Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (26 page)

It was only a matter of time before king Philip would try to exploit the quarrel. By his lust and stupidity John had doomed the peace by which his mother set such store. Her brave journey to Castile had not, after all, saved the Angevin empire.

19 The Murder of Arthur

‘The death
Of young wolves is never to be pitied.’

The Duchess of Malfi

‘So the king’s counsellors … suggested that he should order the noble youth to be deprived of his eyes and genitals.’

Ralph of Coggeshall

When king John landed in Normandy in May 1201 he did not suspect that he was on the verge of a great war, nor had he any reason to do so. Admittedly the Lusignan family were still in revolt, but he had taken practical steps to cow them; their castles in Poitou and Normandy had been captured or were besieged, and his troops would soon be harrying their lands in La Marche. And as yet the rebels had not appealed to Philip of France, who was showing no sign of wishing to intervene. Indeed, after entertaining the French king on the Norman border, John and Isabella of Angoulême visited him in Paris, where he lent them his palace. During the visit Philip retired to Fontainebleau with queen Agnes, who was seriously ill and about to die. Both monarchs appear to have reached full agreement over their policies — though no details are known of their discussions — and John and Isabella gave themselves up to enjoyment in the French capital.

However, the Lusignan revolt refused to die down. John would not demean himself by diplomacy, although the rebels might easily have been bought off, and accused them of treason. Most unfairly, instead of offering them a proper hearing in his ducal court, he ordered them to prove their innocence in a trial by combat in which he himself would be represented by professional champions. After this his opponents took the obvious step of appealing to Philip, who was his overlord. Meanwhile John continued to attack them and lay waste their lands, seizing Raoul of Lusignan’s castle of Drincourt and confiscating his county of Eu. Then, in April 1202, the French king summoned John as his vassal to come to Paris and appear before his high court and answer the Lusignan charges.

As might have been expected, John refused to appear and denied Philip’s right to hear the case. Accordingly, on 28 April the latter declared war and struck almost immediately down the Seine into north-east Normandy, capturing Aumâle, Boutevant, Gournai and other Norman castles of vital strategic importance, and besieging Arques, the fortress that protected Dieppe. Philip had clearly prepared his campaign in some detail, and with his dogged determination was once again planning to destroy the entire Angevin empire, or at least to dismember it.

At the end of April the king of France formally betrothed his baby daughter to Arthur. Two months later he publicly received the young duke’s homage for Brittany, Anjou, Maine and Touraine, and also for Poitou. In strict feudal law Philip had no right whatsoever to give Poitou to duke Arthur, as he had received his grandmother’s homage, which was still valid. It was the plainest possible way of announcing that he meant to overthrow completely the Angevin dominion in France. Furthermore, the treaty that Philip and Arthur now concluded specifically denied the latter any right to Normandy. ‘Concerning Normandy’, the treaty stipulated, ‘the king of the French shall keep what he has already gained and also what it may please God to let him gain in the future’. Arthur was then publicly knighted by Philip, and sent off to conquer Poitou.

In the meantime king John was making his own preparations for a counter-attack and had assembled an army in southern Normandy. Knowing that he would have to fight on two fronts, however, he moved his headquarters to Le Mans, from where he would be able to supervise operations in both Normandy and Poitou while keeping well away from the actual fighting. Here on 30 July 1202 he received alarming news.

Eleanor had been warned, just in time, of Arthur’s invasion of Poitou. Her grandson had joined forces at Tours with the Lusignan rebels and their men, who told him that the queen mother was travelling from Fontevrault to Poitiers, where she intended to take refuge. She would be a bargaining counter of unparalleled value, so — without waiting for the greater part of his troops, who were still on their way from Brittany, and against the advice of the French knights — the young duke led his little army to capture her. He learned that she had stopped with her small escort at the town of Mirebeau on the borders of Anjou and Poitou. He soon reached it and his men speedily stormed the walls.

