Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  A few days after Clarendon, Henry received news of his youngest brother’s death, an event that only added further fuel to his hatred of Becket. Henry had always felt a special affection for William. Unlike his second brother, Geoffrey, whose ambition and jealousy created barriers between them, William seems to have demanded nothing. Earlier, the king had entertained thoughts of invading Ireland for the express purpose of providing William with a fief of his own, and only his mother’s reservations had led Henry to abandon the project. Determined to provide for William, he tried to give him the hand and extensive estates of the widowed countess of Warenne, heiress to the earldom of Surrey. Due to Becket’s intervention, however, the marriage had been forbidden on the grounds of consanguinity. This had been one of Becket’s victories in the months shortly after his ascension, but it would be a victory he would come to regret. There was no denying William’s very voluble disappointment, because he complained to his mother, to the monks at the Norman monastery at Bec, indeed to anyone who would listen. Thus, when he fell ill and died on January 30 at the age of twenty-seven, it was not surprising that people claimed he had died of a broken heart. Whatever the cause of death, Henry, inconsolable, held Thomas responsible.

  To judge from the pipe rolls for 1164, Henry’s melancholia found expression in a total incapacity for work. He and Eleanor spent the winter in the southern counties and then traveled up to London for Easter on April 12, but uncharacteristically, he accomplished nothing of note. For the months of May, June, and July the king and queen seemed to have dropped out of sight, because there is no record of their whereabouts, an extraordinary occurrence. Those months must have been fearful for Eleanor. It was a time of violent passions, a time of mourning, for Henry grieved the death of his friendship with Becket as strongly as he did his brother’s passing, and a time of great hatred. The king had prematurely aged, in fact he suddenly seemed older than she, and the tyrant into which he had matured was not a person she could admire. One reason she had married him was her belief that he would develop into a great man, but whatever greatness he had once assumed in her eyes had dwindled during the quarrel with Becket. It had brought out the worst in him, and no one saw this more clearly than Eleanor. She saw, too, that Thomas, who had once preoccupied him by virtue of the pleasure he provided, continued to preoccupy him in hatred. It must have been a bitter and humiliating realization to know that Henry and Thomas hated as only those who have loved deeply can hate.

  By the end of the summer it was apparent that matters were coming to a head. While Henry had exercised his right to influence Becket’s appointment to Canterbury, and although he often ranted that he would bring him low and put him back where he had found him, still he could not remove the archbishop from office. It was necessary for Becket to resign, something Henry intended to humiliate him into doing. It was clear that the archbishop, for all his defiance, was a frightened man, because twice in early September he had made two abortive attempts to leave England, only to be turned back by the king’s men at the Channel ports. Henry’s taunts—“Has this island grown too narrow to contain us both?”—had the ring of a man who has backed his prey into a very tight corner. Now he pursued the archbishop as though he were a besieged castle that must be laid waste at all cost. As Eleanor well knew, there was no room in England for a queen let alone two kings, and Thomas . had made himself a rival to Henry. During seven days in October, she received a telling lesson on how the king treated a rival whom he wished to destroy. After a complaint by one of his barons, John Marshal, that he had not received justice in the archbishop’s court, Henry summoned Thomas to appear at Northampton on Tuesday, October 6, to answer charges of contempt. When Thomas arrived, he found that the lodgings reserved for his party had already been occupied by some of the king’s men, who refused to move. He also discovered that the king had apparently forgotten his coming, because he had gone out to hawk along the river Nene. The king did not return until evening.

  Early Wednesday morning, Thomas dutifully appeared at Northampton Castle, where the hearing was to take place. Informed that the king was attending Mass, Thomas sat down to wait in the corridor connecting the chapel with the main hall. When Henry entered, Thomas rose to greet him, but the king strode by as if the archbishop were invisible. The king, he was informed by servants, was going to have his breakfast. Later in the morning, when finally he was admitted to the royal presence, Thomas immediately referred to the complaint made by John Marshal. Why, he asked, was Marshal not present to press charges? The king replied that Marshal had been detained in London on business (Marshal, in fact, would never arrive). With that, he put over Thomas’s case until the next day and sent him back to his lodgings.

