Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (27 page)

One may well ask whether queen Eleanor must take any of the blame for her grandson’s murder. Certainly Arthur and his mother had been her sworn enemies and he had tried to lay hands on her at the point of the sword: still more unforgivably, he had intended to take away her lands, power and independence. Knowing John, she must surely have foreseen what might happen to the wretched youth. Yet on the other hand, though plainly no friend to Arthur, it is quite likely that she thought he would simply remain in perpetual confinement, as in fact happened to his sister. One has to take into account the story that at one moment John actually thought of releasing Arthur. The most convincing testimony to Eleanor’s innocence in this matter is her shrewdness. She was too far-sighted a politician not to realize that the young duke’s murder would prove disastrous for her son’s cause. Not only did it give his enemies moral justification for making war on king John, but it also enabled Philip of France to claim homage from Arthur’s outraged vassals.

20 The End of the Angevin Empire

‘What! mother dead?

How wildly then walks my estate in France!’

Shakespeare,
King John

‘Now boast thee, death! In thy possession lies A lass unparallel’d.’

Shakespeare,
Antony and Cleopatra

It can truly be said that the Angevin empire died with Eleanor of Aquitaine. In a sense it had only come into being because of her, and it passed with her, although it was no fault of her’s that it came to an end: indeed it was the Norman and Plantagenet possessions that were lost, not Aquitaine. Perhaps she realized that her unbalanced youngest child would find it impossible to hold such a vast inheritance, and that Richard’s death had spelt its doom. Yet, shrewd as she was, probably even the old queen found it hard to believe that Philip II was capable of conquering her sons’ great fiefs in France. And while she lived, she could try to stave off disaster.

Nevertheless, one person considered that Eleanor was responsible for the coming débâcle, which he foresaw only too clearly. When the bishop of Lincoln, St Hugh, lay dying during the last months of 1200 he made a dismal prophecy:

The descendants of king Henry must bear the curse pronounced in Holy Scripture: ‘The multiplied brood of the wicked shall not thrive; and bastard slips shall not take deep root nor any fast foundation,’ and again: ‘The children of adulterers shall be rooted out.’ The present king of France will avenge the memory of his virtuous father, king Louis, upon the children of the faithless wife who left him to unite with his enemy. And as the ox eats down the grass to the very roots, so shall Philip of France entirely destroy this race.

The early thirteenth century was accustomed to bloodshed but it is clear that contemporaries were genuinely shocked by the murder of Arthur, although they could only guess at what had happened. As late as October 1203 Philip II did not know whether the young duke was dead or alive, but he obviously had his suspicions. William of Les Roches, to whom John had sworn that Arthur should come to no harm, turned against the king of England, almost certainly from revulsion. William was a serious loss; he was not only one of the greatest lords in Anjou, and its seneschal, but also one of John’s most capable commanders. Many others of the English king’s subjects were outraged, not least those in Brittany, where the young duke seems to have been extremely popular. Philip of France called upon John in the name of the Bretons to show that Arthur was still alive.

In any case Philip’s troops were already invading Normandy, while a Breton army was attacking it from the south-west. The Norman border was quickly conquered and then strongholds in the heart of the duchy began to fall, some surrendering because John had not made proper provision for their defence, and others because they preferred to be ruled by king Philip. For the Normans were war weary, crushed by savage taxation and by the ravages of John’s mercenaries. Furthermore the suspicious English king would not trust the Norman barons and set them against him by preferring to use his own paid henchmen.

King John wandered aimlessly through eastern Normandy, with his treasure and his hostages, apparently incapable of any proper plan for a defensive campaign. By the end of 1203 probably only the Cotentin, Mortain and Rouen remained loyal to him. Château-Gaillard was still holding out, although it had been besieged since August and an attempt to relieve it had failed. The king could do nothing but mutter helplessly, ‘Let me alone!’ as news of fresh enemy advances kept on coming in; ‘One day I shall reconquer all I have lost’. At the beginning of December John gave way to despair and left Normandy for England, never to return.

In March 1204 Philip made sure of victory in Normandy, taking Château-Gaillard by assault. The greatest stronghold in France had fallen, although it was supposed to be impregnable. The French king struck westwards to join forces with the Bretons. Early in the summer Falaise, also thought impregnable, surrendered after a siege of only seven days, and then Caen and Bayeux went too. Avranches was taken by the Bretons. By the end of May only Rouen, the ducal capital, continued to hold out for John. Its garrison commander, Peter of Préaux, sent a desperate appeal to the king in England, but was told that he would have to help himself. Accordingly, on 24 June Rouen surrendered to Philip II. Save for the Channel Islands, king John had lost the entire Norman heritage bequeathed by his great-great-grandfather, William the Conqueror.

It was the first step down in a very gloomy descent indeed. John’s reign became steadily more disastrous. His oppressive government and savagery alienated not just his vassals in France but the English baronage as well. He also made an enemy of the Church, which eventually excommunicated both king and kingdom. His road led to Runnymede and the humiliating concessions of Magna Carta. It ended in an invasion of England by Philip II’s troops during which the country was nearly lost to the Plantagenets; a septuagenarian William Marshal saved the throne with difficulty for John’s son, the boy king Henry III.

In the meantime William of Les Roches seized Angers and quickly won control of all Anjou. In August 1204, in his capacity of seneschal, he surrendered the county to Philip. By 1205 Maine and Touraine, together with the north and east of Poitou, had gone the same way.