The fierce old queen retreated into the small keep, probably scarcely more than a tower, which served as the town’s citadel. She manned the ramparts with her few troops and refused to surrender, although there was only a thin wall between her and her grandson’s men. Resourceful as ever, she then asked for a parley and began to bargain. Her besiegers did not know that she had secretly sent two messengers for help: one to William of Les Roches, the seneschal of Anjou, at Chinon, and one to king John at Le Mans. Unsuspectingly, Arthur’s soldiers made no attempt to storm the keep but waited for Eleanor to surrender. They had barred all the gates in the town walls to prevent anyone escaping from the keep, but had left a single gate open in order to admit their own food.

As soon as the queen’s messenger reached Le Mans, John started on the one gallant enterprise of his life. He came at once, covering eighty miles in forty-eight hours, riding through the night as well as the day. William of Les Roches and the garrison of Chinon joined him en route. They reached Mirebeau at dawn on 1 August. At the council of war just before the attack, William of Les Roches asked the king to promise to put none of his captives to death, to treat his nephew as though there was no war between them, and to confine Arthur’s supporters in the immediate locality until a truce had been arranged. John agreed, telling William that he and the other lords present could refuse their homage and cease to recognize him as their king if he broke his word. Then the royal army attacked, pouring into Mirebeau through the open gate.

It was a hot night and, with no thought of danger, Arthur’s men had not bothered to sleep in their armour. When Geoffrey of Lusignan was interrupted during a hearty breakfast of roast pigeon and told that the king of England was attacking, he laughed and said that he would finish his breakfast. There was a bloody scuffle in the narrow little streets of Mirebeau, but Arthur’s troops had been caught in a trap from which there was no escape and they were hopelessly outnumbered. Their attackers quickly overpowered them.

Indeed king John had won an extraordinary victory in the only engagement in which he personally commanded his troops during his entire reign. Arthur had brought no more than 250 knights but these included the two most important members of the Lusignan clan, Hugh the Brown and his uncle Geoffrey. The king had captured not only Philip II’s chief ally but the principal leaders of the revolt in Poitou. He had also captured Arthur’s heiress, his unmarried sister Eleanor of Brittany, who had adventurously ridden with her brother. It was a dazzling success, and should have completely altered the course of the war. If Richard had still been king, Philip would almost certainly have hastened to make peace. As it was, he abandoned the siege of Arques and retreated, and John was able to capture both Angers and Tours. But the English king did not know how to use his victory.

Instead of keeping the promises he had made to William of Les Roches, John inflicted on his prisoners every humiliation he could think of. The noblest lords were packed ‘as though they were calves’ into ox carts and chained together, their faces to the beasts’ tails as an added refinement, and dragged in triumph through their own domains; to ride in a cart was the ultimate disgrace for any knight. Hugh the Brown was confined in a prison in Normandy, but most of his companions were shipped to England to await ransom, where some are said to have been blinded. Probably at least twenty were deliberately starved to death at Corfe castle because they could not find the money to buy their freedom. But the one man whom the king should have kept in prison — Hugh the Brown, the leader of the Lusignan party — was allowed to ransom himself.

Beyond question, king John was fiendishly cruel and bloodthirsty. Quite apart from the prisoners of Corfe, he was to have all too many murders to his discredit. The barbarous massacre of 300 captives at Evreux has already been mentioned. There is little evidence for the popular tale that in order to make a Jew of Bristol disgorge his gold he tortured him by pulling out several teeth a day, but the story has the stamp of John’s peculiar sense of humour. Half a dozen chroniclers bear witness to a much more horrifying crime The wife of William of Braose — a once loyal supporter who eventually turned against the king — refused to hand over her children to John as hostages; when he caught Matilda of Braose, he deliberately starved her to death at Windsor with her elder son; their corpses were found after eleven days without food and it was seen that in her agony the mother had gnawed her own child’s cheeks. John hanged twenty-eight Welsh boys who were hostages for their chieftain fathers’ good behaviour. He also hanged a man and his son for prophesying (wrongly) the date when the king’s reign would end. Many others met a violent death in his dungeons or simply disappeared.

