Henry would have preferred a more business-like conversation. It was absurd to pretend that two people meeting for the first time were already deeply in love, and in his private opinion anything the lady had suffered she had richly earned. She had accompanied King Louis on his futile Crusade, which was one reason why Edessa was still in infidel hands; if half the stories of her adventures in Outremer were true she was lucky to have a head on her shoulders. It is the duty of any King to take vengeance on a faithless Queen, lest the succession to his Kingdom, that sacred trust, should go astray. Louis had merely got rid of her by a friendly annulment, and she had nothing to complain of. But since she had begun the interview on a note of high chivalry he replied in the same vein.
‘My lady, your wrongs would rouse the blood of any true knight. When I knew you sought my aid I came as swiftly as horse could bear me. But if I am to protect you from your enemies it would be more seemly if you gave me the right to be with you day and night. This is a brief wooing, but you already know that every man who is admitted to your presence seeks to possess you. I am your peer in blood, and free to marry. I beg you to accept my sword as your defence, and my company to relieve your loneliness.’
Whew, he had brought that out pretty smoothly, considering that he had come to this meeting prepared to discuss the harbour dues of Bordeaux and the obligation of Norman vassals to fight on the Pyrenees. It was unfortunate that he had just noticed a gaping seam in his left shoe, and now could not take his eyes off it. She would think him a boor who never bothered to dress properly. But her next speech should settle the matter, and then they could discuss arrangements for the wedding.
Eleanor rose from her cushioned chair, in a graceful rippling motion that brought out all the curves of her body. She made to clasp the young man in her arms, but he evaded the embrace by sinking to his knees.
‘My true knight,’ she murmured. ‘With your sword to defend me I need fear no foe. As a helpless heiress I live in daily dread that some ruffian will carry me off and force me. Let us be wed as soon as the clerks can arrange it. Then I shall sleep in safety, and with a stout young hero. We shall be merry in Aquitaine, and you can help me to judge the suits my vassals bring before me.’
‘I am the happiest of men,’ mumbled Henry, who had bumped his nose on her jewelled girdle as he knelt. ‘But it would be better if you came with me to Normandy. I shall commission a deputy to rule Aquitaine in your name.’
‘I am Duchess of Aquitaine. If a deputy is commissioned it is I who should commission him.’
‘But unless you have a husband to protect you, and soon, King Louis will rule Aquitaine as firmly as he rules Paris.’
‘Of course, my lord. After we are married these things will arrange themselves. I shall summon my clerks immediately, to prepare the marriage-contract. I must not remain an unprotected lady for a day longer than necessary.’
‘No day will be too soon for me, my gracious lady and Duchess. I suppose the ecclesiastical court at Beaugency gave you a document to prove your annulment? I should like my clerks to glance through it, just to be sure that all is in order before we exchange our vows.’
‘You think of everything, my lord,’ answered Eleanor, in a practical voice from which the tone of coaxing was notably absent. ‘They say all Normans are lawyers born. Not every suitor would ask for legal documents at such a time.’
‘I am a man of business. On one side I am descended from a tanner, and on the other from the Devil,’ said Henry stiffly. ‘Nevertheless I am a peer of France, and my mother was held worthy to wed an Emperor, as my grandfather was held worthy to be King of Jerusalem. Since consanguinity bars you from the King of France even the Duchess of Aquitaine could not find a more fitting husband.’
‘That I knew before I saw you, my lord. Now that you have agreed, from the most disinterested sentiment of chivalry, to marry a helpless ill-used lady, there is no need for this interview to be continued in private. Let us summon our clerks to arrange dower and settlement.’
