Queens Consort (24 page)

During her brief meeting with the grieving Eleanor at Fontevrault, Berengaria discussed with the papal envoy, Cardinal Pietro di Capua, the prospective marriage of her sister Blanca. The bridegroom was Thibaut of Champagne, Eleanor’s grandson by her daughter Marie, who had succeeded to his brother’s comital title two years earlier. Berengaria accompanied her sister to her wedding at Chartres in July and acted as witness to the ceremony Marie, the former regent of Champagne, had died the previous year, but Berengaria’s association with the Champenois court highlights a neglected link that hints at a spiritual affinity between Richard and herself, whatever disappointments their marriage brought them.

Until their deaths, Richard and his half-sister Marie had shared a confessor, Adam de Perseigne, abbot of the eponymous Cistercian abbey in the diocese of Le Mans. The Cistercians were much favoured by Berengaria’s Navarrese family, a tradition she was to continue in her own foundation, and in her widowhood Adam remained a staunch supporter and friend to her. Unlike many clerics of the day, he sustained warm relations with women (though he was sharp on the frivolities of Blanca’s court), and while none of his letters to Berengaria survive, he also corresponded with her sister and appears as a signatory and witness on several
documents relating to Berengaria, as well as assisting in the establishment of her own Cistercian house and personally selecting his successor, Gautier de Perseigne. Richard and Marie had enjoyed a close relationship, the strongest attestation of which is a poem written in captivity by Richard addressed to his ‘Countess sister’. The connection with Adam de Perseigne suggests that Berengaria was less marginalised among the second generation of Angevin royalty than has previously been assumed. Through him she was linked to one of the most significant female rulers of her day, and their friendship after Richard’s death indicates that both husband and wife had confided and trusted in this astute, literary cleric. The interests and values they shared with Adam were clearly mutual, and such confidence implies a subtle degree of sympathy between Richard and Berengaria.

Blanca of Champagne herself was soon widowed: Thibaut died in 1201, leaving her the mother of one child and expecting another. Her court provided a refuge for Berengaria over the next few years, as both Eleanor and John were too absorbed in the upheavals of the Angevin succession to concern themselves with her welfare. Another sadness had come with Joanna’s death late in 1199. Raymond of Toulouse had spent much of their marriage warring with his own barons, and had proved to be a neglectful and, it seems, cruel husband. Joanna had decided to leave him and turned to Richard for protection, but as she travelled to meet her brother, ill and pregnant with her second child, she received the news of his death from Eleanor at Niort. By August, she had managed to rejoin her mother and brother John, who were keeping court at Rouen, and when it was obvious that she was dying she asked to take the veil as a nun at Fontevrault. Eleanor was able to persuade the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, to set aside canon law to admit this unconventional vocation, and though Joanna was too unwell to stand up in church to make her profession, she was able to ensure her entitlement to be buried as a veiled nun after her death. She was interred alongside her father and brother at Fontevrault. Her child, possibly born by Caesarian section, lived only a few hours. Joanna made no mention of Berengaria in her will, but then this princess who had been a queen had nothing to leave but 3,000 marks given in charity by her brother John, which she requested be distributed among the poor. The Cypriot princess who had shared Berengaria and Joanna’s experiences of the Holy Land seems to have had a knack for being in the right place at the right time: she became the next Countess of Toulouse.

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Eleanor of Aquitaine had spent much of the period between Richard’s reconciliation with John at Lisieux in 1195 and his death in 1199 in relative seclusion at Fontevrault, where she still lived in royal style, albeit on a smaller scale. When, on his deathbed, Richard finally confirmed John, rather than Arthur of Brittany, as his heir, Eleanor knew she would have to intervene to ensure the succession. Richard’s decision has been attributed to Eleanor’s influence, but why was she so keen for John, who had repeatedly shown himself to be so disloyal, to inherit over Arthur, who, as Geoffrey’s son, arguably had the better hereditary claim and could also add Brittany to the Angevin power bloc? One answer is Eleanor’s powerful dislike of Arthur’s mother, Constance of Brittany Since Arthur was barely into his teens, a crown for the son would mean a regency for the mother. The reduction of the governance of a large area of Europe to a squabble among women is typical of the way in which Eleanor’s legend has subsumed her political acumen. Underage kings were inevitably surrounded by destructive factionalism, and the aggressive tactics of Philip of France would require a strong opponent with a united baronage to oppose them. Moreover, John had effectively been king of England for some years, he was experienced and, with the backing of Eleanor’s status in Aquitaine, stood a better chance of holding the Angevin lands together.

