Richard & John: Kings at War (9 page)

To his consternation and stupefaction Henry II now realised that his wife Eleanor, his sons Richard and Geoffrey and other great magnates were all in league with Louis. Geoffrey, almost fifteen, was already revealing his true serpentine nature; it seems he had ambitions for an independent Britanny. He also saw the chance to indulge his taste for plundering and looting, which was to be so marked a feature of his career. Some claim that Geoffrey was the most intelligent of the Devil’s Brood but he was certainly the one without any redeeming features. He accepted evil as an irreducible fact of life and even revelled in the knowledge. He seemed to have something of a grudge against the Church, perhaps because it preached the triumph of good and the doctrine of redemption, but it is certain that he took a particular relish in sacking and despoiling churches, abbeys and shrines. Richard and his Poitevin allies were meanwhile angry that at the great meeting with the southern powers at Limoges on 21-28 February, when Henry II achieved his great diplomatic triumph, Count Raymond had paid homage for Toulouse to the king of England rather than to himself, the lord of Aquitaine, whose right to Toulouse had already been recognised by King Louis. But all three sons had, in their own minds at least, compelling motives for rising up against their father. The spectre of anarchy and chaos, never far from the surface in the Angevin empire, was once more abroad. It seemed that yet another of those ancient prophecies of Merlin in which Roger of Howden, convinced believer in miracles and the supernatural, so delighted was about to be fulfilled: ‘The cubs shall awake and shall roar loud, and, leaving the woods, shall seek their prey within the walls of the cities. Among those who shall be in their way they shall make great carnage, and shall tear out the tongues of bulls. The necks of them as they roar aloud they shall load with chains, and shall thus renew the times of their forefathers.’
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Yet it was the defection of Eleanor of Aquitaine that most shocked contemporaries. It was a seismic event that seemed to betoken the swallowing up of the natural world by a realm of chaos, for such unwifely behaviour seemed against the laws of Nature themselves. Ralph of Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, seeking for parallels for the events of 1173-74, claimed to have found more than thirty examples of sons rebelling against fathers but none of queens raising the standard of revolt against their kings and husbands.
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Peter of Blois, one of Henry II’s political protégés (he had whisked him from the Norman court in Sicily to serve as his secretary), an erudite, witty, acidulous man and a noted literary stylist, reminded Eleanor in a letter of all the famous biblical injunctions requiring a wife to obey her husband and pointed out that many ecclesiastical sanctions, including, at the limit, excommunication could be exercised against her for this ‘sin’. Invoking the chaos principle, he wrote: ‘Unless you return to your husband you will be the cause of general ruin.’
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More patronising commentators, citing ‘woman’s weakness’ asserted that, although she was responsible for her sons’ rebellion, she was more sinned against than sinning. The usual story was that she had been misled by her uncle and confidant Ralph de Faye, seneschal of Poitou, who was well known to favour Aquitainian separatism and to be a major influence on her.
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But Eleanor was her own woman and needed no
éminence grise
to seduce her down unwise byways. We know for certain that the decision to rebel was hers and hers alone; for one thing, her sons Richard and Geoffrey would have listened to their mother but would not have heeded mere counsellors, even ones as eminent as Ralph de Faye. Given that Eleanor was the guiding spirit of the conspiracy and that Richard, the classic mother’s boy, would do all in all as she did, the only remaining question is, why did Eleanor act as she did?

