Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  Her third son, Geoffrey, was only fifteen, though he too was precocious. Dark haired and not as tall as Henry or Richard, he was perhaps the most intelligent of the family and certainly the most untrustworthy. Benedict of Peterborough referred to him, when he had grown into a charming and thoroughly evil man, as ‘a son of iniquity and perdition’, and even as a boy Geoffrey must have been dangerous enough. He wanted to enjoy his wife’s duchy of Brittany at the earliest possible opportunity.

  By 1173, therefore, Eleanor’s plan was ready. She had decided that, young as they were, her three rather alarming elder sons were capable of leading her revolt. Henry’s wife and children prepared to overthrow him.

  10 Eleanor’s Revolt

  ‘Note here how God stirreth up the wife of his own bosom, and the sons descending of his own loins, to be thorns in his eyes and goads in his sides.’

  Holinshed on Henry II in 1173

  ‘What peace, so long as the whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?’

  The Second Book of Kings

  The great revolt of 1173 against Henry II is often seen as a spontaneous rising by the angry young king, joined on the spur of the moment by all the old king’s enemies within and without his domains. But it was so general and so concerted that one has to conclude that it was carefully planned in advance. The young king was too scatterbrained to do this, and his brothers, though precocious, were still too juvenile. Even if there is no firm documentary evidence, all the circumstances point to Eleanor as the architect of an ingenious plot. Its basic object was to obtain appanages for the young princes, with no strings attached, and so to weaken Henry that he would never be able to reassert his authority. Indeed, the plotters intended if possible to depose him. The queen’s prize was to be Aquitaine, which she would rule through and with her beloved Richard. Only a blunder by the inane young king saved Henry.

  It is clear that, until the revolt broke out, the king of England had not the slightest suspicion that his wife was plotting against him. From Roman times until the sixteenth century and the age of Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici, almost no European woman played a leading part in politics. They intrigued and occasionally succeeded in turning their menfolk against someone they disliked, but that was all. The outstanding exceptions were the empress Matilda and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The first failed because of her arrogance and lack of subtlety. Eleanor failed too, but not from any shortcomings of her own; she had bad luck and she faced an exceptionally skilful and vigorous opponent. One can only suppose that so uncannily shrewd a man as Henry II underestimated her simply because she was a woman. Yet, with a mother like Matilda, he ought to have known better.

  Clearly, Eleanor dissembled over a long period of years during which she was planning to attack her husband. Perhaps one should not blame her too much. For two decades he had deprived her of her independence and power. She was like some Victorian heiress who had fallen into the clutches of a fortune-hunter before the Married Woman’s Property Act; although this is an anachronistic simile, it nonetheless conveys something of the resentment that she felt. She was not unnatural: Henry had forfeited any claim to her loyalty by his repeated adulteries and, above all, by taking a mistress who was a lady and a rival. Moreover he himself was always ready to break his word, so Gerald of Wales tells us, and Thomas Becket once described him as a Proteus in slipperiness.

  By 1173, men throughout Henry’s territories, in both England and France, had grown heartily sick of his oppressively efficient rule. In England — according to the dean of St Paul’s, Ralph of Diceto — men were joining the young king’s party because his father ‘was trampling on the necks of the proud and haughty’ and demolishing robber-barons’ castles, and because ‘he condemned traitors to exile, punished robbers with death, terrified thieves with the gallows, and mulcted the oppressors of the poor with the loss of their own money’. The dean’s was an exceptionally loyal and charitable view. It is likely that all too many of Henry’s barons thought that he was heavy handed, especially in Aquitaine, where he must have been disliked as a northerner and as a tyrant; he was savagely autocratic compared with William IX, and tolerated only because he was Eleanor’s husband. Meanwhile the rebels whom he had put down in Maine and in Brittany a few years previously were biding their time.

