Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  In the meantime the two abbots had found Richard, in mid-March 1193, as he was being taken under escort to a new place of imprisonment on the Rhine. He cannot have been an easy prisoner: his chief relaxations were playing unpleasant practical jokes on his gaolers and trying to make them drunk. On 23 March the English king appeared before the imperial diet at Speier to defend himself against a variety of specious charges, after which he publicly exchanged the kiss of peace with the emperor. Henry was under strong pressure from the Welf (or anti-Hohenstaufen) magnates, who admired Richard, and also from pope Celestine, who had excommunicated duke Leopold for having violated the ‘Truce of God’ in seizing a crusader. The emperor was not going to overplay his hand, and he needed money badly. He was much too subtle to ill-treat or torture Richard in order to make him agree to a ransom: that would merely damage imperial prestige. Instead Henry simply threatened to hand him over to Philip of France.

  On 20 April Hubert Walter at last returned to England. He had been in Sicily on his way home from the Holy Land when he heard of the king’s arrest and had immediately gone to Germany to look for him. Having found Richard, he returned to his native land, bringing a depressing message from the king to the effect that to obtain his freedom he was probably going to need a ransom of 100,000 marks, though there was no guarantee that he would be set free on payment.

  Then followed a letter from Richard, dated 19 April and addressed to ‘his dearest mother Eleanor, queen of England, and his justiciars and all his faithful men in England’, to say that William Longchamp — of all unlikely people — had persuaded the emperor to agree to see Richard at Hagenau after Hubert Walter’s departure, and that king and emperor had made ‘a mutual and indissoluble treaty of love’. Among other clauses this treaty stipulated that Richard was to pay a ransom of 100,000 marks and to provide military assistance for Henry’s forthcoming campaign against Tancred of Sicily. The king asked his subjects to be generous in subscribing to the ransom and ordered some highly practical measures to be implemented. All Church plate of any value was to be impounded; every baron was to give hostages for his share, who would be under Eleanor’s care before being sent to Germany; a register of the magnates’ contributions was to be forwarded to Richard so that he might learn ‘by what exact amount we are indebted to each one’. Significantly all monies were to be entrusted to the queen mother or to those nominated by her.

  Eleanor and the two justiciars at once set about raising the ransom. It was a daunting task. The exorbitant sum mentioned in Richard’s letter was confirmed in a ‘golden bull’ given by the emperor in person to William Longchamp, who in turn presented it to the great council of England when it met at St Albans in the first days of June 1193. Since April Eleanor had been trying to find the money, and by now she must have known that it would not be easy, because Richard had already bled the country white in financing his crusade. At the council she hopefully appointed officers to superintend the operation, and issued decrees for new taxes; these included one quarter of the yearly income of every man whether lay or cleric, a fee of twenty shillings — a vast amount for the period — from every knight, and, just as the king had ordered, the gold and silver plate from every church and abbey in the land; the Cistercian monks, the Gilbertine canons and the white canons, who possessed neither gold nor silver but owned enormous flocks of sheep, were to donate a whole year’s wool-clip. Normandy and the other Angevin lands across the Channel were also burdened with these draconian levies. By Michaelmas, waggons were trundling down the muddy roads to London, laden with treasure that was to be placed in coffers at St Paul’s cathedral under the seals of the queen mother and the chief justiciar.

  In the event far less money was raised than the queen and the council had expected. Many people evaded the taxes or simply refused to pay them; abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds threatened officials with the saint’s curse if they dared to plunder his shrine. Despite the ruthlessness of the tax collectors a second levy and then a third had to be imposed. There was a good deal of administrative confusion; the money was not handled by the Exchequer, and the government had no clear idea of how much the new taxes and levies would bring in, so the collectors’ accounts could not be audited properly. According to William of Newburgh, the collectors stole most of the money. It also seems that the actual tax-payers had few scruples about under-valuing their own resources.

  Among those who exploited the confusion over taxes was count John, who levied them mercilessly in his own lands and estates and kept the money for himself. He still hoped that his brother would never return. However, early in July 1193 Philip of France received news that, because of fresh negotiations between the emperor and Richard, it seemed likely that the latter would be released before the end of the year. He immediately sent a warning to John: ‘The devil has been let loose.’ Terrified, the count slipped out of Windsor and fled from England to join Philip in Normandy. But even then John did not abandon all expectation of profiting in some way from his brother’s captivity. He made a fresh alliance with the French king, offering him eastern Normandy and eastern Touraine if he would install him in Richard’s possessions on the French side of the Channel; he also sent word to his supporters in England, ordering them to rise in revolt as soon as they heard that the French had invaded Normandy. However, Eleanor was ready. She had no trouble in persuading the great council to confiscate all John’s English lands and to besiege his strongholds with more vigour than hitherto. Normandy proved equally loyal.

