Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (16 page)

The campaign was abandoned, however, when terrible news arrived from Outremer. In July 1187 the army of the crusader states had been annihilated by Saladin at the Horns of Hattin; Jerusalem and the Holy Cross were now in infidel hands, and of all the Holy Land only two or three seaports remained to the Christians. The pope proclaimed a new crusade and the emperor, the kings of France and England and count Richard took the cross. Henry had been offered the crown of Jerusalem by the patriarch Heraclius in 1185, and had declined it. But now he and his sons may have had second thoughts: the current king, Guy of Lusignan, was hopelessly discredited. Henry began to assemble an expedition, imposing a savage tax — the Saladin tithe — to pay for it. Before he was able to set out, however, a new war began in France.

Richard was invading Toulouse. Count Raymond had tortured and murdered some merchants of Poitou, blinding and gelding them, apparently as a carefully considered insult. For all their friendship — they ate out of the same dish and slept in the same bed when they were together — Philip, as overlord of Toulouse, could not tolerate Richard’s attack on his vassal. In June 1188 the French king struck in Berry, storming several castles. Henry immediately sailed from England with an army of Welsh merceneries, while his son swung north and quickly expelled the French from Berry. The war spread to Normandy and Anjou. But, in a series of skilful diplomatic moves, Henry detached two of Philip’s chief allies — the counts of Blois and Flanders — while the French king began to run out of money. By November it looked as though the Angevin had proved too much for the Capetian.

Then Richard turned against his father. He demanded that his marriage to the unfortunate Alice should take place at once (he was almost certainly insincere), that Henry should guarantee his succession to the throne of England, and that he should immediately be given full possession of Anjou, Maine and Touraine as well as Poitou. The old king refused all his demands. In his father’s presence Richard thereupon formally declared himself king Philip’s vassal, kneeling swordless before him, placing his hands in his and doing homage to him for every Angevin fief in France. It was unfilial, even unnatural; consciously or unconsciously, Richard may have felt that in some way he was avenging the wrongs that his father had inflicted on his adored mother. A truce prevented the war from breaking out again until Easter 1189, and the pope tried desperately to put an end to the quarrel, which could have wrecked his crusade.

In June 1189 the combined armies of count Richard and king Philip invaded Maine. In residence at the capital, Le Mans, Henry had too few troops to stop them. He set fire to Le Mans, although it had been his birthplace — some say that the burning was an accident — and fled towards Angers, pursued by his son. But Richard found his way barred by William Marshal, the most redoubtable knight of the age. Afraid for once, the count cried out, ‘Marshal, don’t kill me — it would be wicked as I’m unarmed’. William replied, ‘I shan’t kill you, but I hope the devil does’, and drove his lance into Richard’s horse to bring him crashing to the ground.

Shortly afterwards, Henry, who was seriously ill from blood poisoning, met his enemies at Villandry. Swaying in the saddle but refusing to dismount, he agreed to all their demands. As he gave his son the kiss of peace, he whispered in Richard’s ear, ‘God grant that I don’t die before I can take my revenge on you’. But the old king had to return to Chinon in a litter, a dying man. He was so bitter that at first he refused to be shriven. ‘Why should I revere Christ? Why should I honour Him who dishonours me?’ For Henry had learnt on his deathbed that even his favourite child John had gone over to the enemy. Only his bastard son Geoffrey remained with him. His face turned to the wall, Henry II’s last words were, ‘Shame on a conquered king’. Eleanor had been revenged in full.

12 Queen Mother

‘The eagle of the broken vow shall find joy in her third nestling.’

Geoffrey of Monmouth

‘The king then sold everything that he had, castles, towns and manors.’

Roger of Howden

In his famous
Prophecies of Merlin,
Geoffrey of Monmouth had foretold how ‘The eagle of the broken vow shall find joy in her third nestling’ (
Aquila rupti foederis tertia nitidatione gaudebit
). Later the dean of St Paul’s, Ralph of Diceto, was not slow in seeing that these words might be applied to the queen mother and Richard I. Eleanor was of course an imperial eagle, ‘because she spread her wings over two kingdoms, those of France and England’; the broken vow signified both her divorce by king Louis and her imprisonment by king Henry; and the ‘third nestling’ was the new king, her third surviving son. The dean was not necessarily a sycophant in claiming that Eleanor found joy in Richard: everyone must have known that he was her favourite child.

On hearing that his father was dead, Richard came in a repentant mood to weep by the bier before the interment at Fontevrault. Then he seized the royal treasure at Chinon and sent orders to England for the release of his mother. His messenger was his erstwhile enemy, William Marshal. When William arrived at Winchester where Eleanor had been imprisoned, however, he found that she had already freed herself and was ‘more the great lady than ever’. Her son had directed that she was to order everything as she wished and that her commands were to be obeyed implicitly. She at once gathered the court together, and went on progress ‘from city to city and from castle to castle, just as she pleased’. That she was able to free herself so promptly is a revealing witness to the widespread recognition of the bond between herself and the new king; not even the justiciar dared to resist her. A modern French historian had described queen Eleanor as emerging from captivity transformed, ‘a sovereign in full sail’.

Anxious to court popularity while establishing his rule, king Richard told his mother to release large numbers of prisoners. Accordingly, she sent an order throughout England for the freeing of men who had been unjustly imprisoned, notably for infringing the tyrannical forest laws, or because of malicious accusations. When issuing the order Eleanor remarked that she herself had found ‘by her own experience that prisons were hateful to men, and to be released from them was a most delightful refreshment to the spirit’. Another who benefited was her old ally of 1173, Robert Beaumont, earl of Leicester, whose lands were restored to him.

