Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (11 page)

Like William X and William IX before him, Henry looked hopefully at the great and rich county of Toulouse. Cut off from Capetian France by the Massif Central, Toulouse had once been part of greater Aquitaine. It was especially important in that through it ran the trade routes so vital for Aquitaine’s prosperity, the waterways and Roman roads that connected the duchy with the Mediterranean. Its possession would be the ultimate rounding off of the Angevin empire, which without it would be strategically unsound. Eleanor may well have encouraged Henry to assert the rights to Toulouse that she had inherited from her grandmother, although Henry was hardly the man to be unaware of such a useful claim. The present count, Raymond V, was weak and inept and at odds with his vassals, who included the formidable count of Barcelona whose wife was queen of Aragon; he was also on bad terms with his countess, Constance of France, who was Louis VII’s sister. In June 1159, Henry approached the French king to obtain his agreement on a campaign against Toulouse. Possibly to his surprise, after three days of discussion Louis refused; but Henry ignored this setback and at the end of the month set out with a vast army that had been assembling at Poitiers since March. The host was large enough for a crusade; as well as the lords of England, Normandy and Aquitaine, it included the king of Scots (Malcolm IV), the duke of Brittany, and even a Welsh prince, together with the count of Barcelona and many other of Raymond’s estranged vassals. So great a prize required a great army. Yet the English king — an experienced soldier who had fought in many campaigns — disliked bloodshed and had little taste for war; nor was he a good strategist.

Nevertheless Henry besieged and captured the fine town of Cahors, overran the rich little county of Quercy, and in early July laid siege to Toulouse itself. His intention seems not to have been to capture the city or to depose Raymond, but simply to make the count submit to his overlordship. Suddenly king Louis intervened, showing unexpected abilities as a statesman. First, he visited Henry to mediate; then, finding the English king obdurate, he installed himself in Toulouse and took over the direction of the defence. Henry was confounded. He had no desire to attack his overlord, although Thomas Becket urged him to do so; such a step meant breaking his feudal oath and, besides being dishonourable, would provide his own vassals with a dangerous precedent. Moreover the French king, despite his lack of material resources, enjoyed a moral prestige throughout France that it was unsafe to discount. And Henry had also a curious affection for Louis; as a distinguished historian has observed, after marrying Eleanor ‘Henry by turns fought, outwitted, despoiled and made friends with her sometime husband in one of the most remarkable political love-hate relationships in mediaeval Europe’. Nonetheless the English king continued to invest Toulouse even if he dared not mount an assault. At last in September he led his huge army away, having achieved nothing. He would never again be able to repeat such an expedition and had lost for ever any hope of acquiring Toulouse. He went up to Normandy, to expel invading forces led by Louis’s brother, after which he negotiated a truce.

The fiasco of the Toulouse campaign marks the end of Henry’s years of almost unbroken triumph. Henceforth he would have to fight constantly to keep his empire, though he was to do so with considerable success. For Eleanor of Aquitaine, however, the final loss of Toulouse must have been a still more bitter blow, the extinction of the dream of her father and grandfather. Without Toulouse, Aquitaine would always be vulnerable, an unpleasant fact that she must have clearly recognised. So masterful a woman never suffered gladly either fools or failure, and she may well have blamed Henry for not daring to attack Louis.

It was still possible, however, that her son would be king of France, a prize even greater than Toulouse. On 2 November 1160 five-year-old Henry and five-year-old Margaret were married at Rouen by papal legates. In consequence the English king obtained immediate possession of the Vexin and its fortresses, much to Louis’s irritation. No doubt king Henry was uneasy. Louis’s second wife had died in 1160, and with shameless haste he had taken a third bride, the sister of the count of Champagne. For the time being, however, she remained childless.