  Between Thursday, October 8, and Sunday, October 11, the king demanded that Thomas return all of the monies entrusted to him while he had been chancellor, the financial exactions including nine years’ revenues from the manors of Eye and Berkhampstead as well as, curiously enough, five hundred marks that Henry insisted he had lent Thomas during the Toulouse war. In effect, what was being asked of Thomas was every penny he had been advanced for expenses during his eight years of service as the king’s chancellor. One chronicler stated that Henry demanded a total of thirty thousand marks, a sum equivalent to the total revenues of the archbishopric of Canterbury for seventeen years or, in today’s currency, almost $850,000. Few individuals in the world, kings included, could have paid such a colossal assessment.

  After retiring for the night on Sunday, Thomas, who suffered from kidney stones, was stricken with acute renal colic so painful that he could not sit up in bed.

  On Monday morning, he notified the king that he would not be able to appear that day due to illness. The king, suspicious, sent the earls of Leicester and Cornwall to Thomas’s room to find out if he were malingering.

  On Tuesday, October 13, a group of bishops begged Thomas to resign, because they had heard rumors that the king planned to condemn him as a traitor. Thomas refused. After celebrating Mass, he appeared at the king’s castle carrying the great silver cross of Canterbury, a sight that caused onlookers in the courtyard to gape in amazement, for an archbishop’s cross was customarily borne by his crossbearer. At the castle doorway stood Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, and Hugh Nonant, one of Thomas’s clerks. “My lord Bishop of London,” said Nonant, “why do you allow him to carry the cross himself?”

  Gilbert Foliot despised Thomas. “My good man,” he snapped, “he always was a fool and he always will be.”

  Thomas entered the hall and sat down on a bench, holding the heavy cross before him. From a second floor chamber Henry sent down some . of his barons to ask Thomas if he was prepared to account for his financial transactions while chancellor and to stand trial in the king’s court. Thomas reminded them that he had been summoned to Northampton to answer John Marshal’s complaint and for no other reason. For most of the day Thomas sat in the downstairs hall clutching his cross, while Henry, upstairs, badgered his council to pass sentence against the archbishop. When this information was relayed to Thomas, he pointed out that he had appeared before no court, had received no trial, and therefore could not be sentenced. After the barons retired to the second floor to report this latest development, Thomas picked up his cross and began to leave. Stumbling over a pile of fagots, he regained his balance and pushed his way through the crowd. “Where are you going!” someone called out menacingly; “traitor!” shouted the king’s illegitimate brother, Hamelin. Some of the bystanders began to pelt him with handfuls of rushes and other refuse they scooped from the floor.

  According to one chronicler. Thomas answered, “If I were a knight, I would prove thee a liar with my own hand.” Others claimed that he made no answer at all, or that he replied violently, calling Hamelin “varlet and bastard.”

  That night, under cover of a storm, Becket left Northampton disguised as a monk named Dereman. For the next two weeks he traveled by night, moving from one monastery to another and finally reaching the coast at
Sandwich, where he managed to hire a small boat. On the evening of November 2, 1164, he washed up safely on a beach in Flanders, accompanied by two canons and a servant, carrying with him only his pallium and his archiepiscopal seal.

  When Henry learned of the archbishop’s flight, he fell, it was said, into so spectacular a rage that he could not speak. Only when he had recovered his breath did he gasp, “We have not finished with him yet!”

  The events at Northampton and Becket’s escape had a subtle but dramatic effect on Eleanor’s relationship with her husband; after five years of physical and emotional estrangement (how complete cannot be said) there now appears to have been a sort of reconciliation. With the object of Henry’s persecution safely out of reach, he seems to have turned in his frustration to his queen, even though thoughts of Thomas constantly tormented him and he still thirsted for revenge. Immediately after learning of the archbishop’s departure, he had sped an embassy to Louis Capet with a letter demanding Becket’s extradition from France or Flanders or wherever he might have sought asylum. “Be it known to you that Thomas, who was Archbishop of Canterbury, has been publicly judged in my court by a full council of the barons of my realm as a wicked and perjured traitor against me.... Wherefore I earnestly beg you not to permit a man guilty of such infamous crimes and treasons, or his men, to remain in your realm.... Let not this great enemy of mine, so it please you, have any council or aid from you and yours, even as I would not give such help myself to your enemies in my realm.”