  The conspirators had a valuable ally in Eleanor’s former husband. Louis VII had matured considerably, both as a statesman and as a politician. Although a lesser man than Henry II, and certainly not so gifted, he was slowly and quietly improving his position in France; he was even strengthening the power of the crown against the Church, despite his piety, and controlling episcopal elections as well as asserting royal rights, though without any of the Plantagenet’s noisy disputes. Indeed Louis had lost much of his naivety, even something of his innocence. The constant menace from Henry and his vast empire, together with threats by unruly vassels inside his own borders, had developed considerable powers of survival in the French king, who was determined that the Capetian monarchy should overcome all obstacles. In particular he had acquired the most unsaintly habit of escaping from dangerous situations by proclaiming truces and then breaking them. The settlement at Montmirail had given him the tantalizing if distant prospect of a division of the Angevin empire. Eleanor’s design of a grand rebellion promised to hasten the process. Although no record has survived, it is logical to conclude that secret ambassadors had been passing between Louis on the one hand and Eleanor and her sons on the other. When the young king of England visited him in the autumn of 1172, Louis told the boy to insist on being given one of his father’s territories.

  Henry suspected nothing. The betrothal of his daughter to the king of Castile in 1170 had effectively put an end to any danger of a Franco-Castilian alliance, besides strengthening his position vis-à-vis Toulouse. As we have seen, in 1171-2 he had been gratifyingly successful in establishing a bridgehead in Ireland. Also in 1172 he had made his peace with the Church at Avranches, where he had sworn that he had neither desired nor ordered the murder of Thomas Becket and reached an agreement with the churchmen that was more compromise than surrender. In 1172 too he had made a placatory gesture towards Louis by having the French king’s daughter crowned with the young king. He had every reason to believe that he was safe from attack.

  In February 1173 at Montferrand, Henry and the young king met count Humbert of Maurienne to negotiate a marriage between Humbert’s heiress and John Lackland. The count ruled Savoy and Piedmont, controlling several Alpine passes from France into Italy. This was of vital concern to Henry, because the papacy (at odds with Frederick Barbarossa) was seriously considering offering him the imperial crown. That Henry was interested in so ambitious an adventure shows how he felt about the security of his own territories. He therefore promised count Humbert that John would receive the three castles on the Loire that were the customary appanage of a younger son of the house of Anjou — Chinon, Loudun and Mirabeau. This infuriated the young king, who angrily told his father that he had no right to make such a gift without his joint-sovereign’s approval and that he would never agree to it. The old king, hardly the man to be browbeaten, refused to change his mind. Furthermore he at once ordered certain young knights, whom he considered a bad influence, to leave his son’s household.

  The young king had also demanded either England, Normandy or Anjou, as Louis had suggested. Perhaps now, for the first time, Henry began to suspect that some sort of plot was in the wind. Already he seems to have received a warning from Raymond of Toulouse that his family were plotting to depose him, but apparently he disregarded so notoriously treacherous and unreliable an opponent. Nevertheless, from the young king’s outburst he may well have suspected that Louis VII was trying to make trouble between father and son. Henry thought of imprisoning the young king, but decided against it. Then, on the night of 7 March 1173, at Chinon, the young king made his guards drunk and fled north, riding for the coast as though he intended to cross the Channel and raise England. When he
reached Normandy however, he changed his mind and went to Paris instead to take refuge with Louis. By his stupid outburst and subsequent flight the young king had alerted his father and, ultimately, doomed his mother’s plot to failure. But the old king did not yet appreciate the full extent of the conspiracy.

  Henry II sent to Paris, demanding the return of his son. Louis’s reply was both a curious piece of humour and a declaration of war. When the English ambassadors said they had come from the king of England, Louis answered: ‘Impossible. The king of England is with me. You are quite wrong in giving the title to his father. That king is dead and it would be as well if he ceased to think of himself as a king since before all the world he has handed over his kingdom to his son.’ A council of the barons of France was summoned to Paris; they swore solemnly to fight for the young king, who in turn pledged himself to make no peace without their approval. He promised the earldom of Kent to the count of Flanders and wide lands in Touraine to the count of Blois. The council declared unanimously that ‘he who was once king of England is king no longer’. A seal was specially cut for the young king on Louis’s orders, so that he could convert his verbal promises into formal grants. By now Richard and Geoffrey were also in Paris, with their mother’s encouragement.