Until the beginning of 1163, Henry continued to concentrate on affairs in France, and Eleanor was with him for most of the time. They kept Christmas together at Bayeux in 1161, a year during which the queen had given birth to another daughter, Eleanor, at Falaise. The queen was also a good deal in England, where she reigned (if not ruled) as regent. When Henry returned, it was to crush a rising in South Wales, which he did by dragging prince Rhys of Deheubarth out of his mountain lair. In July 1163 all the Welsh princes paid homage to the English king at Woodstock, acknowledging him as their overlord, as also did king Malcolm of Scotland for his lands in England. But the Welsh remained unsubdued. Henry led an expedition into Wales in 1165, but it was a disastrous failure, and only a string of strong castles on the border prevented the princes from raiding deep into England.

There were other problems besides the Welsh to plague Henry. At about this time he involved himself in his famous struggle with the Church. He was determined to assert his legal rights over it in non-spiritual matters, particularly over criminal clerics, who were escaping the full civil penalties by being tried by special ecclesiastical tribunals — the ‘courts Christian’. Because of an untypical situation inherited from the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, Church and state were much more closely involved with each other in England than on the Continent, with a complex intermixing of secular and clerical admistrative machinery. The growing strength and centralization of the new Angevin monarchy on the one hand and the spiritual and intellectual renaissance of twelfth-century Catholicism on the other made conflict inevitable.

Ironically, Henry brought it to a head and intensified it by making his chancellor archbishop of Canterbury in 1162; priesting and consecration transformed Thomas Becket from a king’s man into a fanatical champion of the Church’s rights. In 1163 Henry was informed that over one hundred acts of manslaughter had been committed by clerics since he had come to the throne. He was outraged by Thomas’s leniency in such cases. When a priest in Worcester seduced a girl and then murdered her irate father, the archbishop had him branded — a sentence hitherto unknown in the courts Christian, which went against his own claim that no cleric should be mutilated. A priest in Bedford killed a knight, and Thomas merely banished him. On the whole the archbishop probably had right on his side in the technical context, however, even if it was a very fine point. But he showed such extraordinary tactlessness and such inflexible obduracy that an argument between Church and state turned into a personal duel between archbishop and king. Henry tried to bully Thomas into submission and to make him accept a new legal code for the Church in England — the Constitutions of Clarendon, which forbade appeals to Rome. The archbishop took up the most intransigent position consistent with canon law: ‘Christian princes should obey the dictates of the Church instead of preferring their own authority.’ In October 1164 Thomas and the king met at Northampton, where they nearly came to blows. The archbishop fled by night and, crossing the Channel in a small open boat, took refuge in king Louis’s domains. Here he remained until 1170, his partisans squabbling with Henry’s prelates in endless wrangles, each side appealing to the pope.

Eleanor did not like Thomas Becket; indeed, a letter of 1165 from the bishop of Poitiers told him to expect no help from that direction. She took little part in the controversy, though on at least one occasion she seems to have tried to restrain Henry’s wrath. One may guess that the intractability of both her husband and the archbishop irritated so shrewd and subtle a woman; she herself would have managed the affair very differently.

Admittedly, apart from Thomas Becket, Henry kept perfect control in England. He even managed to bring the Welsh to heel. In France too he maintained his position well enough. The tacit overlordship of Brittany, which he had extracted from king Louis, brought him especially rich dividends. In 1165, after a revolt by duke Conan IV of Brittany, Henry deposed the duke, and Conan’s daughter Constance was betrothed to Henry’s third surviving son, the seven-year-old Geoffrey; Henry then took possession of Brittany in Geoffrey’s name, its barons paying homage to him. When war broke out again with Louis in 1167, Henry more than held his own.

Yet Plantagenet ambitions had suffered a terrible blow. On 22 August 1165, Louis VII’s third wife gave him the son and heir for whom he had so long prayed, the future king Philip II Augustus. Gerald of Wales, who was a young student in Paris at the time, remembered afterwards how the birth was welcomed by the Parisians ‘with joy inexpressible by human speech’, how ‘throughout the whole of that city there was such a din and clanging of bells and such a forest of burning candles’. An old woman told Gerald that one day the baby would bring disaster on the king of England, ‘as though she was saying openly, “This night a boy is born to us who, by the blessing of God, shall assuredly be a hammer to your king”’. She spoke all too truly. Philip II was going to destroy the Angevin empire. His birth was in itself a bitter disappointment for Eleanor, the end of a dream that had lasted for nearly thirty years. Now no son of her’s would ever be king of France.