In these circumstances, duke Arthur’s prospects were bleak. All that is known for certain about Arthur after his capture is that he was imprisoned at Falaise, where his gaoler apparently treated him well enough. According to Roger of Wendover — frequently unreliable, but he may well have been telling the truth in this instance — the young duke spent some months in a dungeon at Falaise, and then the king came to see him. It seems that for once John was in a merciful mood, if Roger is to be believed. The king told his nephew that he would set him free and give him back his duchy of Brittany if he would break with Philip II and promise homage and loyalty. But the young duke was not a Plantagenet for nothing and appears to have possessed all his father’s and his uncles’ insane pride. Even after a long and miserable imprisonment he showed his evil streak. (In 1199, discussing him with Hubert Walter, William Marshal had already discerned it.) Arthur answered fiercely that he would never make peace until he had obtained not merely Brittany but everything that had belonged to his uncle Richard, including the kingdom of England. John immediately ordered that Arthur should be moved to Rouen, where he was confined in a newly built tower, ‘and not long after that, Arthur suddenly vanished’.

Nobody knows what happened. Ralph of Coggeshall, who took pains to be as accurate as possible about most matters, says that because the Bretons were in revolt over their duke’s imprisonment ‘the king’s counsellors’ had already suggested that Arthur should be blinded and castrated ‘so that he would thereafter be incapable of princely rule’. Ralph further tells us that John had ordered Hubert de Burgh to do this, when Arthur was at Falaise, but that Hubert disobeyed him. (Ralph’s version is very likely the origin of Shakespeare’s scene, ‘Heat me these irons hot’.) There was also a contemporary rumour, perhaps put about by the court, that Arthur had fallen from a high tower while trying to escape. A French life of Philip II, the
Philippide,
says that John took the boy out onto the Seine in a boat, where he cut his throat and threw him overboard.

The last story may contain an element of truth. Among the king’s counsellors at this time, William of Braose was one of the most important, perhaps the most important of all. A benefactor of the Cistercian monastery of Margam in Wales, William may have confided the secret to its monks after he turned against John. Certainly the
Annals of Margan
contain an extremely plausible account: at Rouen on Maundy Thursday 1203 the king, ‘when he was drunk and possessed by the devil’ (
ebrius et daemonio plenus
), killed Arthur with his own hand and then dropped the corpse into the Seine after tying a heavy stone to it. A fisherman dredged up the body in his net and it was identified and secretly buried at a nearby Benedictine priory ‘in fear of the tyrant’.

In 1203 Maundy Thursday fell on 3 April. Not quite a fortnight later, on 16 April, king John sent a certain brother John of Valerant to queen Eleanor with a letter. The king said that God had been kind to him and that the messenger could tell her all about it. It has been suggested that the king was referring to the death of his nephew, with the inference that Eleanor may even have welcomed the murder. This seems most unlikely, as the letter was addressed to eight other people as well, including the archbishop of Bordeaux.

The rightful duchess of Brittany was now Arthur’s elder sister, Eleanor, who had been taken prisoner with him at Mirebeau. Being unmarried, she constituted almost as much of a danger to John as had Arthur. Indeed she was also the heiress of the king himself, for the king was as yet childless. The fate of the ‘pearl of Brittany’ remained unknown for a long time: no doubt many contemporaries suspected that she too had been murdered. In fact she was merely taken to England and put in close confinement, apparently in some comfort; her uncle provided her with money, expensive clothes and other luxuries. Nevertheless, despite the pleas of the bishops of Brittany and the demands of the king of France, John always refused to release her. At one time it seems that he considered using her as a puppet duchess of Brittany and she was taken to France on one of the king’s later campaigns, but the scheme came to nothing and she remained in prison at various castles — mainly Bristol — until she died, forty years after her capture. She was buried at the Fontevrault priory of Amesbury. (There is a curious legend that John’s son, Henry III, felt so guilty about the cousin who should have sat on his throne that he once presented her with a gold crown, but that she gave it back to him after a few days.)