On a pleasant May morning the Duke of Normandy married the Duchess of Aquitaine. It was a match that made Henry more powerful than the King of France, and furnished his bed with a celebrated beauty into the bargain. Henry had never expected to marry for love. He should count himself lucky that his wife was pleasing in body and vigorous in mind; for such an heiress would have been worth marrying if she had been lame and halfwitted. But it might have been easier if Eleanor had been a less vivid personality. She had been brought up by a doting father to know herself a great ruler; and her natural independence had been strengthened by the freedom she had won as the strong-willed Queen of the pious King of France. Louis was not a milksop; milksops do not go on Crusade or conduct patient unremitting war to sap the independence of their great feudatories. But he was so chaste as to appear indifferent even to the licit pleasures of married love. It had taken the personal intervention of the Pope, himself closing the curtains of the marriage-bed while uttering exhortations which came oddly from a celibate, to make Louis fulfil the duties of a husband. Perhaps a woman like Eleanor could not be expected to cleave to such a partner.
On the honeymoon Henry heard Eleanor’s version of her chequered first marriage. The account of their stay in Rome, returning from the Crusade, was made the funniest part of the story. ‘… and the result of all these efforts was only another daughter! Pope Eugenius is a well-meaning old darling, but perhaps there was a flaw in his election. I can’t believe that the true successor to St. Peter, with all the plenitude of power he enjoys, would have presided over a mating that brought forth a mere female. Any jongleur would give the story a better ending. France should now have a male heir born with all his teeth and fit to strangle serpents in his cradle. To think that Charlemagne and Roland were conceived at home, in the ordinary course of business as you might say; and this child, the fruit of a night in Rome with God’s Vicar bending over the bed, turns out a girl.’
‘But you and I will produce strong sons, worthy children of the Devil and the tanner. They will fight like Normans, but their ferocity will be guided by the intelligence of Languedoc. Our sons will be so mighty, whether for good or evil, that they will be alive in the minds of poets as long as the world lasts.’
At this time Henry was very happy, making love to a passionate southern princess in the bloom of her ripe beauty. It was unfortunate that she seemed so determined to keep the government of Aquitaine in her own hands, when feudal custom made it the responsibility of her husband. But these were early days; soon he would persuade her to see reason.
In the meantime there was a French invasion to be repelled; for Louis, though glad to be rid of his wife, was angry that her second marriage had created such a concentration of power on his western border. But the war offered a sensible excuse for combining the administration of the two Duchies, and when it was over Aquitaine would see the need to help Normandy in a second conquest of England. Until he had won the whole of his inheritance Henry would not rest.
The snow had turned to rain, which was if anything more unpleasant. There had been frost a few days ago, and half the destriers were coughing; a soaking would kill them as they stood at the picket-ropes. The sun had not been seen for a week, and it was difficult to measure time; but the gloom of the January day was thickening, and lucky men far away, under the shelter of roofs and walls, would be beginning to think of supper.
A numbed sergeant sat hunched on the river bank, his head drawn into his shoulders; over his rusty mail he wore a truss of straw, fixed like thatch to keep off the rain; but he had been wet through five minutes after he had taken post. His head was bent so low that an army might have paraded unnoticed in the next field, but what he watched was the thick brown flood of Avon at his feet. Reluctantly he rose, noting with disgust that rainwater at once made a puddle of the dry patch where he had been sitting; but the twig he had placed by the water’s edge had just been swept away by the current, and it was his duty to report.
Splashing through the
slippery grass with the clumsy tread of a horseman, he reached the rag of sacking stuck on spearpoints which marked the bivouac of his captain. Several drenched straw-covered figures sat under it, too miserable to raise their heads at his approach; he addressed the group at large.
‘Send to tell the Duke that the river is still rising; half a hand, by the marker I put in when I took post. We shall have to shift the horse-lines. By morning the stream will be ready to burst its banks.’
‘You need not send far to tell the Duke. Here I am. Now show me this flood. Do you know about rivers? What part of the world do you come from?’
The sodden warrior who had risen to answer him looked no better dressed or better fed than the mercenary sergeants round him. But the man immediately recognized his lord. There was no mistaking that broad-shouldered figure when it moved into its characteristic jerky action. The pink-and-white face, jaw and cheeks veiled by a thin scrub of sandy hair, looked younger than Henry’s nineteen years; but the square freckled hands, with their thick distorted fingernails, might have belonged to a middle-aged craftsman. Obviously, when there was no one to fight and nowhere to ride, one might expect to find the Duke of Normandy plodding on foot round his outposts. The sergeant felt glad that under his lord’s eye he had shown himself alert.
