by Douglas Boyd
Arriving at Eleanor’s court in Poitiers to enlist them to the cause, Young Henry must have had doubts. Yes, the princes all resented and hated their father, but Richard was already reputed to be so unreliable as to merit Bertran de Born’s nickname for him: Richard Aye-and-Nay (in Occitan, Ricart oc-e-no). Vassals, friends and allies never knew where they stood with him, for a promise made on Sunday could be broken on Monday. Prince Geoffrey was a wild card, known for being ‘as slippery as an eel’. The key was to convince Eleanor. After listening to the Young King’s assurances of support from King Louis and his vassals and allies, she concluded that there would never be a better time to strike against the husband and father they had all come to hate, and therefore put her considerable powers of persuasion to work, to reconcile Richard and Geoffrey with Young Henry’s plans.
After she opened her treasury to provide funds, the three princes departed together for Paris, to launch the campaign with Louis’ support. From simple prudence, Eleanor should have gone with them, but was too proud to throw herself on the mercy of her first husband, whom she had not seen for twenty years. So she stayed in Poitiers to brave it out in the heady atmosphere of her court, where the young gallants were cock-a-hoop at the opportunity to test the military skills they had spent years acquiring.
Damning his sons for ingrates, Henry ordered all the cities and castles on French soil that remained loyal to him to be on the defensive. The uprising began on the Sunday after Easter, 15 April 1173, when all his continental possessions outside Normandy rose against him – from Maine and Brittany to the south of Gascony. The Earl of Leicester even landed in Suffolk with a force of Flemish mercenaries said to number over 3,000. In Richard’s Aquitaine and Poitou, the list of those declaring for the rebellion read like a directory of the nobility.
Epitomising the brutality of ‘knightly warfare’, the princes’ ally Count Philip of Flanders ordered his troops to burn and destroy everything and ‘leave nothing for the enemy’s dinner’.8 By fire and sword, his forces ravaged Normandy, substantially loyal to Henry, who shrewdly decided that, although the coalition forces ranged against him looked impressive on paper, they had too many chiefs and no overall commander. The three princes lacked experience in managing large numbers of men and Louis VII had never been much of a general.
Henry’s remedy was to augment his feudal forces by recruiting a huge army of 20,000 mercenaries from Brabant – the area around Brussels. He gradually won the upper hand during the summer, and opened negotiations at Gisors on 24 September, where he offered to share out his continental possessions, Richard to receive half the revenues from Aquitaine while his father reserved to himself only four castles in the whole duchy. The princes’ resolve was weakening, but Louis had learned the hard way not to trust the promises of Henry II. He explained to them that their father was making these offers now because the titles previously bestowed on them with such pomp were in name only, since he had always intended to keep the revenues from their lands for himself.
Following his advice, the three princes rejected Henry II’s terms. Diplomacy and negotiation having failed, he returned to the attack stronger than before. In the south, Richard, recently knighted by Louis, was attempting to rally the Gascons, whose natural rebelliousness required an experienced military leader to impose a co-ordinated strategy. They flocked to Richard’s colours less from loyalty to him than from hatred of his father.9 In a number of cities, like the prosperous port of La Rochelle, the prudent burgesses sat out the conflict behind their stout fortifications in the shrewd expectation that ‘the old king’ would win this war against his upstart sons. The whole of western France was once again a lawless wasteland of burned crops and razed castles, through which armed bands of looters, supporting one side or the other, raped and robbed their way, with nothing the Church could do to stop them. Indeed, its wealth was often the target of their greed.
Henry ordered Eleanor to leave Poitiers and lend her name to his side in the struggle. A letter from Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen penned by Peter of Blois threatened her with excommunication if she did not obey:
To the queen of the English, from the archbishop of Rouen and his suffragans, greetings in the cause of peace.