8 The Court at Poitiers

‘Love rules the court.’

Sir Walter Scott,
The Lay of the Last Minstrel

‘Car nulhs autres jois tant no’m plai
Cum jauzimens d’amor de lonh.’
(For no joys so please my mind
As those of loving from afar.)

Jaufre Rudel

At Oxford on Christmas Eve 1167, Eleanor gave birth to her last child, the future king John. Perhaps she did not realize that her child-bearing days were over; and if she did, she may well have been glad. Now she regained her full energies, and her magnificent constitution was unimpaired. It seems that she and Henry never again slept together. There were other reasons too why John’s birth marked the end of their marriage.

Henry II was a man of strong sexual appetites. He fathered at least two bastards before his marriage: one was William ‘Long-sword’, who became earl of Salisbury; the other was Geoffrey ‘Plantagenet’ — the son of a common whore called Ykenai — whom he tried to make bishop of Lincoln and who was later his chancellor and eventually archbishop of York. An item in the Pipe Rolls seems to refer to another mistress: ‘For clothes and hoods and cloaks and for the trimming for two capes of samite and for the clothes of the queen and of Bellebelle.’ Unfortunately nothing is known of the promisingly named Bellebelle. In the 1160s there was a nasty accusation by a rebellious Breton vassal, Eudo de Porhoet, that the king had seduced his daughter when she was his hostage. Later Henry fathered a child on a prospective daughter-in-law, and he was obviously quite ruthless in satisfying his lusts. William of Newburgh says that the king did not begin to be unfaithful to the queen until she was past child-bearing, but the statement does not carry conviction.

It is likely that Henry began his long affair with Rosamund Clifford before 1167. Unlike his other mistresses she was not merely a sleeping partner but a genuine rival to the queen. It has often been suggested that it was this affair that turned Eleanor against Henry. Yet it is just as likely that she was not altogether displeased with the affair, which left her free to intrigue. Perhaps as early as 1167 Eleanor started to hatch a vast and involved plot that would take many years of careful, secret preparation.

‘Fair Rosamund’ was the daughter of a knight from the Welsh border, Walter de Clifford, who had served in Henry’s wars in Wales. It has been plausibly suggested that the king may first have met her during his Welsh campaign of 1165. We know little about her except that she was young and very beautiful. According to Gerald of Wales, some contemporaries made a play on her name and called her ‘Rose of the World’ (
rosa-mundi
); the disdainful Gerald preferred to call her ‘Rose of Unchastity’ (
rosa-immundi
). The legend of her beauty persisted down the ages, as in the seventeenth-century ballad:

Her crisped locks like threads of gold
Appeared to each man’s sight;
Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearls,
Did cast a heavenly light.

The blood within her crystal cheeks
Did such a colour drive
As though the lily and the rose
For mastership did strive.

Legend also connects her with the palace of Woodstock. Gerald informs us that Henry was for long a ‘secret adulterer’ with her before he openly paraded Rosamund at his court as his mistress, presumably after his final break with Eleanor.

In the sixteenth century Michael Drayton wrote of Rosamund’s labyrinth and tower at Woodstock, ‘by which, if at any time her lodgings were laid about by the queen, she might easily avoid peril’. (This may have been the bower and garden at Everswell, which had originally been built for Eleanor.) The most picturesque legend of all recounts how the angry queen finally penetrated to Rosamund’s refuge and offered her a choice between a dagger and a cup of poisoned wine. (Another version is that the queen arranged for her to be bled to death in a bath.) In reality Eleanor almost certainly never met her.