A variety of explanations has been offered, and we have to work upwards or inwards towards the most plausible. The most far-fetched is the suggestion that Becket’s murder was the trigger for Eleanor’s rebellious actions. The idea is that Eleanor’s apostasy was so sudden - she had spent most of 1170 supporting Henry’s policies - that we must seek a key event between December 1170 and the revolt in 1173, and that event could only have been Becket’s assassination.
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Presumably, the thinking is that for the first time Eleanor saw Henry for the monster he was and noted how in the opinion of all Europe he was a moral pariah. Eleanor did not see Henry for two years until the Christmas court of 1172, and some dramatists have seized on this court as
the
decisive moment when the marriage unravelled in a dramatic way, perhaps following a row about the king’s plans for her beloved Richard, when she might have taunted him for his tyranny and the murder of Becket. The trouble with this argument is that by 1172 Henry had won European opinion round by his abject obeisance to the Pope and his obvious contrition for the murder, which he never authorised.
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Moreover, Eleanor and her sons were never particularly close to Becket, so the entire theory seems a
post hoc
contrivance. More promising is the idea that Eleanor deeply resented her position as a non-entity in the reign and government of Henry II, that she came to feel she had miscalculated by her marriage to the king, which brought her neither the power nor influence she assumed to be her due; maybe Henry’s overpowering mother Empress Matilda, who did not die until 1167, was a factor in this.
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The only snag with this idea is that it does not explain why Eleanor rose in revolt in 1173 rather than at some earlier time, and, if she was really vexed by Matilda, she would presumably have wished to wipe the smile off her face before her demise. In a word, chronology works against an argument from purely personal pique.

Similar considerations apply to one of the most popular of all motifs allegedly explaining the rebellion of 1173: the ‘hell hath no fury’ theme, according to which Eleanor could finally take no more of Henry’s infidelities and particularly the serious long-standing liaison with Rosamund Clifford. The affair with ‘Fair Rosamund’ seems to have begun in 1165 and continued until her death in 1176.
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Of Henry’s passionate love for Rosamund there can be little doubt, as in 1191 we still hear of her tomb, covered in silk cloth, being devotedly attended by the nuns of Godstow Priory; Henry had made this a condition of a generous gift to the convent. The legend of Eleanor of Aquitaine makes her out to have been incandescent with fury over this liaison and to have murdered Rosamund. One story has her personally tearing the mistress’s eyes out and another coldly offering the trapped paramour the choice between poison or the knife. What none of the myths explain is how Eleanor could have accomplished all this while she was Henry’s close prisoner. Yet even if we discard all this nonsense and admit her powerlessness in the matter of Rosamund, it is still possible that Eleanor was that figure beloved of romance: the sexually jealous, vengeful woman. ‘Eleanor did not take revenge by murdering Rosamond; she did it by raising Poitou,’ is one modern verdict.
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Another writer concurs: ‘Henry had broken faith: he had prized lechery above creative sharing, and now the joy of courtly love was gone forever.’
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But one does not have to be a feminist to find this view of Eleanor deeply patronising and insulting, and it is indeed absurd to imagine Eleanor motivated to revolt in this way.
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She was a woman of the world and had made a hard-headed match with Henry right at the start, though doubtless sexual attraction played its part. And it is somewhat anachronistic to import the ‘wronged woman’ scenario into the snakepit of twelfth-century politics. Any intelligent queen - and no one has ever denied Eleanor that epithet - accepted that her husband would have mistresses; indeed, according to the troubadour code, true love between husband and wife was impossible anyway.

