The Kingdom in the Sun (55 page)

Not content with badgering the Pope, the Queen had also written to the second most respected churchman in Europe—Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, now in exile in France. From the very beginning, some five years before, of Thomas's quarrel with King Henry, both protagonists had looked to Sicily for support— the King as a potential intermediary with Pope Alexander, the archbishop as a possible place of refuge for himself or his friends.
As
time went on, the Sicilians had found their position more and more embarrassing. Emotionally, there had been much sympathy for Becket. Richard Palmer was a regular correspondent of his and Walter of the Mill, another compatriot, seems to have been similarly well-disposed, together with most other members of the hierarchy; while Stephen du Perche, high-minded, religious and suddenly to his surprise a fellow-archbishop, had always championed Becket's cause. On the other hand, as Matthew of Ajello had been quick to point out, King Henry was fighting, just as Roger I and II had fought, to free his country of papal interference in civil affairs; the privileges he was now demanding were in many respects a good deal more modest than those which Sicily had enjoyed for decades. It hardly became the government in Palermo to take a sanctimonious line against him.

It had therefore been agreed to remain as far as possible on the sidelines of the dispute; but Sicily had soon emerged as a favourite centre for all those friends and relations of the exiled archbishop for whom. England was no longer safe. Thus, when Stephen and his associates were expelled, the Regent in her despair had felt justified in writing to Becket also, asking him to use whatever influence he could to bring about their return. It was a patently forlorn hope, but Thomas did his best. Soon afterwards we find him replying to Margaret:

Though we have never met
¹
...
we owe you a debt of gratitude; and we render our heartiest thanks for the generosity which you have shown to our fellow-exiles and kinsfolk, those poor ones in Christ, who have fled to your lands from him that persecutes them and

¹
In fact Thomas may have known Margaret's family quite well. The constant companion of his youth, Richer de Laigle, was almost certainly a relation of her mother's.

have there found consolation.
...
So, as the first fruits of our devotion, have we used our good offices with the most Christian King [Louis VII] to second your prayers, as you may know by the requests that he has made to our dear friend the King of Sicily.
¹

In a letter written about the same time to Richard Palmer, Thomas is still more explicit. After similar expressions of thanks, he goes on to
say:

There is one other request, which I will whisper in your ear and which I hope you will grant me; and that is that you will do your utmost with the King and Queen to obtain the recall to Sicily of that noble man Stephen, Elect of Palermo; both for reasons which shall at present be nameless and also because
by
doing so you will earn the lasting gratitude of the King of France and his entire Realm.
²

We can be perfectly sure that Palmer took no action on this request, which Thomas would probably never have made if he had had a better understanding of the circumstances. Meanwhile Queen Margaret's near-hysterical refusal to accept the political reality of her favourite's expulsion, combined with Stephen's own last-minute reluctance to surrender his see, made the council more determined than ever to have the new archbishop enthroned as quickly as possible. A mission left at once for the papal court to offer Alexander, in return for his early approval, a yet larger sum than that by which Margaret had hoped to pursuade him to refuse. After a seemly interval for consideration the Pope notified his agreement—keeping both bribes. On
28
September, in the presence of the King and court, Walter of the Mill received his consecration in Palermo Cathedral.
³

After this last reverse, Margaret seems to have lost heart. She made little or no further effort to maintain her authority. Her name continues to figure on the occasional deed or diploma until her son's

¹
Letter 192.

²
Letter 150.

³
When he heard the news, Peter of Blois wrote Walter a splendidly two-edged letter of congratulation—worthy of St Bernard himself—begging him to thank Providence for having raised him up to his present glory from the 'contemptible poverty' and the 'dust of destitution' whence he had begun. (Letter 66.) As joint tutors to the young King, one suspects that the two may not have been the very best of friends.

coming of age in
1171
; she then retires, probably with considerable relief, into obscurity. Of these twilight years of her life, one monument only remains—the church of S. Maria di Maniace, built on the site of the Byzantine general George Maniakes's victory over the Saracens in 1040.
¹
According to legend, Maniakes had already raised a castle there, in whose chapel he had placed a portrait of the Virgin said to have been painted by St Luke himself; and it was the better to house this treasure that Margaret in
1174
endowed a great Byzantine abbey on the same spot.
²
We can only hope that her interest in this new foundation did something to brighten the last lonely decade of her life. She lived on until
11
83,
when she died at the age of fifty-five.