‘I serve among the Brabançons, my lord,’ he answered. ‘But I myself am a Fleming, Robert of Courtrai. The river Dyle drove me from my holding and made me a routier. I have seen mighty floods many times in my life.’
‘Then walk with me by the river bank. I must be sure Stephen’s men cannot cross to-night. If there is any doubt we must stand to arms, but perhaps this rain will give us a night’s rest. Tell me the truth.’ His hand on the sergeant’s shoulder could be felt through the links of his mail. ‘You want a night in blankets, like every other mercenary. If you tell me the river is impassable and I find to-morrow that even one man has got across, I shall gut you like a salmon, with my own knife.’
The Fleming squinted wisely up and down the flooded Avon.
‘There’s a ford just here, my lord, as you can see from the tracks. It’s seldom used, probably a local short cut. Look, horses cross, but never a waggon; so it must be deep at the best of times. No one would chance it with the river raging like this. There’s another crossing half a mile upstream. I can’t be certain of that until I see it close.’
They called for horses, and rode by the water. Presently Robert pointed out a shelving margin, where deep ruts were roughly filled with stones. ‘That’s a waggon-ford, my lord, where the wheels have scored the bank. There’s no road to it. Probably one man holds land on both banks, and sometimes he will take his team across. Oxen too, I see, and they flinch from what a horse will face. At a pinch I might cross here even in this weather, on a good horse and without my mail. But no man could cross armed. We may sleep sound tonight.’
‘It can be crossed, you say? Then we shall cross it. Do you want to make your fortune, Robert of Courtrai? Then you will strip off your mail, and choose any horse in the army except my own destrier. You can keep him afterwards. You and I will ride together unarmed through the flood. We shall take a rope, and fix it to a tree on the far side. Our foot will throw in fascines of brushwood to make a sound bottom. With the rope and the fascines men can cross, even armed. That’s it. By dawn to-morrow we shall be before Malmesbury, and you will hold richer land in England than the Dyle took from you in Flanders. Or of course we may be drowned. But it’s by risking death every day that we soldiers earn our suppers.’
The sergeant grinned with delight. This was what made soldiering the best of trades, in spite of the low pay. A few hours of risky work and he would be set up for life. He was glad that his band had come ashore in Devon, and so enlisted in the Angevin cause; but for an easterly wind they would have made the Solent to join the army of King Stephen. He liked this gallant young lord, and looked forward to a life as his landholding vassal.
Unfortunately he was drowned instead, and Duke Henry had a very narrow escape. It proved impossible to ford the flooded Avon, and the army remained in the same water-logged camp for several days, peering through the mist at the castle of Malmesbury where King Stephen and his forces lay waiting battle.
But the effort to force a crossing kept the Angevins interested and keen, while Stephen’s men sat about in the rain with nothing to do. When at last the rain ceased and the river subsided Henry forded an unguarded stream to find Malmesbury lightly garrisoned and willing to surrender at the first summons.
King Stephen’s army had gone home to get out of the wet. It was made up of English knights reluctantly performing their feudal duty, who knew that if they all deserted in a body the King could not punish them; and there was a general feeling that soon King Stephen would be unable to enforce his will even on individuals. Latterly he had captured some Angevin castles, but the war still dragged on without an end in sight; and the whole Church now backed Duke Henry, from the Pope in Rome, who had openly forbidden the crowning of Stephen’s heir, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who must officially obey the crowned King but could find ways of letting his sentiments be known. In any civil war public opinion is the deciding factor, and public opinion had declared against Stephen, the enemy of the Church.