In Poitou, however, there had been some genuine resistance to Philip. Eleanor had a loyal and efficient commander in the seneschal, Robert of Thornham. Moreover, Philip was to some extent deterred by the fact that in theory he had no legal quarrel with Eleanor, who had done homage to him as his vassal. One may guess, too, that the defence was stiffened by the indomitable old lady. She had now moved from Fontevrault to Poitiers; after her unpleasant experience at Mirebeau she had been forced to stay in the safety of the capital, since the entire county was torn by war. Even Eleanor could not stop the rot in her own territory. The Lusignan party had become too deeply entrenched, and too many of the other Poitevin lords had been outraged by John’s behaviour. She was too old and frail to lead a full-scale campaign against them. Nevertheless she still had just enough strength to try to keep the county loyal, although well over eighty and obviously failing. As late as 1203 she wooed the citizens of Niort by granting them a charter.

John did nothing to help her. Some historians have attempted to show that he tried to halt the Capetian invasion, but a contemporary troubadour tells a very different story. Writing apparently at the beginning of 1205 Bertran de Born’s son composed a
sirventés
(or satirical ballad) ‘to make king John blush for shame’. It seems that he did so at the request of one of John’s most loyal officers, Savary de Mauléon. The troubadour says that the king ought to be ashamed to think of his ancestors after having abandoned Poitou to Philip II ‘for the asking’, and that all Aquitaine regrets
lo rei Richart,
whom his brother is so plainly incapable of emulating. The younger Bertran adds sarcastically that one can scarcely compare John to Sir Gawain (the Arthurian hero), and that the king prefers hunting or sheer idleness to anything else, which is why he has lost both his honour and his lands. The poem ends by calling John a flabby coward who does not know how to fight and can inspire loyalty in no one.

No doubt the queen mother felt increasingly that her own end was near, when she heard almost every day how some fresh disaster had befallen her son. It has been suggested that the news of the loss of Château-Gaillard — Richard’s creation — killed her. There are varying accounts of her last days, but it seems most likely that she left the security of Poitiers and returned to her dear Fontevrault. Here, apparently, she died as she must have hoped, wearing the black-and-white habit of its nuns. This was on either 31 March or 1 April 1204. She was buried in the crypt of the abbey church. On 10 August 1204 Philip II rode into Poitiers and took possession of the Maubergeon.

Shakespeare was probably correct in guessing that king John regarded his mother’s death as the final ruin of all his hopes in France. In the words of bishop Stubbs, Eleanor was ‘the great source and prop of his continental position …. John’s fortunes are not wholly hopeless until he loses his mother’. Even when she was too aged to be of any active assistance, she must still have had considerable value as a focus of loyalty and a symbol of strength. She could have been yet more useful as an adviser, although the king was probably too stupid to ask her advice, as he demonstrated by his murder of Arthur. Indeed apart from their dramatic meeting at Mirebeau there is little evidence that he saw anything of his mother during her final years. It was therefore fitting that he should not be present at her deathbed. She had never felt much love for him, nor had she ever been tolerant of failure, and certainly she had never known failure on such a grand scale as that of John. Out of all the Angevin empire in France, only Aquitaine remained, except for a strip of south-western Poitou. Admittedly Aquitaine may have had little wish to be ruled by a northern Frenchman such as king Philip II. Yet it is conceivable that the Aquitainians preferred to stay loyal to John simply because he was the son of their magnificent duchess.

Was Eleanor another empress Livia or was she the ‘woman beyond compare’ of Richard of Devizes? The most important hostile testimony is that of St Hugh of Lincoln, whose prophecy of the imminent end of the Plantagenet dynasty all but came true. This Carthusian bishop was not just an eccentric clairvoyant. On the contrary, he was a very practical saint who despised popularity, protected Jews, and defied in turn Henry II, Richard I and John — each of whom respected and liked him, even John. Far from being a misogynist like St Bernard, Hugh thoroughly enjoyed having pious ladies to dine with him. Yet Hugh regarded Eleanor as a wicked adulteress whose sin had left an appalling curse on her progeny, although in the same breath he could speak in the warmest terms of Louis VII, the husband who had cast her off. It is difficult to explain this apparent confusion in the saint’s mind. Perhaps he believed, mistakenly, that Louis had repudiated his queen because of adultery. A more sinister interpretation of his condemnation is that he thought he recognized some inherent evil in Eleanor.

It is reassuring that other contemporaries had a different opinion of her. Half a century later the chronicler Matthew Paris wrote of 1204, ‘In this year the noble queen Eleanor, a woman of admirable beauty and intelligence, died’. And Matthew had surely spoken with people who remembered her. As for her virtues, the good sisters of Fontevrault — who admittedly must have been somewhat biased — extolled their benefactress in their necrology, claiming that ‘in the conduct of her blameless life, she surpassed all the queens of the world’. No doubt they were thinking of the devout old lady whom they had known when she had spent her last years with them, not of the mother queen who, in her lust for power, had raised a vast international rebellion against her husband and turned his own children against him, who had made almost a lover out of her favourite son, and who had ruthlessly altered the succession to the Angevin empire. The nuns conveniently forgot the frivolous patroness of troubadours who had dared to laugh at St Bernard and the monks, the haughty, luxury-loving queen who had ridden in pomp through so many exotic capitals and who had even threatened a pope. All that was many years ago and the nuns may be forgiven; her life, though hardly a happy one, had been so long and varied that it was impossible for ordinary mortals to understand her, let alone to judge her. Certainly Eleanor’s love of Fontevrault and the years that she spent there are the best witness in her defence.

Eleanor of Aquitaine will always remain a fascinating enigma. Her elegant effigy still lies gracefully at Fontevrault, crowned and wimpled and holding a prayer book. She is between her estranged husband Henry II, who stole her inheritance and imprisoned her, and that dearest of all sons, Richard Coeur-de-lion. Nearby lie her daughter Joanna of Toulouse and her daughter-in-law Isabella of Angoulême. By the conventions of mediaeval art her marble face can scarcely be a natural likeness, but it is the face of an extraordinarily attractive woman.