by Marion Meade
The Young King’s behavior at Limoges revolted his contemporaries. “War was in his heart,” observed Walter Map, who went on to term him a parricide who lusted for his father’s death. “Where is your filial affection?” demanded Peter of Blois. “Where is your reverence? Where is the law of nature? Where your fear of God?” It was said that the Young King, at twenty-eight, had fulfilled Merlin’s prophecy of him: “The lynx, penetrating all places, will strive for destruction of his own race.”
While Henry was occupied with the siege of Limoges, a mood of madness seemed to take possession of his son, who fitfully careened about the Limousin like an overgrown adolescent delinquent. Bored with the fighting, he looked for means to enhance his funds, since Henry had cut off his allowance. Toward the end of May 1183, he wandered south with William Marshal and a band of mercenaries, plundering and spreading terror throughout the countryside. In early June, they scaled the rocky heights of Rocamadour, that famous shrine in the Dordogne where pilgrims had long flocked to gaze upon the great iron sword of Roland. Young Henry grew reckless: If his father insisted upon keeping him a starveling, then he would find other means of succor. To the amazement of the pilgrims who had climbed up the steep and narrow steps to the shrine, the Young King and his rowdies looted the altar, stuffed their bags with treasure, and rode off in the burning June heat. Before they had traveled more than a few miles, however, the Young King complained of feeling ill, and they were forced to turn into the village of Martel, where they took lodgings in the house of a burgher, Etienne Fabri. There the Young King was seized by fever and dysentery, that “flux of the bowels” that accounted for so many deaths in the twelfth century. As his condition worsened, a messenger was sent to fetch the king.
Henry’s advisers, remembering the arrows before the walls of Limoges, adamantly opposed any such trip. He should send a physician or money, but he should not expose himself to possible treachery. In the face of his son’s bizarre behavior of late, Henry reluctantly agreed, and the messenger returned to Martel with a precious sapphire ring that the king had inherited from Henry I. On Saturday, June 11, the dying Young King ordered a bed of ashes spread on the floor. Naked, he prostrated himself on the ashes and had bare stones laid at his head and feet. It was late afternoon when he died. Since none of his companions felt eager to face the king, a monk from Grandmont was sent to tell him of the death. He found Henry near Limoges, taking refuge from the afternoon heat in a peasant’s cottage.
“What news have you?” the king asked calmly.
“I am not a bearer of good news,” said the monk.
Dismissing those who had crowded into the hut to hear the latest reports, the king interrogated the monk for every detail of his son’s last days, and then when there was no more to learn, he “threw himself upon the ground and greatly bewailed his son.”
Soon after, Henry sent Thomas Agnellus, the archdeacon of Wells, to inform the queen. Arriving at Salisbury, Agnellus was surprised to learn that Eleanor already knew of her son’s death. Their interview provides one of the few clues to Eleanor’s life in detention, and only now does it become obvious that prison walls did not prevent her from keeping abreast of the world’s news. In all probability she received information from sympathetic jailers and informers, although obviously this was not a fact that she wished to advertise. In a speech that reads as if it had been well rehearsed, she explained to the archdeacon that she had been notified of young Henry’s passing in a dream. He had appeared to her wearing two crowns, one the crown he had worn at his coronation, the other a band of pure light that shone with the incomparable brightness of the Holy Grail. She asked Agnellus, “What other meaning than eternal bliss can be ascribed to a crown with no beginning and no end? And what can such brightness signify if not the wonder of everlasting joy?” Solemnly, tactfully, she sent the archdeacon on his way praising her “great discernment,” “strength and equanimity,” and her clairvoyance.