Perhaps this alerts us to the true motive for rebellion. Maybe the 1173 rebellion had nothing to do with the collision of personalities but instead represented a clash of cultures? According to this view, Aquitaine, home of the troubadours, represented hedonism, dalliance, the cult of open-handed largesse, the sentimentality expressed in the
aubades
when a lover departs from his lady in the dawn’s early light, a milieu of music, dancing, tournaments, knight-errants and fair damsels in distress, while Henry’s dominions to the north symbolised sobriety and joylessness, the world of the quotidian, of stubborn and irreducible facts, the boring domain of penny-pinching accountants, nit-picking lawyers and pedantic administrators, scouring the latest royal writs for loopholes and escape clauses. It was the cult of adultery against the institution of marriage, neo-paganism against the doctrines of the Church and, ultimately, the world of the female and feminine values against the male and masculine ideals.
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Why else was the Young King permanently in debt, except that his open-handed generosity was in collision with the mean-mindedness of the North? But the myth of Aquitaine as a kind of Camelot
avant la lettre
and courtly love as a dominant ideology has been taken too seriously by some historians.
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Moreover, the idea of an ‘aesthetic’ Eleanor ranged against a ‘philistine’ Henry falls foul of the obvious objection that Henry in fact commissioned more artists and poets than she did - he had more money - and even Bertrand de Ventadour wrote more for Henry than for Eleanor.
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When we have discarded all the fanciful scenarios for Eleanor’s defection in 1173, there remains the overwhelming probability that she was motivated solely by her concern for Aquitaine and the fear that it was being absorbed anonymously in Henry’s Angevin empire. Eleanor loved her southern domains, and many scholars think that in the twelfth century Aquitaine was the most important territory in what is now France, certainly wealthier than King Louis’s ‘France’ and more important for a would-be empire builder than either Normandy or England.
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In this context the homage sworn by Raymond of Toulouse may have been the real precipitant for her rebellion. It was true that at Limoges Raymond had done homage to Richard but he had also done homage to the Young King. Well aware of the Anglophobe feeling among Poitou nobles - a definite cause of the death of Earl Patrick of Salisbury - she knew that they, as well as she, resented any implication that there was a pyramid of power and influence that placed England and Normandy above Aquitaine. It may even be that her anger was more furiously concentrated by the ceremony at Limoges, for the dukes of Aquitaine had always claimed Toulouse and yet there was Count Raymond offering homage and so, by implication, reinforcing a de jure claim to Toulouse, repudiating her own claims. The fact that Henry was backsliding for Anglo-Norman and Angevin
raison d’état
may also have occurred to her; it was unlikely to have slipped her mind that the king had been prepared to fight for Toulouse in 1159 but no longer.
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At any rate we know for certain that Eleanor was the guiding hand behind the conspiracy, for Richard and Geoffrey, at fifteen and fourteen respectively, would not have rallied to anyone else in defiance of their father.

The anti-Henry alliance that Eleanor had revised was formidable. There was no question here of some comic-opera palace revolution; instead there was the most deadly threat that Henry II ever faced. The motives of the rebels were bewilderingly heterogeneous, mainly to do with strictly local ambitions and grievances. In Normandy and England there were particular discontents about the technicalities of knight-service, with Henry trying to change the rules so that the barons were forced to supply more men. He also ruffled feathers by trying to eliminate corruption in Normandy via a new form of Domesday Book. Ralph of Diceto says that most men joined the Young King ‘not because they regarded him as the juster cause, but because the father . . . was trampling upon the necks of the proud and haughty, was dismantling or appropriating the castles of the country, and was requiring, even compelling those who occupied properties which should have contributed to his treasury, to be content with their patrimony.’
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Of the southern lords, apart from Ralph de Faye, Count William of Angoulême, Geoffrey and Guy of Lusignan and Geoffrey de Taillebourg, lord of Parthenay, enlisted under the rebel banner. Farther north Count Théobald of Blois, Matthew, count of Boulogne and his elder brother Count Philip of Flanders pledged their support to the Young King. In England four magnates declared for him: the earls of Norfolk, Leicester, Chester and Derby. Ralph de Fougères raised Britanny in rebellion against Henry. But it was the support of the kings of France and Scotland that seemed most likely to portend success for the Young King. For the first time ever all parts of the Angevin empire were in simultaneous revolt, and Henry was aware that there were many ambivalent nobles who were sitting on the fence, waiting to see how events turned out. Particular suspicions were entertained about Richard de Clare, lord of Leinster, about the king’s cousin Earl William of Gloucester, and also the bishops of Durham and Lisieux.
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The chronicler Roger of Howden took the view that all who were not with Henry were against him and, on this basis, roundly declared: ‘nearly all the earls and barons of England, Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou and Britanny rose against the king of England the father’.
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In Paris Louis summoned a great council of French barons to pledge support to the Young King, and in return Young Henry and his brothers swore never to make peace with their father unless King Louis and the French barons had consented.
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Horsetrading, not to mention chicken-counting, was the order of the day at the council, as the great lords extracted their pound of flesh for their support, in the form of lands, estates and castles.