen to be negative, the interdict fell.
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Thenceforth, wherever Philip Augustus appeared, the sacraments were withheld, the altars were darkened, the crucifix veiled, and the king became a singular figure bearing publicly the mark of the transgressor. The sentence of Rome had the effect moreover of alienating many of Philip's prelates and of giving pious nobles an excuse for something less than zealous service. It hampered him at every turn; preventing him from attending the marriage of his own son and heir to Blanche of Castile, and from 'having it celebrated, as it ought to have been, within the boundaries of the Ile. It balked him likewise in his enterprise with the Plantagenets.

Through Lent and Pentecost and the early days of summer, Philip bore up under the hardships of interdict. His entanglement with the Danes had become a
cause célébre
in the
curia
, where it was pursued without respect for his involvement with the Plantagenets. Perhaps he would have persisted longer in his obstinate defiance, if his affair with the Angevins had not been ripening too fast. Under the pressure of hastening events, Philip himself sought an inquiry in September 1200, and a little ground was gained when Agnes, in all her innocence, was presented to the council in her own behalf. The prelates concluded, however, that before Rome could look into her personal distresses, Philip would have to get back to fundamentals by first restoring Ingeborg and placing Agnes for the time being in the position of compromise. Then, after rehearsing the whole course of events, the council might be expected, if evidence warranted it, to proceed step by step in canonical sequence to compose the disorders of the royal house and find justice or mercy for Agnes.

There was only one thing for Philip to do. He agreed to recognize Ingeborg publicly as the lawful Queen of France. Thereupon the interdict was lifted, altars burst into light, bells rang. But in spite of the decree, Ingeborg did not accompany Philip on his return to Paris. He shut her up with her royal dignities, incommunicado, in the castle of Ètampes; and while she was in durance, Agnes bore him another child whom he honored with the name of Philip.

Neither the Danes nor the legates who had sat in judgment had expected Ingeborg to wear her crown in the seclusion of Ètampes, and it was presently obvious that the matter could not rest. In March 1201 a new council was convened in Soissons, that famous arena for ecclesiastical tournaments. Philip and Ingeborg were brought face to face in the course of the proceedings, and at the end of days of dialectic, the king a second time agreed to acknowledge her. On this occasion he rode from the court through the streets of the city with Ingeborg pillioned on the saddle behind him, as evidence to all the world of his honest intentions this time with respect to her.

In July, while the King and Queen of England and their
mesnie
were happily beguiled in Paris, detained from mischief's way, Philip held aloof in Fontainebleau, and there fate relieved him of his long impasse with Rome. In the middle of the month, Agnes of Mèranie, "overcome with chagrin, entered the way of all flesh." The Plantagenets had just left his palace in Paris when on September 4 Constance closed her eyes in Brittany. The time was very ripe to deal with John. But one matter remained to perplex Philip's imperial plans. His dynasty was not soundly fortified with posterity. Louis Capet was its sole bulwark. Had he not seen the abundant offspring of Henry Fitz-Empress rapt one by one away? He determined to require that Rome declare legitimate the children of Agnes of Mèranie. Until this boon was secure, Philip forbore to break the five-year truce with John.

Throughout the autumn, while this last affair of Philip's was in abeyance in Rome, no outward disturbance in the Angevin domains marked the passing of Constance and the recognition of Arthur, who was still the French king's ward, as Count of Brittany. John and Isabella, presently joined by Berengana, passed the vintage in Chinon in a round of palatine festivities with their vassals that bore no indication of hostility. The old queen appeared to nod in her dotage in Fontevrault. The Lusignans ventured no breach of the peace on the marches of Poitou. At last, sometime in March 1202, Rome, deeming Philip's chastisement adequate and salutary, put upon his infants the stamp of authentic royalty.
⁸
On April 28 Dieu-Donné struck at the Plantagenets in behalf of the brothers Lusignan.

When he was ready the King of the Franks cited the King of England to come to his overlord's court in Paris to answer for his accumulated mischiefs: to wit, his failure on his accession to do homage to the King of France for Normandy, and for his injuries to the Count of Eu, who was Raoul de Lusignan, with estates on the Norman marches only a few leagues from Rouen. Philip offered John safe conduct to Paris, but gave him no assurances that, in case of adverse judgment, he could freely travel back. This appeared to the Plantagenet too much like an invitation to a beheading. He sent word that, as King of England and the peer of other kings, he could not be summoned to the seat of justice in Paris. Philip replied that he was summoning his vassal, the Duke of Normandy, and it was no concern of his if the Duke of Normandy chanced also to be King of England. To this legal thundering John replied that he would meet the King of France for parley on the frontiers of Normandy, as had been the ancient custom of their forebears, and suggested a rendezvous between Boutavant and Tillières.

When Philip arrived at the trysting place, the King of England was not there. The reinforcements for which he had appealed to England had not come; his continental forces were scattered in the garrisoning of strategic strongholds in the west; many of his own barons were not to be relied upon; and Mercadier, who knew how to raise
routiers
out of the earth by sowing dragons' teeth and how to hurl them wherever danger threatened, had been murdered in Bordeaux.

Philip Augustus had come to the rendezvous with a strong force at his back John's failure to appear gave him an excuse to declare the truce between them broken, and his possession of the Vexin enabled him to fall with sudden fury on the marches of Normandy. By passing only the strongly fortified castles of Aumale and Gournay, he cut a wide swath from Boutavant toward Eu, burning and razing as he went, until finally he pitched his tents before Arques, not a half dozen leagues from Rouen. When he had anchored the northern end of his line on Eu, he wheeled about and attacked the by-passed castles. He set up a siege before Arques and at Gournay flooded out the garrison by cutting the dam of a reservoir that fed its moats.

His success resounded. This was not like fighting Coeur de Lion. Dieu Donné had groped through the devious corridors of John's mind during the captivity and he knew his way through that dungeon in the dark. He was not overawed by the strategy of this last of the eaglet brood. But his ardor led him to act too precipitately. When he had washed Gournay into the river Epte, he took possession of its meadows, long famous as a jousting field, and there he knighted Arthur of Brittany and in the presence of his magnates received that youth's homage not only for Brittany, but for Maine, Anjou, Touraine; for Poitou also, when the old queen should be dispossessed. Further, he affianced to Arthur the five-year-old daughter of Agnes of Méranie. In a mood of elation he provided the young count who was to be his son-in-law with a household of two hundred elect knights and sent him forth to take possession of the properties with which he had been endowed. The "Hope of Britain," girt with his clean maiden sword, hastened down the valley of the Loire to take over his inheritance.