The Young King’s untimely death placed Eleanor’s preux chevalier, her valorous Richard, as heir to the throne of England, at once upsetting twenty-five years of dynastic planning and causing enormous apprehension for all concerned. Obviously, the Plantagenet inheritance must now be redistributed, but exactly how the king intended to arrange matters was a question that Eleanor must have pondered with some anxiety. She had not long to wait for an answer. Three months after young Henry’s death, the king summoned his three remaining sons to Angers, where he ordered Richard to surrender Aquitaine to his youngest brother and, at the same time, said absolutely nothing about making him heir to young Henry’s patrimony. This unexpected move staggered Eleanor no less than it did Richard. It was clear to her that Henry meant to disinherit her son. What other meaning could she read into his order, except that John, his darling now, was to have not only England, Normandy, Anjou, and Maine but Aquitaine as well? She could not have helped but look upon Henry’s decision as another expression of his hatred for her; he had destroyed her, and now he would destroy the person she loved best. Clearly another bitter power struggle loomed ahead, only this time, Eleanor, a captive, was in no position to fight. At the same time, however, she realized that Richard was an adult capable of waging his own battles. He had left Angers without a word, and after riding back to Poitou, he had sent his father a message. Under no circumstances would he yield his land to anyone so long as he lived. For the time being, then, the matter rested there uneasily.
One of her dead son’s last requests had been that Henry show mercy to the queen. Whether or not as a result of this, Eleanor suddenly found the restrictions upon her begin to slacken. In 1184, she received permission to leave Salisbury and travel through her dower lands, a strange order indeed, for as far as she knew, she no longer possessed any dower lands. Soon, however, she understood that Henry, who never did anything without a reason, was using her as a pawn in his own political games. Soon after young Henry’s death, he had encountered trouble from Philip Augustus, who demanded that the widowed Marguerite’s dower—the Vexin and certain manors in England—be returned to the Franks; Henry had countered by brazenly asserting that these lands had already been bestowed upon the queen, and now, to prove his point, he wished Eleanor to make a tour of “her dower.”
After April 1184, her name begins to figure more frequently in the pipe rolls. Apparently, her household had been considerably enlarged, because there are payments for expenses to her clerk, Jordan. Between Easter and Saint John’s Day—April 1 to June 24—thirty-four pounds fourteen shillings were paid for her allowance. We know that she spent Easter at Thomas Becket’s former manor of Berkhampstead, and then, as if determined to revisit other sites of strong memories, she visited Woodstock; in June, she joined her daughter Matilda and the duke of Saxony at Winchester, where Matilda delivered another child, and in July, the party moved on to Berkhampstead for the remainder of the summer. Reveling in her freedom, Eleanor spent liberally on clothes and wine, and if she was forced to tolerate the presence of one of Henry’s mistresses, one can safely assume that she was long past caring:
“For clothes and hoods and cloaks and for the trimming for 2 capes of samite and for the clothes of the Queen and of Bellebelle, for the King’s use, 55 pounds, 17s.” It is possible that Bellebelle may have been Eleanor’s maid, but if so. she hardly would have been styled “for the King’s use.” Although Henry had released the queen from solitary confinement, there was no question of his accepting her back into his affections or totally restoring her freedom of movement. The rules were made quite clear. She was permitted a limited degree of freedom at his pleasure, but, like Bellebelle and Alais Capet, whom he kept at Winchester, she existed solely for the king’s use, and as his property, he would deploy her as he saw fit. Perhaps to Henry’s surprise, old age had not warped her faculties, and if anything ten years at Salisbury seemed to have instilled in her those feminine traits that she had sorely lacked during her younger years—subservience and reasonability. As he soon discovered, however, there were limits.
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On November 30, the court convened at Westminster. It was both a meeting of the king’s council as well as a family reunion. Matilda and her family were there, and after a decade, Eleanor was able to see her sons again. The occasion was not, however, one of unalloyed rejoicing. Shortly, it became clear that both she and the boys had been assigned roles to play, and moreover, they were expected to perform according to Henry’s directions. Ordered to attend a council meeting, she was led to a place of honor, thus signifying to the assembled barons that she had once again taken her legitimate place in the royal family. That made clear, John and Geoffrey, who had spent the autumn burning towns in Poitou, and Richard, who had retaliated by raiding Brittany, were called forward to forgive one another and make peace. These public gestures of reconciliation completed to Henry’s satisfaction, the court moved on to Windsor for Christmas. No expense had been spared to make the holiday special, and the pipe rolls are full of entries recording purchases of wine, spices, wax, cattle, furs, and “entertaining trifles suitable for feasts.” The fragile picture of the harmonious Plantagenets presented at Westminster did not withstand the journey to Windsor, for now Henry asked Eleanor to endorse his new disposition of the empire. She refused. Ten years of imprisonment had not stripped her of stubbornness, nor her dislike of John, a young man who had little to recommend him as far as she was concerned. The conclave broke up in a flurry of indecision and bitter feelings.