Strictly speaking, as in Henry’s reign, the regent of England was still the justiciar Ranulf Glanvill. But Richard was no friend to Ranulf and during the five weeks before the new king’s arrival Eleanor was ruler of England in all but name. To a woman so fond of power it must have been a most agreeable interlude. She showed her mettle as an administrator, issuing edicts that standardized weights and measures for wheat and cloth throughout the realm and established a single value for the coinage, putting an end to regional variations in the price of silver from which only bankers and moneylenders had profited. She freed the abbeys of their obligation to stable or pasture herds of royal horses, and founded a hospital in Surrey. Above all she ordered ‘that every free man in the whole realm swear that he would bear fealty to the lord Richard, lord of England and son of the lord king Henry and the lady Eleanor, in life and limb and earthly honour, as his liege lord, against all men and women living or dead, and that they would be answerable to him and help him to keep his peace and justice in all things’. She was also busy with arrangements for the forthcoming coronation of her son.

After being acclaimed duke of Normandy, Richard sailed from Barfleur and landed at Portsmouth on 13 August. Next day he joined Eleanor at Winchester, and then mother and son rode to Windsor and thence to London. Richard was crowned king of the English in Westminster abbey on Sunday 3 September by archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, in a ceremony very like that used today. It seems to have been unusually splendid, to judge from contemporary chronicles: the crown was so heavy that two earls had to hold it over the king’s head.

The coronation was followed by a banquet at which, according to the king’s orders, no woman or Jew was present. One wonders if the ban applied to the king’s mother. As for the Jews, some of their leaders tried to enter with gifts and, after being turned away, were set on by the mob; some of them were killed and a general massacre of Jews throughout London followed, much to Richard’s irritation.

The new king was a very different man from his father, taking after Eleanor’s family, the impetuous and eccentric Poitevin dynasty. The least English of all English sovereigns, his tastes were in many ways those of an Aquitainan robber baron; he was cruel and predatory, fond of battles and plunder, and happiest when on campaign. At the same time, he had a poetic streak and was a troubadour like his great-grandfather William IX. He also possessed his great-grandfather’s love of display, which found expression in fantastic clothes. He was homosexual; and his mother was the only real love of his life. Even so, he did beget an illegitimate son, whom he wryly named Philip after his friend and enemy, the king of France. Indeed he had a rather odd sense of humour, together with a taste for the unexpected. He seems to have had small affection for England, which he had scarcely visited since his birth and of whose language he was totally ignorant; no doubt he winced at its uncouth Anglo-Norman French. Nevertheless the English cheered this tall and splendid new king with the red-gold hair. They knew nothing of his amorality and lack of scruple, of his sexual deviations, of his devotion to the weirder ideals of chivalry, of his reckless violence and brutality. Any change from Henry II’s last oppresive days appeared an improvement.

It cannot be too much emphasized that Richard was devoted to his masterful mother, and Eleanor knew just how to control him. On his way to London he was informed that the Welsh had crossed the border and were raiding, burning and slaying. He announced that he would ride up at once and deal with them, but his mother ordered him to wait until he had been crowned, and he obeyed her. Later he not only restored her dowry in England but presented her with the dowries of the queens of Henry I and Stephen as well.

At sixty-seven Eleanor was remarkably well preserved, in an era when old age began at fifty. Not even the empress Matilda had reached such an age, yet Eleanor had another decade and a half of vigorous, active life ahead of her. Probably she appeared strangely young to her contemporaries. Régine Pernoud makes the point that the fashions of the period helped Eleanor to preserve a youthful image; the nun-like wimple hid white hair and a wrinkled neck. And no doubt she continued to paint her face, in the way that had once so scandalized St Bernard and the French clergy. We know from the Pipe Rolls that she took trouble with her wardrobe. At the time of the coronation she ordered a cape that consisted of seven yards of valuable silk edged with sable and squirrel (it cost over £4). She also ordered dresses of red cloth similarly trimmed. It is possible that she owed her longevity and her enduring energy and vitality to the enforced rest that she had taken during her fifteen years of imprisonment. But in any case she must have possessed a magnificent constitution.

To the disappointment of many, the new régime was very little different from that of king Henry. Richard retained all but a few of his father’s officials, even those who had opposed him, including William Marshal. (The latter, who always told the truth, reminded the king that, ‘I could have killed you, but I only killed your horse’.) Richard had no room for the adventurers who were his former companions; they were informed, with a certain irony, that traitors must not expect to be rewarded like honest men. The new chancellor was William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, a Norman of humble origins; and there was also a new justiciar, bishop Hugh Puiset of Durham. This was in no way a snub for Eleanor, who intended to accompany her son abroad. It is obvious that Richard wanted her to retain ultimate authority, to the point of over-ruling his ministers when necessary.

The new king also tried to make sure of his two surviving brothers. He loaded John with presents, giving him castles and estates all over England and marrying him to Isabella — sometimes called Hawisa or Avise — of Gloucester, who was the greatest heiress in the land. His illegitimate brother Geoffrey received the see of York, though not without opposition from its clergy; however, when Geoffrey failed to obtain possession of his archbishopric and (worse) the revenues that he had promised Richard, the king revoked the appointment in a fit of rage. Richard also forbade John and Geoffrey to return to England during the next three years without his express permission. Later and most unwisely he relented in John’s case, apparently at Eleanor’s request. The queen mother can have had no illusions about her youngest son’s capacity for treachery, but perhaps she wanted him in the kingdom to ensure a smooth succession to the throne if his brother should be killed on crusade.