But she never saw Stephen again. For the end of his story we have to look not in any Sicilian chronicle but in that of William of Tyre, the historian of Outremer. 'The following summer,' he writes:

...
a certain nobleman, Stephen, Chancellor of the King of Sicily and elected to the Church of Palermo, a young man, handsome and of excellent character, brother of the noble Rothrud, Count of Perche, was expelled from the Kingdom as a result of the intrigues and conspiracies of the Prince of that country; to the great regret of the King, still a child, and of his mother, who had not the strength to put down these troubles. Stephen was hard pressed to escape from the snares of his enemies; but he succeeded, with a small number of persons, and landed in our Kingdom.

A short while after, he was seized with a serious malady, and died. He was buried with honour at Jerusalem, in the chapter-house of the Temple of the Lord.

¹
See
The Normans in the South,
p.
54
n.

²
The remains of this abbey now form part of the Bronte estate, which was given in 1799 by Ferdinand III of Naples to Lord Nelson and is now the property of Lord Bridport, the descendant of Nelson's niece Charlotte. Of the church itself, the three apses were destroyed in the famous earthquake of 1693, but much of the rest is as Margaret left it—notably the splendid doorway with its fantastically carved capitals and most of the wooden roof. Also preserved is the Virgin's portrait, now on the altar—beside which, incidentally, stands a marble figure which may well represent Queen Margaret herself.

17

THE ENGLISH MARRIAGE

Or a conosce come s'innamora

Lo ciel del giusto rege, ed al sembiante

Del sua julgor lo fa vedere ancora.

Dante,
Paradiso,
XX

Now knows he how the righteous king compels

The love of heaven, and the consciousness

Thereof his glorious semblance yet forthtells.

Tr. Bickersteth

Q
ueen
M
argaret's
relief at laying down the burdens of state was fully shared by her subjects. Though her regency had lasted only five years it must have seemed to them like an eternity; and they looked gratefully and hopefully towards the tall, fair-haired youth who, some time during the summer of
1171,
formally took the government of Sicily into his hands.

Not that they knew much about him. His beauty, to be sure, was famous; he had preserved it intact through his adolescence, and the boy who had seemed like an angel on the day of his coronation now at eighteen reminded people more of a young god. The rest was largely rumour. He was said to be a studious lad, who read and spoke all the languages of his kingdom, including Arabic; mild-mannered and gentle, given neither to those brooding silences nor to those sudden outbursts of rage that had rendered his father so formidable; deeply religious, yet tolerant of faiths other than his own. Ibn Jubair recounts with approval one of the best-known stories about him—how, during the
11
69 earthquake, he had reassured the staff of the palace, Muslim and Christian, with the words, 'Let each of you pray to the God he adores; he who has faith in his God will feel peace in his heart.' His statecraft and political judgment were still untried, but this was more an advantage than anything else; having heretofore been kept well away from public affairs, he was safe from blame for any of the disasters his mother had brought upon the Kingdom.

If, in the years immediately following William's assumption of power, Sicily had once again fallen victim to the political instability that had so blighted her past history, there is no telling how long her new young ruler would have maintained his people's love. It was his good fortune that there should have now begun, simultaneously with his majority, a period of peace and security which was soon to become identified with his reign. This much-needed
detente
was not of William's making; though he was never himself to lead an army in the field, he had a disastrous predilection for foreign military adventures and ultimately proved more bellicose than either his father or his grandfather before him. But those adventures, costly as they might be in lives and money, scarcely even ruffled the surface of domestic life in his own realm. Thus it was he, both during his lifetime and posthumously, who took the credit for this new tranquillity; thus too, in later years, men looked back on the Indian summer—for such it turned out to be—of the Sicilian Kingdom, thought of their last legitimate Norman King who looked so glorious and who died so young, and gave him in gratitude the name by which he is still known—William the Good.

Nothing bears more persuasive testimony to this change of atmosphere than the fact that, for the first five years of William's majority, the greater part of Sicilian diplomatic activity in Europe was taken up with the relatively pleasant task of finding him a wife. This was not a new issue. Sicily's domestic upheavals never seemed to have much effect on her international reputation, and it had long been evident that when the time came there would be no shortage of prospective brides; indeed there was not a ruler in Europe who would not have been proud to have the young King as a son-in-law. First in the field, as we have seen, had been Manuel Comnenus; since his daughter would probably have brought the whole Empire of the East as her dowry, Queen Margaret and her advisers might well have accepted the proposal on the spot. But they had refused to be hurried, and the field was still open when, sometime in
1168,
King Henry II of England suggested his third and youngest daughter, Joanna.