The year 1185 opened with Richard’s return to Poitou and Geoffrey’s dispatch to Normandy to assume control of the duchy, an astounding move on Henry’s part and one that suggested to Eleanor that he contemplated making Geoffrey his heir. That winter, Eleanor stayed with Matilda and her family in England, where she watched developments with an anxious eye. The elevation of nineteen-year-old John continued when Henry knighted him in March and sent him off to assume the throne of Ireland. From the day of his landing, he demonstrated his total and utter irresponsibility. Greeted at Waterford by the Irish chieftains, John and his friends had burst into derisive laughter at the sight of the Irish in their long beards and native costumes. Not only had he pulled their beards and mocked them, he snatched lands and castles from English colonists and awarded them to his favorites, in one stroke alienating both natives and colonists before a week had passed. Even the Young King, with all his faults, would never have behaved so stupidly.
Meanwhile, on the Continent, Richard tried to make sense of his father’s puzzling actions. It seemed certain that Henry’s advancement of John and his appointment of Geoffrey as custos of Normandy foreboded his own downfall in one way or another. Actually, he did not really care if Henry passed over him in favor of Geoffrey or John, but the possible loss of Aquitaine, his home, was more than he could bear to consider. Arming his castles, he launched an attack on Geoffrey and, according to Hovedon, took his brother prisoner.
Those who cast their eyes to the future in search of auguries agreed that the world might gird itself for evil days. The previous year, the astrologers had unanimously forecast “slaughter by the sword, shipwrecks, scanty vintage, universal carnage, the fall of mankind and the sudden ruin of the world with mighty winds which shall destroy cities and towns.” Like most visions of holocaust, little of this happened, but in April of 1185, “a mighty earthquake was heard throughout nearly the whole of England, such as had not been heard in that land since the beginning of the world.” Whether Eleanor suffered hardship as a result we do not know, but it was recorded that Lincoln Cathedral was demolished and many houses destroyed. Undeterred by natural disasters, Henry crossed the Channel on the day after the quake to confront his warring sons. Apparently, his initial effort to reduce Richard to a state of obedience proved unsuccessful, because two weeks later, he was forced to devise some stronger means of persuasion. On his orders, Eleanor was brought to Normandy in late April, and shortly after her arrival at Bayeux, “the king immediately ordered his son Richard to give up Poitou, with its appurtenances, without delay to Queen Eleanor because it was her inheritance.” Furthermore, if Richard failed to comply, then Eleanor would be placed at the head of an army to take Poitou away from him by force. Eleanor could only have blinked at this bizarre proposal. Obviously, Henry had no intention of sending her back to that proverbially faithless province with an army. At sixty-two, however, she had grown adept at playing Henry’s games, especially when there was nothing to lose. On her advice, Richard surrendered the province to his mother’s representatives and returned to his father’s court in Normandy. “And then,” says a chronicler, “he remained with his father like a tamed son.”
Eleanor remained on the Continent until the spring of 1186. The restoration of her queenly dignity still extremely precarious, she appears to have emulated the obedience she advised Richard to follow. Docile, she traveled with the king, keeping her eyes and ears open but her lips closed. From her vantage point, she had ample opportunity to form her own conclusions about many subjects, and one of these would surely have been the new king of the Franks. It was apparent that the prince for whom Louis had waited nearly three decades owed nothing to his father; no one would ever call Dieu-Donné “more simple-minded than is becoming to a prince.” Even at fifteen, when he had assumed the throne, he had worn his toughness like an ominous challenge to the Plantagenets. He had none of the charisma, none of the humor and grace, that marked even the least of Eleanor’s sons. In adolescence he had been ill-kempt, nervous, and subject to sickly fears and hallucinations; his intellectual gifts were modest—he cared so little for books that he failed to learn Latin—but, nevertheless, he owned a kind of keen practical intelligence. At twenty, he was clever, humorless, dogmatic, and coldly calculating. Obsessed by the dream of destroying Plantagenet rule on the Continent, he had already discovered that his most powerful allies against Henry Plantagenet were Henry’s own sons. “I wonder,” he had once mused idly to a courtier, “if it might ever please God to grant that I, or some heir of mine, should restore the kingdom to what it was in Charlemagne’s time?”