John was invested as Duke of Normandy on 25 April 1199 and crowned King of England at Westminster on Ascension Day the same year. The English and many of the Norman lords accepted his accession, but the situation on the Continent was far from clear. Arthur continued to behave as if his rights superseded John’s, for example, in presuming to appoint William des Roches as seneschal of Anjou. Accompanied by Des Roches and his mother, he then led an army to the city of Angers, which promptly surrendered to him. The lords of Anjou, Maine and Touraine now came out in support for Arthur, and Eleanor was obliged to come out of retirement at Fontevrault to go to war. She selected Mercadier, one of Richard’s most loyal military captains, as her general, and accompanied him to Angers. Constance and Arthur fled north and the city was sacked on Eleanor’s orders as punishment for accepting Arthur. Eleanor then commanded that the surrounding countryside be laid to waste. If the dating of these incidents is correct, then it is an impressive example of Eleanor’s energy at the age of seventy-three. In the space of a fortnight she had travelled from Chalus to Fontevrault after Richard’s death, buried her son, campaigned in Anjou and arrived back at Fontevrault to make a grant to the abbey of St Marie de Turpenay for the celebration of Richard’s anniversary, witnessed by Berengaria, on 21 April.

Eleanor could have rested for only a few days at Fontevrault, because on 29 April she was at Loudun, then at Poitiers on 4 May, Montreuil-Bonnin the next day, followed by Niort (where she broke the news of Richard’s death to Joanna), Andilly, La Rochelle, St-Jean d’Andely, Saintes and Tours. By 1 July she was in Bordeaux, and in Rouen by the end of the month. The purpose of this progress was most obviously to consolidate support among her own people, but she also initiated a small political revolution when, at Tours in June, she paid homage to Philip Augustus of France for her Aquitaine dominions. This was an extraordinary act for a woman to perform independently While it was not unknown for women to hold lands in their own right, Capetian tradition had always deemed that a man — a husband or a brother — paid homage as her proxy. To do so personally made a powerful symbolic statement about a woman’s ability to wield authority. Moreover, it was a shrewd move in the campaign against Arthur. By paying homage herself, Eleanor was effectively separating Aquitaine and Poitou from the other Angevin dominions. Having already exchanged a series of charters with John designating him her heir, she was able to deprive Philip of France of any legal cause to invade her lands or interfere there to Arthur’s advantage. To have acted so quickly, in such a compressed period of time and under the strains of bereavement and war shows not only an informed knowledge of the law but a remarkable ability to apply it.

Eleanor displayed similar ingenuity in her inauguration of communes or corporations in several towns, including La Rochelle. Based on a set of rules known as the Establishments of Rouen, these charters have sometimes been seen as evidence of a proto-democratic strain in Eleanor’s governance, but in fact by granting ‘independence’ to towns, Eleanor was incorporating the relatively new commercial power of the urban bourgeoisie more firmly into the older system of vassalage. The flattered burghers were permitted a mayor (subject to Eleanor’s approval) and the freedom to order some of their own affairs, but along with the right to defend themselves and their customs came an obligation to participate in the levy when Eleanor summoned her vassals to war.

Swindled by Richard out of her dower properties, Berengaria was eventually obliged to throw herself on the mercy of the French and spent the remainder of her life as Lady of Le Mans. From this point she no longer used any of the titles that had accompanied her signature in Rome over a decade before. Now she signed herself
‘humilissima regina quondam Anglorum’
— ‘most humble former queen of the English’. Berengaria had been
a queen without a kingdom, but in the city of Le Mans and its suburbs, a total of thirty-seven parishes, she found her own small realm. She was permitted to appoint her own seneschal, Herbert de Tucé, and members of her household included Paulin Boutier, a knight, Pierre Prévot, her cantor, Simon and Garsia, her clerks, Adam and then Gautier de Perseigne, her chaplains, and her women, of whom one, Julian eta, was an embroideress. Thus established, she began to take an active and rather contentious part in local politics.