  The young king found allies throughout the Angevin empire. In England, the earls of Norfolk, Leicester, Chester, Derby and Salisbury, together with the lesser lords, hired mercenaries, put their castles into a state of defence, and began to attack the old king’s supporters. In addition, king William the Lion of Scotland and his brother began to raid over the border. If Henry had received a single serious defeat there would probably have been a general rising throughout England. So worried was the old king that at one moment he offered the young king half England, and Richard half Aquitaine. In Poitou and Aquitaine his seneschals and castellans were expelled, and the barons, led by the count of Angoulême and the Lusignans, rose against the consort whom their duchess had repudiated. There were risings too in Normandy, Brittany, Maine and Anjou. The declared aim of Louis, and no doubt of Eleanor as well, was to strip Henry of every one of his domains save Normandy. Few rulers have suddenly found themselves so isolated, or been faced by so co-ordinated an opposition.

  Henry survived. Without the young king’s loss of nerve, which had set off the conspiracy prematurely, Henry might well have been seized and deposed before he had a chance to resist. As it was, most of the actual fighting took place in Normandy (which had remained largely loyal to him), in northern England and in Brittany. Henry first threw a French invading force out of Normandy and then turned to smash the Breton rebels before crossing to England. Here his supporters, together with peasants armed with scythes and clubs, scattered the earl of Leicester’s mercenaries at Fornham in Suffolk in October 1173, and by the end of the year English rebels held out only in the north and in the midlands. In the spring of 1174 a scouting party captured the king of Scots in a Northumberland fog, and by the summer the party of the young king of England had been completely broken. Meanwhile Louis and the Plantagenet princes were besieging Rouen. With an army that included Welsh mercenaries, Henry re-crossed the Channel, raised the siege, and drove the enemy out of his territories. By the autumn of 1174 it was clear that he had defeated the grand alliance: on 8 September a peace conference began at Gisors.

  The old king, who knew when to compromise, was generous: the young king was given two Norman castles and an annual allowance of £1500; Richard recieved two castles in Poitou together with half the county’s revenues; and Geoffrey — who, like Richard, was forgiven on account of ‘his tender age’ — obtained half the revenues of Brittany. But the old king insisted on his right to provide for John, giving him lands on both sides of the Channel. In appearance, at any rate, his sons had been taught a stern lesson: ‘Thus the mighty learned that it was no easy task to wrest Hercules’s club from his hand’, exulted their father’s treasurer.

  The settlement made no mention of the arch-conspirator. Eleanor had been in Henry’s hands for over a year. When in August 1173 her husband had first begun to retaliate in Poitou, she had taken refuge in the castle of Faye-la-Vineuse, the stronghold of her devoted uncle, Raoul of Faye. Already the archbishop of Rouen, Rotrou of Warwick, had sent her a stern letter, ordering her to return to Henry, and to cease setting his sons against him, ‘otherwise you will be the cause of general ruin’. Faye-la-Vineuse soon fell to Henry’s soldiers, but Eleanor fled in time. Quite by chance, on the road to Chartres and almost within sight of the Ile-de-France, some of Henry’s troops intercepted a group of knights riding towards Paris. Among them, riding astride and dressed as a nobleman, was the fifty-year-old queen. She spent the next few months immured in a tower of her husband’s castle of Chinon in Touraine.

  11 The Lost Years

  ‘Foolish woman, thou art now like a firebrand that hath kindled others and burnt thyself.’

  Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

  ‘O sovereign mistress of true melancholy.’

  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

  Henry II’s fury with his queen must have known no bounds. She was revealed at last as a secret enemy of many years, who had plotted to depose him and unleashed against him the greatest danger of his life. Admittedly he had been unfaithful to her, but — as no doubt he saw it — that was hardly sufficient reason for her to bear such enmity towards the father of her children. Reconciliation was impossible after treachery such as this. That her plot had so very nearly succeeded demonstrates how formidable she was as a politician. It is also a testimony to her lust for power.

  In July 1174 Eleanor was shipped from Barfleur (possibly in the Esnecca — or ‘snake’ — which was the king’s personal vessel). According to the chronicler the weather was stormy, but she survived the crossing and was confined first in Winchester and then in Old Sarum castle. Here the tower’s site can still be made out within the ring of the grassy mound which is all that remains of the castle.

