April Queen (34 page)

The
trobairitz
Clara d’Anduza yearned for a lover to tell her, ‘I shall always be true …

And what could be more deliciously seditious that a man on his knees, a slave to love?

Appropriately, the church onto which Eleanor looked from her apartments in the Maubergeonne Tower was consecrated to the Virgin, for what was happening in Poitiers was a rebellion against the bloody masculine business of war and the tournament and the harrying and killing of beasts with hawk and hound in favour of the subtler pleasures of life – fine clothes, good conversation, poetry, music and all the
gai saber
of Mediterranean civilisation. In a very short time Eleanor re-created a way of life essayed during her reigns in Paris and London. On the banks of Seine and Thames she had been merely a consort, and yet had introduced fashions and comforts and entertainments, in some cases with lasting effect. Here, where she had grown up to the sound of lute and laughter, she was more a queen in her own right than any other woman in the world.

A
side-issue of the meeting at Montmirail on 6 January 1169 was Louis’ persistent endeavour to reconcile Henry and Becket. Henry had agreed to their first meeting in the four years since his archbishop’s furtive departure from Sandwich in a humble rowing boat. But Becket was so obstreperous that when Henry walked out of the meeting in a fury no one blamed him; even in the arch-bishop’s own entourage everyone considered it time to make some concessions and end the long dissension. As a lord of the Church, Becket owed a duty to listen to his counsellors, but would not.
¹

Leaving the Young King with William the Marshal to keep order in Normandy, Henry rode south to reimpose his authority in Poitou and Aquitaine. The two Henrys met again at Angers in August and spent some time hunting together before travelling north to Bayeux, where papal legates tried again in vain to patch things up between the king and Becket. There was a subtext to their comings and goings: with the crown of Lombardy on hold for the moment, Henry turned his attention further south, betrothing Princess Joanna to William II,
King of the Two Sicilies. At the Hill of Martyrs, now Montmartre, Louis again tried again to reconcile king and archbishop.

The concession came from Henry’s side: on 18 November 1169 at St Germain-en-Laye, south of Paris, he restored Becket’s confiscated property in England and asked him to officiate at the coronation of Young Henry. This was not strictly necessary; since the Conquest the rival archbishops of York and Canterbury had both officiated at different coronations.

In addition to the verminous hair shirt and his daily flagellations, Becket had contracted osteomyelitis of the jaw while locked with a tooth abscess into the sewers of the monastery at Pontigny as self-imposed penance for sexual desires, and been operated on without anaesthetic by a monk known as Guillelmus Medicus to remove two splinters of bone from the jaw.
²
Whether from the pain or simply to frustrate Henry, he failed to grasp the olive branch that could have ended the dispute between Church and Crown there and then.

The Christmas court was held with Constance and Geoffrey at Nantes to emphasise to the Bretons that he really was their duke, but the festivities did little to appease Henry’s anger with Becket. Resolving to have Young Henry crowned anyway, he crossed from Barfleur to Portsmouth on 3 March 1170 in a mood so foul that he insisted on setting sail during a gale that sank the largest ship in his convoy with the loss of some 400 souls.
³

Knowing how often Henry reneged on promises, Eleanor held her Easter court of 1170 in Niort, where she summoned the chief Poitevin vassals to swear fealty to Richard.
⁴
At twelve, he was already tall and well built, schooled to speak and write Occitan and Latin fluently as well as
langue d’oïl
. Having shown prowess in riding, hunting and the use of weapons from an early age, he was in every sense a warrior-poet in the making – the first duke of Aquitaine in thirty-three years of whom his vassals could, at least to begin with, approve.

After Niort she took him to Poitiers, where he was, in accordance with comital tradition, proclaimed abbot of St Hilaire, with the archbishop of Bordeaux and the bishop of Poitiers presenting him with the lance and standard that signified his authority as count of Poitou. The ceremony ended with a huge procession in his honour, in which everyone sang the responses,
‘O princeps egregie!’
⁵
An extraordinary prince indeed… .

From there, Eleanor took her son to Limoges to be proclaimed duke of Aquitaine at a symbolic ceremony designed to seduce the volatile citizenry into accepting Richard as one of their own. Geoffroi du
Vigeois, then a monk at the abbey of St Martial, described how the bishop placed on the finger of the young duke the ring of martyred St Valérie, patron saint of the city, making Richard her symbolic bridegroom.
⁶
Despite Geoffroi’s sour comment that the Poitevins had stolen
‘O princeps egregie!’
from the liturgy of St Martial,
⁷
this heady moment for the prince must have caused his mother’s heart to swell with pride. But there was more than mere maternal emotion involved in these moves: having Richard swear fealty to Louis and formally installing him in these three important cities made it more difficult for Henry to reverse the restoration of Aquitaine to him.

Shortly afterwards Eleanor travelled north to Caen, in anticipation of the coronation of her eldest son, at which her attendance would have been normal. To spite her for securing Richard’s titles, she was not invited to the ceremony. Nor was Princess Marguerite in her husband’s entourage when Young Henry crossed the Channel on 5 June, escorted by the bishops of Sées and Bayonne. Knighted by his father soon after arriving in England, he was crowned in Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Roger of York on Sunday 14 June 1170,
⁸
a step in the grand design freeing his father for the next move,
⁹
shortly to be pre-empted by his own sons.