… a woman is at fault if she leaves her husband and does not observe the bond (of marriage) … unless you return to your husband, you will be the cause of widespread disaster. Therefore, O illustrious queen, return to your husband and our master … If our pleadings do not move you to do this, at least let the sufferings of the people, the threats of the Church and the desolation of the Kingdom do so. Against all women and out of childish counsel, you give offence to the lord King, to whom however powerful kings bow the neck … Truly, you are our parishioner, as is your husband. Either you will return to your husband, or we shall be compelled by canon law to use ecclesiastical censures against you. We say this reluctantly, but unless you come to your senses with sorrow and tears, we shall do so. Farewell.10
The threats simply stiffened Eleanor’s resolve, for Henry had rejected and insulted her for years before the menopause that followed John’s birth. But one after another the rebel fortresses fell to Henry’s Brabant mercenaries, enabling him to appropriate the treasuries within, with which to pay them. The winter of 1173/74 saw the traditional Lenten truce extended for another fifty days until the feast of Pentecost.11 At the end of the ninety-day truce, Henry struck. His mercenaries took Le Mans and marched south across a landscape of death and destruction to capture Poitiers on 12 May.
With Richard on the run, silence descended on Eleanor’s great audience hall, her troubadours and jonglars far away and the flickering fire of southern culture blown out once again. Too late, Eleanor swallowed her pride and fled, disguised as a man and with only a small escort, to seek asylum on Louis’ territory. A few miles from safety, she was overtaken and arrested by knights loyal to Henry II, her whereabouts having been betrayed by her own most trusted courtiers, whose names had been appended to so many of the charters drawn up during the years at Poitiers.12
There is no more dread sound than a key turning in the lock, followed by the jailer’s footsteps receding outside. She spent the first night probably in the Tour du Moulin at Chinon, a bleak tower in the most inaccessible part of the castle that was reserved for important hostages. Next morning, she looked south through the narrow unglazed windows towards the duchy she would not see again for many years. One can imagine her feelings when brought a captive before her implacable husband, most probably in Rouen. History was full of noble and royal sons who had risen up against their fathers, but all Christendom regarded her as an ‘unnatural’ wife for raising their sons in treason against her husband. The pope would grant Henry an annulment if asked, for the degree of consanguinity was even closer than that which provided the grounds for her divorce from Louis VII. However, an annulment would require Henry to give back her dowry of Poitou and Aquitaine – and Henry never gave anything back, not even a son’s rejected fiancée whom he kept as his own mistress. Nor would he have her killed, unless in one of the berserker rages that betrayed his Viking ancestry, for then Richard would enter fully into his inheritance.
He offered her a choice: she could either abdicate her titles and take the veil at Fontevraud, or be locked up for however long it took to make her change her mind. She was 52 years old and Henry only 39. Refusing to give in to a man almost certain to outlive her, she was facing the prospect of spending the rest of her life under lock and key. But she did refuse. Poitou and Aquitaine were her identity. She had given Henry everything else, but not this. Henry was in a hurry to break her will and thus shorten the war, so the conditions under which she was kept must have been hard. All she had to cling to was the hope that somehow Young Henry and Geoffrey and her beloved Richard would outwit and outfight the father they hated.
But Richard was retreating southwards – all the way to Saintes, the western terminal of the Via Agrippa, the great east–west Roman highway across central France. His preparations f
or a stand there were brought to nothing by the tactic that had won Henry II so many victories: speed of attack. While Richard thought he was still in Limoges, his father appeared outside the triumphal arch of the Roman general Germanicus, which then served as a town gate of Saintes. He took it by storm and laid siege to the cathedral, where the cloisters were being used as Richard’s arsenal and food reserve. Since there was no escape from it, and because he was never one to waste resources, the old king simply sat and waited until the defenders surrendered, swelling his depleted coffers not only by Richard’s treasury, but also by no fewer than sixty ransomable knights and 400 men-at-arms. However, his rebellious son was not among them, for Richard had deserted his followers and fled with his household knights to the reputedly impregnable fortress of Taillebourg on the other side of the River Charente. Having travelled too fast to bring any siege engines with him, Henry left him there for the time being and withdrew northwards with his captives after dividing Aquitaine into six regions placed under military governors. Porteclie de Mauzé, the doyen of those barons who had betrayed Eleanor, was rewarded with the profitable office of seneschal of the duchy.