  Henry’s problem was what to do with this treacherous wife. At first he seems to have been determined to divorce her, according to Roger of Howden. On 31 October 1175 a papal legate, cardinal Uguccione Pierlone of Sant’ Angelo, met the king at Winchester to discuss Church-state relations and tidy up the last vestiges of the Becket affair. It was rumoured that they were also discussing the possibility of a divorce. This posed many problems, however: to leave Eleanor free again would be to commit exactly the same political blunder that Louis VII had made nearly a quarter of a century before. Gerald of Wales believed that Henry offered the queen a divorce, but on condition that she should abandon the world and take vows as a nun; she would then be installed as abbess of the monastery of Fontevrault, of which she was so fond. Furthermore Gervase of Canterbury heard that the cardinal had been given large sums of money by the king, presumably to put him into an accommodating frame of mind, because he was noted for his avarice. The stumbling block was Eleanor herself. Despite her affection for Fontevrault, she was not going to solve her husband’s difficulties by abandoning her rights, and she refused. Although she was fifty-three — which was almost old age in the twelfth century — and although all her plans lay in ruins, she would not give way to despair and accept that she no longer had any chance of regaining the slightest vestige of power. In the event her determination was rewarded; but first she had to endure fifteen years of imprisonment, or at best semi-confinement, usually in strongly fortified buildings from which there was no hope of escape.

  These years were not all spent at the same place, though Winchester seems to have been the most usual. Sometimes she was moved to Ludgershall or back to Old Sarum or to other castles in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Nottinghamshire. Her gaolers were her husband’s most trusted men, notably the great justiciar Ranulf de Glanvill, and William FitzStephen, who was one of the royal judges (and the biographer of Thomas Becket). The chronicles are almost silent about her during her imprisonment, and the few entries in the Pipe Rolls suggest that little was spent on he
r upkeep, in miserable contrast to the luxury that she had known all her life. But even if she pined for Poitou, nothing could break her extraordinary spirit.

  Henry was now openly living with Rosamund Clifford, but she did not enjoy her triumph for long. In 1176 she fell ill and took up residence in the nunnery of Godstow, where she soon died; she had become a nun, perhaps on her deathbed. In all save beauty Fair Rosamund had been the opposite of Eleanor, showing no taste whatsoever for politics or power. She was interred before the convent altar and her tomb became a sort of shrine, decked with silken cloths and carefully tended by the nuns according to the provision of Henry’s endowment. In 1191, two years after Henry’s own death, that stern Carthusian bishop St Hugh of Lincoln visited Godstow and was horrified to find that the community still venerated the grave; he had her corpse removed to the cemetery — ‘because she was a harlot’, Roger of Howden explains. Henry II’s latest biographer says of Rosamund, ‘undoubtedly she was the great love of his life’. He may even have thought of making her his queen instead of Eleanor. He continued to take mistresses, but none of them filled Rosamund’s place in his affections.

  Eleanor must have known very little about what was happening in the world outside her prisons — a wretched deprivation for so active a mind. Perhaps her gaolers were kind enough to let her know of the betrothal of her daughter Joanna (born in 1165) to king William II of Sicily in July 1176; Joanna travelled overland to her new kingdom, where she married William in February the following year; her lot as a wife cannot have been altogether agreeable, as her husband kept a harem like those of his Saracen subjects. As for Eleanor’s sons after they had made peace with their father, Richard waged a long and bloody campaign against the rebels who had formerly supported him, and to such effect that in the autumn of 1176 he stormed Angoulême and sent its count to England to implore Henry’s pardon on his knees. In 1178 her husband met Louis VII at Ivry and swore, though no doubt with scant sincerity, to go on a joint crusade to the Holy Land; they also discussed arrangements for the marriage of Louis’s daughter Alice (who had been brought up at the English court since 1162) to Richard. In the following year Louis visited Canterbury to pray at the shrine of St Thomas for the recovery of his only son Philip from a dangerous fever. Henry joined him, presumably with mixed feelings.