To counter the very real danger of an emissary from Becket crossing to England and forbidding the coronation, the Norman justiciar Richard fitz Richard of Le Hommet had been ordered to close all the Channel ports on the French side. The fish caught in this net was a cousin of the king, Bishop Roger of Worcester, who was compelled to kick his heels in Dieppe instead of preventing the coronation by the threat of excommunications as Becket had instructed him to do. Among the six bishops present at the coronation were Becket’s enemies the bishop of Salisbury and Gilbert Foliot, immediately excommunicated by the exiled primate. In Foliot’s case, this was a second anathema, the first having been absolved after he had struggled in midwinter halfway across Europe to present his petition in person to the pope.

From the moment of his coronation, Prince Henry was known to his contemporaries as Henry III or Henry the Young King, and his father was referred to as ‘the old king’ although only thirty-seven years old. Like many another fifteen-year-old born with a solid gold spoon in his mouth, once endowed with his own household and seal the Young King was often carried away with his own importance. At the coronation feast his father, in a typically informal moment, carried in the platter bearing the
plat de résistance
, a stuffed boar’s head. Young Henry made a disparaging remark which the archbishop of York tried
to smooth over by observing that it was a privilege to be served by a king, at which the arrogant Young King joked that he saw nothing wrong in the son of a count waiting on the son of a king. In a society where breeding and pedigree counted for so much it was an insult to remind his father of his comparatively lowly origin.

Another insult – this time to the house of Capet – was the exclusion of Princess Marguerite from the ceremony. At a meeting arranged by him and Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen with Becket on 22 July at Fréteval, Henry agreed to have her crowned as soon as he returned to England and went as far as he could to build a bridge for the exile’s return, admitting that the coronation had been a mistake and asking Becket to re-crown Young Henry – this time with Marguerite – in England.

In an additional effort to prevent his erstwhile bosom friend from persuading the pope to place all England under interdict, Henry offered to go on crusade as a penance for his behaviour
¹⁰
and to entrust Young Henry and the country to Becket as regent during his absence. What more could he do? The contentious Constitutions of Clarendon were not mentioned. Becket agreed to return, but Henry refused him the kiss of peace, saying that he would get that once back in England.

Two weeks later, on 10 August, Henry was ill in Domfront with a high fever, possibly malaria. Rumours of his imminent death ran throughout Christendom after he dictated a last will and testament confirming the division of power as at Montmirail.
¹¹
Nearly two months passed before he could celebrate his recovery by a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to the shrine at Rocamadour in Quercy.
¹²
Grateful to be still alive, Henry was in a less rancorous mood than for a long time when he and Eleanor discussed betrothing Princess Eleanor to Alfonso, the fourteen-year-old king of Castile, because his manoeuvring with Saxony, Lombardy and Sicily had so alienated the German Emperor that her betrothal to his son had been broken off.

In October, Becket had another meeting with Henry at Chaumont near Amboise before deciding to return to Canterbury under safe conduct. In pain at a level that blocks rational thought, he was issuing letters of excommunication right up to 30 November, the day before he landed at Sandwich. On 2 December he was back at Canterbury, heavily in debt but bringing with him a library of books and scrolls weighing half a ton and a whole shipload of wine that was hijacked by ill-wishers somewhere between the coast and Canterbury. The exile’s return made him more intractable than before. His continuing provocations of Henry included further excommunications of royal officers and a refusal to rescind his excommunication of the English bishops.

Summoned like any other vassal to Henry’s Christmas court of 1170 at Bures to account for her stewardship of the duchy, Eleanor was present when Foliot and two other excommunicated prelates protested about Becket’s continuing excesses. Young Henry was holding his own Christmas court at Winchester, but the other princes and Joanna were all at Bures. Not unnaturally, Henry was furious to hear that Becket was still defying him, despite all the concessions made. Such was his anger that his chamberlain Ranulf de Broc
¹³
incited four household knights – Hugh de Morville, who had been an itinerant justice in the north of England, Reginald fitz Urse, Richard de Brito and William de Tracy, a former chancellor of Becket – to travel to England and rid the king of his most troublesome subject.

After the four knights arrived in Canterbury with obviously murderous intent, Becket was accused by his secretary John of Salisbury of having brought the situation upon himself. An archbishop owed a duty to listen to his advisers in council just as a baron listened to the advice his vassals were required to give. In this Becket was constantly remiss, according to his own secretary.
¹⁴
When it became clear that his master was set on a martyr’s death, John pointed out that he and the other members of the archie-piscopal household were sinners, not yet ready to meet their Maker. He saw no one else present who
wanted
to die.
¹⁵

In that eyewitness account may lie the key to Becket’s intransigent provocations. Since he was never reported to have any other sexual inclinations, he may have been a pathological masochist who, once launched on the progression from hair shirt to daily floggings, could not stop escalating the doses of pain until the final overdose.