It was against those appointees of his father that Richard led his reduced forces for the next months in a succession of forced marches and skirmishing that produced little result. The Roman military philosopher Vegetius, in his book Epitoma rei militaris, wrote that courage is more important in war than sheer numbers and speed more important still. Henry was about to demonstrate that once again. A number of Louis’ vassals under Philip of Flanders were preparing to cross the Channel, led by Young Henry, and place him on the throne with the support of King William of Scotland. On 8 July the Young King’s party were awaiting favourable winds at Gravelines13 when Henry metaphorically took the wind out of their sails by putting to sea from Barfleur in a gale with a fleet of forty vessels transporting several thousand Flemish mercenaries and his entire family with the exception of the three princes.
Eleanor, who had been kept incommunicado since her capture, found herself aboard the same storm-tossed ship as her daughter Joanna, Prince John and Alix de Maurienne, the Young Queen Marguerite and Richard’s betrothed Alais Capet, Constance of Brittany and Emma of Anjou.14 They constituted Henry’s VIP hostages, whom he would entrust to no other jailer.15 However fraught the position of Marguerite, Constance and the others, Eleanor knew that a far worse fate awaited her once across the Channel.
The Anglo-Norman vassals had watched the progress of the rebellion in France with interest. Aware that by no means all of them supported him, Henry played a trump card, to bring the Church on-side. After confining Marguerite, Alais and Constance of Brittany in the castle of Devizes and Eleanor in Old Sarum,16 he rode on to Canterbury along the Pilgrims’ Way for an act of public penance at the shrine of Becket. On Saturday 12 June he dismounted at the Westgate, donned a simple woollen pilgrim’s robe and walked barefoot through the dirt streets to the cobbled precincts of the cathedral.
In the crypt, he took off the robe and knelt at the saint’s tomb, to suffer three lashes from each of the eighty monks in the community.17 Meanwhile, Bishop Gilbert Foliot was outside, preaching the king’s innocence to the assembled crowd of townspeople and pilgrims. Some of the monks involved in the flagellation had witnessed the murder and must have taken pleasure in personally punishing the kneeling monarch for polluting their cathedral with a blood crime, as a result of which services had been suspended for a whole year until the bishops of Exeter and Chester formally ‘reconciled’ the building.
After the flagellation, Henry spent the night on his knees in the crypt before departing next morning for London, exhausted by a three-day penitential fast. At the palace of Westminster he had the cuts on his feet and the welts on his back dressed while getting an update on the rebel forces in English soil. The Scots were moving south and Philip of Flanders’ force had already landed in East Anglia.18 However, the Young King’s main force was still in France, waiting out the storms. Before the night was out, a messenger burst into the king’s chamber with the news that the Scottish king had been captured and was held prisoner in the castle of Richmond in Yorkshire, his army melting away by the hour. Proclaiming that this was a miracle to reward his penance, Henry ordered all the bells of Westminster to be rung in order to waken the citizens of London with the news that God was on his side again.19 Three weeks after Henry’s return, the rebellion was over in England, its leader, the 78-year-old Duke of Norfolk Hugh Bigod having reaffirmed fealty to his king in return for a pardon. After the advance guard of the Flemish force was permitted to return to Flanders, Young Henry abandoned the idea of invasion and headed for Rouen, to support Louis’ siege of the Norman capital. Once again, his timing was off. On 8 August Henry landed at Barfleur with his Brabanters and 1,000 Welsh mercenaries, whose arrival to lift the siege was so rapid that Louis at first doubted the evidence of his own eyes.