  It was a shocking letter, unstatesmanlike, whining, exaggerated, almost comical, and Eleanor no doubt suspected that if Louis had his wits about him, he would use it to Henry’s disadvantage. After all, of what “infamous crimes and treasons” was Thomas guilty, except that he had pitted his will against Henry? And while he had not exactly won, neither had he lost. Common sense told her that Louis, always on the lookout for ways to undermine Henry’s authority on the Continent, would be eager to take Thomas’s part.

  After Northampton, the court made a progress through southern and southwestern England and then, as Christmas drew near, retired to Marlborough for their court festivities. It was the time for feasting and caroling, for festooning the Great Hall with boughs of holly and dragging in the Yule log to blaze on the hearth. If Eleanor had looked forward to a holiday without shadows, this hope was shattered on Christmas Eve, when the ambassadors whom Henry had sent to France finally caught up with the traveling court. Louis, the envoys reported, had interrupted them before they had finished reading the first sentence of the letter; a verb annoyed him. “Who was Archbishop of Canterbury?” he had cried in agitation. “Who has deposed him? Tell me that, my lords, who has deposed him? Who has deposed him?” When Henry’s men could think of no good reply to that embarrassing question, Louis rendered his opinion. “Certainly I am as much a king as the King of the English, but I do not have the power to depose the most insignificant clerk in my realm.” This rebuke, which had been noted with satisfaction by the dignitaries attending Louis’s court at Compiègne, caused Henry to glare and breathe heavily. Did they remind the king of France that Thomas, as chancellor of England, had seized some of his towns during the Toulouse campaign? What did he say to that! What he had said smacked of the tiresome sermonizing that invariably made Henry’s blood boil. As far as Louis could see, Thomas’s conduct at Toulouse had been in the service of his lord, and it ill became Henry to return evil for good. Then the king of France had turned to a papal chamberlain standing nearby and said meaningfully, “Tell my lord Pope Alexander from me that I hope he will receive the Archbishop of Canterbury with kindness, and not heed any unjust accusation against him.”

  By this time, Henry had worked himself into a seizure. Christmas 1164 was undoubtedly one of those occasions when “the King, burning with his customary fury, threw the cap from his head, undid his belt, threw far from him the cloak and robes in which he was dressed, with his own hands tore the silken coverlet off the bed and sitting down as though on a dung-heap began to chew the straw of the mattress.” The next day he seethed impotently, his hands tied out of respect for the Lord’s nativity, but on the day after that, “giving way to unbridled passion more than became a king, he took an unbecoming and pitiful kind of revenge by banishing all the archbishop’s relatives out of England.” In the dead of winter some four hundred persons of every age and sex were stripped of their possessions, herded into boats, and shipped to Flanders where they were forced to beg their bread on the highroads. It was a cruel and tyrannous act but one that seemed to surprise none of Henry’s intimates and surely not the queen. What may have startled her, however, was that sometime during that violent Christmas court Henry returned to her bed. Early in the new year of 1165, at the age of forty-two, she found herself pregnant again.

  With another child on the way, it was easy for Eleanor to entertain the illusion that her life with Henry had taken a permanent turn for the better. Becket, when she thought about him, may have seemed exactly what Henry had said—the son of a peasant—and as such, he had little significance compared to the Plantagenets’ real business of governing their lands and establishing a solid empire for their heirs. During the past two years both Eleanor and Henry had lost sight of these goals, but now they turned their attention to the future of their eldest children. Ten-year-old Henry, the child of greatest importance, seemed nicely settled with Princess Marguerite in their own court, an honor that some thought unnecessary because the boy was already showing a tendency to nurse illusions of grandeur. It seemed virtually certain that someday he would preside over a greater territory than his father, since Louis Capet’s marriage to Adele of Blois, now in its fourth year, remained childless. Of course, one undeniable inconvenience resulting from Becket’s precipitate flight was the lack of an archbishop of Canterbury to crown the boy, but Henry vowed that this did not matter; he would find another archbishop to anoint his namesake. All in all, the prince’s prospects seemed splendid.