In Le Mans, Berengaria lived mainly at the palace of the counts of Maine and took a close interest in its church, St Pierre, which was constantly at odds with the rival cathedral chapter of St Julien. In 1204—6, two of Berengaria’s servants, Martine and Luke, tried to exact a tax payment from one André, who claimed he owed the money not to St Pierre but to St Julien. In retaliation, the cathedral chapter excommunicated one of the servants. The next year, Berengaria ordered the seizure of André’s goods and imprisoned him in the tower of Le Mans. The chapter promptly placed the city under interdict, but St Pierre defied them and successfully petitioned the papal curia to be allowed to celebrate low Mass with the church doors closed and no bellringing. The feud continued in 1218, this time over money Berengaria allegedly owed to St Julien, as Ann Trindade recounts:

Several other canons, acting on the authority and instructions of the Chapter, had warned Queen Berengaria to see that the money that her servants had taken in contravention of the rights of the Chapter was returned. But she replied that she would not return the money because, as she said, this customary right was hers. They told her the Chapter was ready to grant a hearing to her representatives and those of the man she had imprisoned and pass judgement. She replied that she would have none of it and after she had been warned several times about this by the Chapter and still refused to do anything about it, the Chapter placed the church and the city under the interdict.
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Berengaria herself enjoyed special protection from the Pope during the interdict. In acknowledgement of her ‘devotion to the Holy Roman Church and to our own person, and because of the universal obligation of our pastoral office, which charges us to exercise our case and concern with special favour towards the orphan and the widow’.
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The interdict was eventually lifted in 1218 after which Berengaria, who had been living at Thorée, returned ceremonially to Le Mans. She finally handed over the
money to St Julien in 1220. Given that the sum in question was five denarii of Tours, a paltry amount, the whole affair rings slightly of the bickerings of a suburban local council.

However, money was never far from Berengaria’s mind. In 1213, she had sent envoys to John to try to make arrangements for the transfer of funds from properties that were hers by right, but John enjoined her to keep silent and reassured her that arrangements were in hand. He finally promised 2,000 marks in arrears and 10,000 pounds in two instalments, but then wrote the next year to regretfully inform his ‘dearest sister’ that he couldn’t pay. In 1216, the Pope complained to the archbishop of Tours of the ‘frequent acts of injury and theft’ Berengaria had endured, but despite papal pressure it was left to John and Isabelle’s son Henry III to settle the debt to Berengaria, agreeing to pay her 4,500 pounds over five years. The negotiations were still dragging on in 1226, more than a quarter of a century after Richard I’s death.

One of the more blithely ridiculous claims to have been made about Berengaria is that, notwithstanding the view of many writers that she was the only English queen never to have set foot in England, ‘in fact she was a frequent visitor to the court of King John, as is attested to by the numerous safe-conducts given to her and her servants … In 1216 she toured England after the King had given her permission to travel wherever she pleased in the realm and in 1220 she was amongst the vast throng gathered to witness the translation of Becket’s bones.’
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Safe-conducts were issued for Berengaria and her servants in 1215, 1216, 1219 and 1220, but there is absolutely no evidence that she undertook a pleasant tour of England during the barons’ wars. Nor is there any confirmation that the conducts were even used, though they may have been intended to serve as passports through Aquitaine to Navarre, in the event that Berengaria was left so impoverished by her genial brother-in-law that she was obliged to return to her homeland.

Since John had well and truly cheated her, Berengaria was obliged to make the best of what resources she had. Her efforts to do so earned her a rather unpleasant reputation as ‘a persecutor of the Jews’.
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Le Mans had a significant Jewish community, and Berengaria, perhaps following Navarre’s liberal tradition towards the Jews, had employed the services of Jewish moneylenders during her marriage. A record exists of her use of revenues from the queen’s Cornish tin mines to pay a debt to an Italian Jew named Pontius Amaldi in 1199. But France was not Navarre and, as in England, Jews were liable to have their property confiscated without recompense, despite this being expressly forbidden in a papal bull of 1120.
Berengaria was prepared to exploit their degraded legal status, rewarding her servant Martin with a house and vineyard taken from two Jews, Desiré and Copin, in 1208, a gift he sanctified by selling one acre of the land to pay for a memorial Mass for Richard I’s soul. Berengaria also profited from the sale of land by converted Jews and gave a former Jewish school building to her chapel. The signature of Adam de Perseigne on one such document, and her donations to the Dominican order, who made the conversion of Jews something of a speciality, may testify that she was interested in saving Jews as well as robbing them. Certainly Adam, her close friend and spiritual counsellor, disapproved of the ill-treatment of Jews, so his involvement suggests that at least some of Berengaria’s transactions were conducted with a degree of probity. Such activities in any case hardly amount to persecution, and indeed were not considered illegal by the powerful, but in the light of Berengaria’s readiness to plead her own vulnerable status as a widow to the Pope, they do seem somewhat hypocritical.