In high spirits Duke Henry’s army rode eastward until they reached the faithful castle of Wallingford, for many years the furthest Angevin outpost. They drove back the besiegers to their counter-fortress at Crowmarsh on the opposite bank of the Thames. The faithful castle had been at the extremity of endurance, and there was great rejoicing when the leaders of the relieving army were feasted in its hall. The Angevins were not only encouraged to find themselves winning at long last; their fervour for the cause was also increased by the lucky accident that the castellan of Wallingford, Brian fitzCount, was perhaps the only disinterested and chivalrous leader who had fought on either side through the treasons and manoeuvres of the long sordid struggle. Ever since, fifteen years ago, he had sworn homage to the Empress, he had upheld her cause, seeing his lands ravaged to the last haystack without heeding the tempting offers of King Stephen.
The cause for which the lord Brian had given everything seemed the more noble in consequence. The old game in which powerful magnates put themselves up for auction, or supported the weaker claimant to keep the war alive – that old game was now outmoded. When they heard that King Stephen was marching on Wallingford the Angevins faced the impending battle with high hearts.
There was no battle. Stephen’s army would not fight, and the magnates of both parties arranged a truce. Obviously the war was ended at last, and King Stephen was the loser.
There was no military reason for this sudden change of fortune. It had come about because the Angevins had a new leader, a red-haired, red-faced boy of twenty, with freckles and bitten fingernails; he dressed shabbily and raved like a lunatic whenever he lost his temper, which was very often; and any knight who had talked with him for half an hour would follow him through fire and water.
During that summer Henry rode through the Midlands, receiving the homage of doubtful magnates and seeing the leopards of Anjou hoisted on the keeps of strong castles before his besieging army had time to unsaddle. It seemed that God Himself intervened to end the war, by removing irreconcilable contestants. Matilda of Boulogne, Stephen’s Queen and the best man in her party, died in her bed; the aged King David of Scots was dead at last; the double-dealing Count of Chester was sick to death and would never ride again. That gave the parties something to bargain with, for King David and Count Ranulf had accumulated claims to half the fiefs in England. Then Count Eustace, Stephen’s heir, was struck down by disease as he ravaged the monasteries of the fens. King Stephen was old and sick and lonely. When the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested another peace conference at Winchester, that ill-omened site, he agreed to attend.
The Winchester Conference of November 1153 had been arranged by the Church. It was to be held in the castle of the Bishop, who was brother to King
Stephen and cousin to Duke Henry, but it had been summoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Archbishop Theobald was naturally anxious that it should open smoothly. On the feast of St. Martin, soldier and Bishop, he said Mass with special fervour and at breakfast afterwards ran over the arrangements with his most trusted assistant, the new archdeacon of Canterbury.
‘These men have been fighting one another for fifteen years, and it will be a great thing if we can start them talking peaceably together in one hall. What I fear is that in the first half hour someone will insult someone else, and then one side will sweep out in a huff. After that we may never get them talking again. You have arranged that they shall enter separately?’
‘Yes, my lord. King Stephen will be seated on his throne among his supporters, when Duke Henry and the Angevins come in by the main door; it will be opened by the deputy-constable as a herald cries ‘Make way for the Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine‘. The King will then rise from his throne and advance to meet the Duke. Then both parties seat themselves on benches, with a long table between; and the throne on the dais will remain empty.’
‘You yourself arranged these details, Master Thomas? You have an instinct for ceremonial.’
‘I was greatly assisted, my lord, by Master John of Salisbury, who is familiar with the protocol of the papal Curia.’
‘Of course, of course. But my dear John would never have won agreement from all these hot-tempered magnates. You deserve our thanks. That is, if you are certain both sides will abide by their agreements. Are you sure Duke Henry won’t change his mind at the last minute?’
‘No one can be sure of that. They say the young man has the temper of a devil. But he has given his word that he will do what has been laid down for him, and by public repute he is a knight who keeps his word of honour. I was careful to negotiate only with his clerks, never meeting him myself; in that way I could press a point without rousing his famous wrath. And by this procedure we avoid the most dangerous crux. The high and puissant prince Stephen of Blois sits on a throne, and I expect he will wear a crown. But no herald proclaims him publicly as King of England. That is the one condition on which Duke Henry insisted.’
God and My Right Page 10