  Shortly after the beginning of the year, Henry began considering the future of his eight-year-old daughter; when he looked at Matilda, he did not see, as Louis Capet had once remarked about his girls, “a superfluity of daughters,” but a channel through which he might extend Plantagenet power and also score another point against both Becket and the traitor’s new patron in Paris. Sailing to Normandy in February, he entered into negotiations at Rouen with a delegation from the Holy Roman emperor, an action at once anti-Becket, anti-French, and antipapal. Pope Alexander, in exile at Sens, southeast of Paris, had received Thomas with tears and embraces, despite his reluctance to offend in any manner the king of England. The pope’s greatest fear was that Henry would ally himself with the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, who had supported Alexander’s rival for the papal throne. Even though the antipope, recognized in Germany as Victor IV, had died the previous year, the Germans had perpetuated the schism by recognizing a new rival, Paschal III. When Alexander learned that Henry had agreed upon a marriage between Matilda and the emperor’s cousin, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, he grew alarmed, which was precisely Henry’s intention.

  Eleanor, who had remained in England, was not content to leave the matchmaking entirely to Henry, for in April the archbishop of Cologne visited England to speak with her and meet Matilda. Henry the Lion was thirty-six years old, Matilda only eight, an enormous age difference even for the twelfth century, but Eleanor does not seem to have regarded this an insuperable barrier. Henry the Lion was the most notable of the emperor’s vassals; he had brought under subjection the eastern part of Germany, and by now had almost a free hand in the empire. Furthermore, he seemed to be the kind of man Eleanor admired: rich, powerful, a patron of the arts and of the Church, a man already famous throughout Europe for his courage and enlightenment; hence, she most likely believed it to be a prestigious match for her eldest daughter.

  After Henry’s departure, Eleanor remained at Winchester. She had been given no viceregal duties and seems to have spent the spring
making short trips with the children to Sherbourne Castle in Dorset and what sounds like a seaside holiday at the Isle of Wight. In several respects, however, that spring of 1165 was a time of renewed hope. After five years of idleness, she was eager to reassume responsibility, and now circumstances combined in such a manner that Henry felt need of her assistance. Since the previous autumn, he had been planning another expedition against the Welsh, who had shown amazing persistence in pushing the English out of Wales. This time, however, determined to avoid the mistakes of 1157, he planned to campaign with foot-soldiers instead of knights in cumbersome armor. Now that his energies would be devoted to war preparations, he decided to make Eleanor regent for Anjou and Maine. On May 1, she crossed the Channel with Matilda and Richard, her other three children remaining in England, and joined Henry in Normandy. It was a brief reunion because two weeks later Henry returned to England, while she moved south to establish a headquarters at Angers. This was as close as she had come to her homeland in several years, and while there is no evidence that she visited Aquitaine, she does seem to have renewed contact with at least one member of her family, her uncle Ralph de Faye.

  Shortly after she arrived in Angers, it appears that she was approached by supporters of Becket, who wished to solicit her aid. If the archbishop imagined that the queen might feel sympathetic toward his cause, he was either remarkably insensitive or perhaps merely desperate. If he had failed to recognize her hostility in previous years, this was due to the fact that she had covered her feelings well, but nevertheless he should have known better than to expect her support. While it is unclear precisely what sort of feelers may have been extended, we do have a letter indicating her reaction. In July, the bishop of Poitiers wrote to Becket, now living at the Abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy, that he should not expect the queen’s intervention, since she was wholly under the influence of Ralph de Faye, one of the archbishop’s enemies. The bishop, evidently a gossip, added gratuitously that the relationship between Eleanor and her uncle was subject to “conjectures which grow day by day and which seem to deserve credence.” Although he fails to specify the nature of the conjectures, his implications are unmistakable. This was the first recorded scandal about Eleanor since she became queen of England, but it serves as a reminder that her past, those tales of adultery bruited about during the final years of her marriage to Louis, had not been forgotten. To the argument that Eleanor acted indiscreetly at Angers, it may be answered that she often behaved with excessive affection toward her relatives, and this was not the first time that outsiders attributed unwarranted significance to her actions. Even though accusations of illicit relations with uncles seem to have hounded her, there is no need to give any particular credence to the bishop’s account. No doubt Eleanor felt relieved to be free of the morose English court, an atmosphere made all the more depressing by her husband’s continual emotional outbursts. Twelve years earlier, during the first year of her marriage, she had been happy at Angers, and perhaps her renewed residence there brought back memories of carefree days when she had still been serenaded by poets. Angers was not Poitiers, but for the moment it was close enough to bring her a measure of happiness.