  William Longchamp, the ousted chancellor and justiciar, had been causing the queen mother some concern. When he returned to England to deliver the emperor’s bull and Richard’s commands, he obviously had high hopes of re-establishing himself. But the bishops would not lift their excommunication, and London refused to admit him and barred its gates. At St Albans the great council treated him with public disdain and accepted the bull and the king’s commands from him only after making him swear that he came simply as a bishop and a messenger, ‘not as a justiciar, not as a legate, not as a chancellor’. Eleanor — as good a judge as ever of popular feeling — would not obey Richard’s order that the young hostages be entrusted to Longchamp to take to Germany, and refused to hand over her grandson, thus enabling the magnates to disobey the king’s command; they inferred that the man was a voracious homosexual, stating, ‘We might put our daughters in his care, but never our sons’. It is probable that the queen mother complained about Longchamp to Richard, who soon recalled him.

  The new negotiations between the emperor Henry and Richard that had so alarmed John and king Philip had taken place at Worms at the end of June 1193. After four days of wrangling, Henry and Richard reached a fresh agreement: the English king would be released on payment of 100,000 marks of the ransom money (the total was raised to 150,000 marks, 50,000 of this being instead of taking part in the expedition against Tancred of Sicily), and on receipt of 200 noble hostages as a guarantee for the remainder; the former ‘emperor of Cyprus’, still in his silver chains, was to be handed over to Henry; and Eleanor of Brittany, the daughter of Richard’s brother Geoffrey, was to be betrothed to duke Leopold of Austria, the man who had captured Richard. When the imperial envoys came to London in October, Eleanor was able to show them that the necessary 100,000 silver marks were ready for shipment — thirty-five tons of precious metal.

  Richard, understandably anxious that nothing should go wrong, sent orders that the queen mother should personally accompany the silver on its way to Germany. A fleet of vessels assembled at the Suffolk ports of Dunwich, Ipswich and Orford. It is very likely that Eleanor spent a night or two in the beautiful little castle at Orford; built by her husband in the 1170s, when it was the latest thing in military design, this elegant polygonal keep is one of the very few buildings in England that she would still recognize were she to return today. Accompanied by her faithful archbishop of Rouen, Walter of Coutances, by other great magnates (including William Longchamp), and by the 200 young hostages, Eleanor set sail with th
e treasure in December. Her fleet was packed with soldiers in case pirates should try to intercept so alluring a cargo. England was left in the capable hands of its new justiciar, Hubert Walter.

  Despite the winter the queen mother seems to have had a smooth crossing. Once across the North Sea, she continued her journey by road and then up the river Rhine to join her son at Speier. Here she was to have celebrated the feast of the Epiphany (6 January) with him. But in the meantime the emperor Henry had postponed the date for Richard’s release — originally intended to have been 17 January 1194 — and was threatening to repudiate the precarious agreement between them. The exact reasons why Henry changed his mind will never be known. The most likely explanation is that it was because king Philip and count John were offering him a further 100,000 marks in silver if he would keep Richard in captivity until next Michaelmas, by which time they hoped to have partitioned his lands between them. Henry, who may have possessed a sense of humour, showed John’s letter to Richard.

  It must have been a cruel disappointment for Eleanor after her long journey in the depths of winter. She had not seen her favourite son since that short meeting in Sicily in the spring of 1191. But she quickly ended the deadlock in negotiations, with an inspired suggestion that showed all her skill as a diplomatist.

  Plainly the emperor Henry, notoriously avaricious, had been strongly tempted by the prospect of more money from Philip and John. Indeed the latter was certain that the emperor would accept the offer and actually sent an agent to England to order his castellans to prepare for war. Henry, however, was alarmed at the outrage expressed by the princes of the empire; the king’s imprisonment had been relaxed and he had employed his liberty to make useful friends among the Germans. Richard’s charm and elegance had a considerable effect on the princes, who were already deeply impressed by his exploits in the Holy Land. (Probably he had even then begun to be known as ‘the Lion-heart’, although it is unlikely that the legend of his tearing out with his bare hands the living heart of a lion that attacked him had yet developed.) Moreover Henry knew very well that Philip and John were hardly the most reliable of business partners. Then, in a public debate at Mainz before the princes, the English king aroused still more admiration by his majestic eloquence, calling on them to come to the help of a man who had been seized when on crusade. Many of his hearers shed tears.

  The emperor realized that he would be wise to forgo Philip and John’s bribe, but he wanted something else in compensation. To the consternation of the English he demanded that Richard should pay homage to him as his vassal. It was now that Eleanor intervened. Always a realist, she saw that by accepting this humiliating, though in fact meaningless condition, her son could escape. On her advice Richard took off his leather hat and placed it in the emperor Henry’s hands as a sign of vassalage. The Hohenstaufen promptly returned it, stipulating that the English king should pay him a yearly tribute of £5000.