Retreating to Paris, he advised Young Henry that he could not dip further into his nearly exhausted treasury to subsidise the princes’ ambitions and that now was the moment for them to extract the best terms from their father, who was worn out with all the travel and stress of the last eighteen months and so near the end of his resources that he had had to pawn even the bejewelled ceremonial sword used at his coronation.20 Henry agreed to a meeting with the Young King on 29 September as a way of isolating him from Richard and Geoffrey, still campaigning in Poitou and Brittany respectively. The tactic worked. Richard acted true to his nickname oc-e-no, and abandoned his supporters to their fate, riding to Montlouis near Tours on 23 or 29 September to throw himself at his father’s feet in tears. Henry raised him up and gave him the kiss of peace, after which they rode east together like the best of friends, arriving one day late for the meeting with Louis, where Prince Geoffrey and Young Henry likewise humbled themselves before their father.21
As the broker of the peace, Louis insisted that a treaty be drawn up, under which the princes and the barons who had supported them accepted Henry’s sovereignty in return for pardons and guaranteed possession of the lands and castles that had been theirs two weeks before the uprising. For the princes, it was a rewrite of Montmirail, under which Richard was awarded half the tax revenue of Poitou and two unfortified and ungarrisoned castles for his personal residences, with the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau – the dispute over which had triggered the rebellion – confirmed as given to Prince John, who was also awarded other properties on both sides of the Channel. In addition, Henry undertook to release 1,000 ransomable captives, which was many times more than the coalition had taken. Of the princes’ mother there was no mention. Henry needed to make an example to ensure his sons would think twice before defying him again and it suited the princes’ self-interest to let her accept all the blame for the rebellion.
In 1964 some amateur historians cleaning the twelfth-century chapel of Ste Radegonde at Chinon discovered a fresco hidden beneath layers of lime wash (see plates 22 and 23). The painting has been dated to immediately after the rebellion and shows a richly dressed and crowned figure identified as red-bearded Henry of Anjou making a gesture that says, I am in command here. He is leading Eleanor away to her long captivity in England. The dark-haired girl with her is Joanna, who is known to have shared the journey. She seems to be begging her parents to stop fighting. The two beardless youths riding behind are the princes Geoffrey and Richard, who is grabbing from his mother’s hand a white gyrfalcon, which was the emblem of the duchy of Aquitaine. Geoffrey is copying his father’s gesture as a sign of obedience.
That says it all. Richard and Geoffrey renewed their homage to their father; Young Henry was excused from doing this on account of his title making him theoretically equal to Henry. As for Eleanor, all that was known was that she was locked up in one of England’s grimmest castles known as Old Sarum, on a windswept hill outside Winchester, and was likely to stay there for the rest of her life.
NOTES
1. As John Calvin was later to comment
, if all the extant pieces of the alleged True Cross were gathered together, they would fill a very large ship.
2. J. Attali, Les Juifs, le monde et l’argent (Paris: Fayard, 2002), p. 197.
3. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 164.
4. Ibid, p. 161.
5. Ibid, p. 166.
6. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 2, p. 40–6.
7. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Vol 1, p. 170.
8. Jordan Fantosme, quoted in Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, p. 255.
9. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 173.
10. Abridged by the author. For the full Latin text, see Recueil, Vol 16, pp. 629–30.
11. Recueil, Vol 13, p. 158.
12. Ibid, Vol 12, p. 420.
13. Ibid, Vol 13, p. 158.
14. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 2, p. 61.
15. Recueil, Vol 13, pp. 158–9.
16. Ibid, p. 443.
17. W. Stubbs, ed., The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, Rolls Series No 73 (London: Longmans, 1879–80), Vol 1, p. 148.
18. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Vol 1, p. 194–5.
19. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 2, p. 63.
20. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 179.
21. Ibid, p. 180.
6
Death of a Prince
Henry II held his Christmas court of 1174 at Argentan in Normandy, after which he obliged his sons to accompany him on a lengthy pacification of the continental possessions to ensure they were seen by his vassals to be again under his thumb. In Poitou and Aquitaine, the castles of vassals that had remained loyal to him were strengthened and allowed to stand with garrisons sufficient to put down any further unrest; those castles reinforced by the rebels were reduced to the state in which they had been fifteen days before the outbreak of hostilities. Cities like La Rochelle that had not taken part in the uprising were rewarded with new privileges. That done, he departed for England in May with Young Henry, whose loyalty he still mistrusted.