Such daydreams made Eleanor nervous. Although she could find little to like or trust about the bloodless Philip, it was apparent that her sons did not feel the same way. The Young King had preferred to spend his time in Paris, and now Geoffrey was following in his footsteps. During the year that Eleanor stayed on the Continent, Geoffrey lived with Philip Augustus at the Cite Palace, as close, some said, as a blood brother. Dissatisfied with his inheritance of Brittany, he stood now on this side of the Franco-Norman border, now on that, wavering between loyalty to his father and loyalty to Philip, who had made him seneschal of France. William of Newburgh claimed that “while engaged in active service with the King of France, he made great efforts to annoy his father.” The conspiracy they were hatching—an invasion of Normandy —Eleanor could only guess at. Leaving Geoffrey to his scheming, she returned to England with Henry on April 27, 1186. Three months later, on August 19, Geoffrey and his horse were thrown to the ground in a tournament at Paris. When he refused to yield to the knights who had attacked him, “he was so trodden by the hoofs of the horses and so severely shaken by the blows that he shortly finished life.” His body was laid on the high altar of Notre Dame, and “there he was buried with but few regrets from his father, to whom he had been an unfaithful son, but with sore grief to the French.” Overcome, Philip Augustus had to be forcibly restrained from throwing himself into the tomb, and the Countess Marie of Champagne, who was present at the requiem, demonstrated her abiding affection for her half brother by establishing a Mass for the repose of his soul.
Of the five male children Eleanor had born to her second husband with such relief and pride, only two remained.
In the autumn of 1187 a wave of consternation rippled throughout Europe. Every appalling portent uttered by the astrologers suddenly seemed to be materializing, not in the local spots where most had expected them but far away, in Outremer: Saladin, the most terrible Saracen of all, had wrenched Jerusalem from Christian hands; the citizens had been mass
acred and the king of Jerusalem taken captive; and, worst of all, the True Cross and the tomb of Christ had fallen into the hands of “infidel dogs.” The news had not been entirely unexpected by Eleanor, for in early 1185, Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, had visited England to warn of approaching disaster and to beg Henry to defend the Holy Land as king of Jerusalem. At the time, Henry had refused to even consider such a notion. Crusades were for the young and romantic, and instead, he had offered Heraclius fifty thousand marks, an offer that the patriarch had literally spat upon with contempt. Now the fever for crusading that had possessed Eleanor and Louis in the 1150s began to envelop the conscience of Christendom once more. The fall of Edessa, however, was as nothing compared to the idea of Jerusalem itself in the hands of Saladin. Young gallants in every castle and village square talked about taking the cross; King William of Sicily, Joanna Plantagenet’s husband, put on sackcloth and retired to mourn; Pope Urban III died, from grief some said. And Richard Plantagenet, receiving the news late one afternoon in early November, took the cross the next morning near Tours.
When Henry heard of his son’s action, he responded with a grief he had shown only upon the deaths of Becket and the Young King; he withdrew to his chamber and suspended all business for four days. At fifty-four, surely an age at which a man might expect peace, crises threatened him on every side. After siring a fine brood of boys, he was left with an eldest son whom he disliked, a boy as obstinate and headstrong as his wife; but even though he privately accepted Richard as his heir, he would not give him the pleasure of recognizing him as such publicly. For how much trouble had he not reaped by prematurely declaring his intention to the Young King? He had meant to discipline Richard by keeping him uncertain, but now the boy had foolishly run off and taken the cross. Not only was there Richard with whom he must contend but Philip Augustus with his embarrassing questions as well. How many times had he not met the Capetian boy under the elm at Gisors only to hear him complain of his half sisters Marguerite and Alais and their dowers? Why, the young Capetian asked repeatedly, was Alais still a maiden at the age of twenty-seven? When would her marriage to Richard take place? Can a man under suspicion of dishonoring a woman tell her kin that they lie, especially when they are not lying? Loath to give up his mistress, he had promised that the girl would be married soon, without of course committing himself to a definite date. Alais and the custody of the Vexin, these were needles with which Philip Augustus regularly prodded him.