  At long last, on 4 February 1194, Richard was released, ‘restored to his mother and to freedom’. Those who witnessed Eleanor’s reunion with her son wept at the spectacle. No doubt in her old age she could appear as pathetic as she was formidable. Indeed, in one of those frenzied letters to pope Celestine she had written of herself, with unaccustomed self-pity, as a woman ‘worn to a skeleton, a mere bag of skin and bones, the blood gone from her veins, her very tears dried before they came into her eyes’. She and Richard then began a joyful progress together down the Rhine, via Cologne and Antwerp, where they were splendidly feted. At Cologne the archbishop celebrated a Mass of thanksgiving in the cathedral; the introit began most fittingly, ‘Now I know that the Lord hath sent His angel and snatched me from the hand of Herod’, and every literate man present knew that this was not the introit for the day. At Antwerp they were the honoured guests of the duke of Louvain. Throughout the journey Richard took the opportunity of allying with as many local magnates as possible and especially with those lords in the Low Countries whose lands bordered the territory of the king of France.

  Archbishop Hubert Walter: from his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. Courtauld Institute.

  Orford Castle in Suffolk, one of the few secular buildings to remain much as it was in Eleanor’s time. A. S. Kerning.

  Finally, on 4 March, Richard and Eleanor sailed from Antwerp on board the Trenchemer. The royal admiral, Stephen of Turnham, who was commanding the little ship in person, had to employ experienced pilots to take her through the coastal islets and out into the estuary of the Scheldt. It was a long crossing, perhaps deliberately so, to avoid an ambush by Philip’s ships, and the Trenchemer was escorted by a large and redoubtable cog from the Cinque port of Rye. Richard and his mother landed at Sandwich on Sunday 13 March 1194. The king had been out of his kingdom for more than four years. It was the end of Eleanor’s regency in all but name.

  14 Richard’s Return

  ‘Odysseus hath come, and hath got him to his own house.’

  Homer, The Odyssey

  ‘When his return from his long captivity had become an event rather wished than hoped for by his despairing subjects.’

  Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

  It was about nine o’clock in the morning when Richard and Eleanor sailed into Sandwich. The sun shone with such a wonderful red glow that men later said they had known that it announced the return of the king. He and his mother did not linger at Sandwich but rode straight to Canterbury, where they heard the monks sing Sunday mass and Richard prayed at the shrine of St Thomas in thanksgiving.

  William of Newburgh, who remembered Richard’s return, wrote how, ‘The news of he coming of the king, so long and so desperately awaited, flew faster than the north wind’. Everyone was weary of insecure government, of the threat of being ruled by a man as giddy and feckless as count John. Yet not all rejoiced. One of John’s supporters, the castellan of St Michael’s Mount, actually died of fright on hearing the news. Most people were deliriously happy however, and folk memory seems to have preserved something of their happiness in the legend of Robin Hood. Perhaps Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe is not so very far from the truth after all.

  London prepared a magnificent reception for Richard,

  Richard that robb’d the lion of his heart,

  And fought the holy wars in Palestine.

  The streets were decked with tapestries and green boughs. Ralph of Diceto, the dean of St Paul’s, who was almost certainly present, tells us that the king was ‘hailed with joy in the Strand’. In the city Richard was escorted by cheering crowds to St Paul’s, to be welcomed at the cathedral by a great throng of clergy. Some of the emperor’s German officials, in London to collect the remainder of the king’s ransom, were astonished by the general rejoicing and by the city’s obvious prosperity; they grumbled sourly that they had expected London to have been reduced to utter poverty from paying the money demanded by their master, and that had he realized how rich the country was, he would have asked for much more — the lamentations of the English had deceived him.

  Richard then rode to the shrine of the martyred East Anglian king, St Edmund, at Bury St Edmunds, to give thanks to the man who appears to have been his favourite saint. Then he went to Nottingham. It was time for him to restore complete order in England and to deal with his brother John’s supporters.

  Nottingham, one of John’s castles, was still holding out for its master, as was Tickhill in Northumberland, which had just been invested by the bishop of Durham. The two garrisons believed John’s lies and could not credit that the king had returned. When two of the knights inside Nottingham came out and saw that it really was Richard who was beseiging them, however, the castle surrendered at once, on 27 March. Tickhill had fallen a few days earlier and count John’s revolt was now completely crushed. In the ensuing great council at Nottingham — at which the queen mother was present — the king summoned his brother to appear before it within forty days or forfeit any right to succeed him in any of his territories. At the same time pope Celestine responded tardily to Eleanor’s appeals,
and excommunicated both John and Philip of France for violating the ‘Truce of God’.

  Meanwhile, on Low Sunday 17 April 1194, Richard was re-crowned at Winchester by archbishop Hubert Walter of Canterbury. Eleanor sat in the north transept of the cathedral on a special dais, surrounded by great ladies as though in one of her courts of love. She had been a good steward for her son; in bishop Stubb’s words: ‘Had it not been for her governing skill while Richard was in Palestine, and her influence on the continent … England would have been a prey to anarchy, and Normandy lost to the house of Anjou long before it was.’ Even if she herself was not re-crowned during the splendid ceremony, she sat there as queen of the English. Perhaps significantly, Berengaria was not present, but was far away in Poitou — no doubt to Eleanor’s complete satisfaction.