April Queen (37 page)

Retreating to Paris, he advised Young Henry that he could not dip further into his treasury to subsidise the princes’ ambitions and that now was the moment for them to extract the best terms from their father, 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 ceremonial sword used at his coronation.
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Henry welcomed the heralds’ approaches and agreed to a meeting with the Young King on 29 September as a way of isolating Richard and Geoffrey, still campaigning in Poitou and Brittany respectively. The tactic worked. Richard acted true to his nickname, abandoned all
the castles he had taken and left his supporters to their fate as he rode to Montlouis near Tours on 23 or 29 September to throw himself at his father’s feet in tears. Henry raised him and gave him the kiss of peace, after which they rode east together and arrived one day late for the meeting with Louis, where Prince Geoffrey and Young Henry likewise humbled themselves before their father.
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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 they were to be pardoned 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.
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Young Henry was to have a generous annual stipend of 15,000 pounds Angevin, plus two castles in Normandy to call his own. Richard was given half the taxes of Poitou and two unfortified and ungarrisoned castles for his residences. Geoffrey was given half the revenues of Brittany and the promise of all of them upon his marriage to Constance. The three castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau, which had triggered the rebellion, were to remain with seven-year-old John, who was also awarded other properties on both sides of the Channel.

In addition, Henry undertook to release 1,000 of his ransomable captives, many times more than the other side had taken. The exceptions to this amnesty were some VIP prisoners detained in the castle of Falaise, among them the king of Scotland and the counts of Leicester and Chester.

Of Eleanor there was no mention in the treaty. She had inflamed the princely arrogance of her sons, but it was not she who had given them grounds to rebel. However, Henry needed a victim of whom to make an example so that they would think twice before defying him again. It suited the princes’ slyness to let her accept all the blame.

In 1964 some amateur historians cleaning the twelfth-century chapel of St Radegonde near Chinon discovered a fresco hidden beneath layers of limewash (see plates 16, 17, 18, 19). The painting, dated to within a few years of the rebellion, shows a richly dressed and crowned figure identified as red-bearded Henry of Anjou making a gesture that says, I am in command. He is leading Eleanor away to her long captivity in England after the failed rebellion. The dark-haired young woman with her is Joanna, who is known to have shared the journey. She seems to be begging her parents to stop their fighting. The two beardless youths are Richard and Geoffrey, a year his junior. Eleanor is bidding farewell to Richard after giving him
a white gyrfalcon, symbolic of the duchy. Geoffrey is copying his father’s gesture as a sign of obedience.

That says it all. Richard and Geoffrey renewed their homage to the king; Young Henry was excused on account of his title being equal to Henry’s.
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As to Eleanor, all that was known – except by Henry and a trusted few – was that she was locked up near Salisbury in one of England’s grimmest castles known as Old Sarum, and likely to stay so for the rest of her life.

J
ust north of Salisbury’s city limits, one of Salisbury Plain’s many Iron Age hill-forts dominates the landscape for miles around. The entire hill has been remodelled by pick and spade; its concentric rings of ditches and earthen ramparts are not worn soft with time, but still crisp. Pre-Roman hill-fort, it became a Romano-British
oppidum
, then a well-defended Saxon administrative and trading centre which was in turn refortified after the Conquest by William I, who considered it secure enough to site a mint there (plate 22).

The space within the outer ditch and rampart was the first site of Sarum or Salisbury. The houses have all disappeared but the foundations of the cathedral show up chalky white in the thin turf. Roughly in the centre of the levelled area, an inner circular rampart and ditch enclose a steep mound, on the flattened top of which stand the ruins of an eleventh-century castle built by a bishop named Roger for King Henry I. Quite a character, the bishop had in his mistress, Matilda of Ramsbury, as tough a military commander as they came. When besieged in another of her lover’s castles at Devizes,
she refused to surrender until the attackers paraded in front of the drawbridge with a noose around his neck a captive who happened to be her son by Bishop Roger.

Eleanor’s heart must have sunk on arriving at Old Sarum with the knowledge that this grim fortress was to be her prison. Rescue was out of the question. An assailant had to climb up the hill, scale or breach the outer parapet, cross a deep ditch and break through a high parados surmounted by a formidable palisade. Having got that far, he had to cross 200 yards of flat killing ground devoid of cover before coming to the inner defences: another rampart, deep ditch and steep earth glacis surrounding the base of the castle walls. The sole gateway was reached by a drawbridge and protected by a portcullis.

So exposed is the position of Old Sarum that five days after the inauguration of the cathedral, which had taken fourteen years to build, the roof blew off in a gale, causing considerable damage to the whole structure. Standing on the motte or mound, the castle walls reached as high as the cathedral roof, and were subject to the same wind loading. The keep that was the key feature of Norman castles was higher still, to give sentries on the top visibility for miles in all directions. Although it was the safest part of the castle for storing gold or incarcerating hostages, the original royal apartments in it were too cold and miserable to be lived in from choice, even by Norman standards.

Accordingly, in the 1130s Bishop Roger built a small palace within the courtyard, where the high walls afforded some protection from the elements. Its ground-floor rooms were filled with earth as a defence against battering rams, should an enemy ever penetrate into the courtyard. Usually, for defensive reasons, access to a keep was on the first floor. The entrance to the palace was on the second floor, reached by an external stone staircase. On that level was a hall and a solar or smaller room with
garderobe
or latrine emptying into a cesspit. From here a narrow staircase inside the thickness of the walls was the only means of reaching the gloomy first-floor apartments.

In the whole of England Henry could not have chosen a more secure prison for Eleanor. Her accommodation had the advantage of being less cold and windy than the keep, but offered no view of the outside world. The horizons of the woman who had seen Rome, Constantinople and the Holy Land had shrunk to a cobbled courtyard in which she could take at most seventy paces in a straight line before being brought up short by a high stone wall, from the walkway of which sentries stared down at her. For most of her incarceration there, her prison was shared only by a small detachment of guards. Their first
commander, under Henry’s justiciar Ranulf de Glanville, was Robert Maudit by name – although that may not have been his real surname, for it means ‘accursed’.

Eleanor’s world for much of the next decade and a half was to be this grey, grim stone cage, open only to the sky. In a repetition of her lost year in the Holy Land, she ceased to exist. Her retinue was reduced to one maid, Amaria. Even her wardrobe had dwindled to the minimum, the Pipe Rolls indicating her need for something fitting to wear when occasionally summoned to court. One entry is for two scarlet cloaks and two capes and two grey furs and one embroidered bed furnishing ‘for the use of the Queen and her maid’, which sounds as though Eleanor and her sole retainer had to share a bed. The size of the solar in the palace makes that likely in any case. An anonymous Poitevin poet evoked her fate:

When Henry needed a lady to grace his public events, there was always the Young Queen, whose allowance was accordingly increased. Across the Channel in France, he kept Richard and Geoffrey as puppet-rulers, each dependent on his father’s purse. In Aquitaine, as a way of demonstrating his loyalty to the hand that paid him, the prince who would become England’s hero-king was enthusiastically persecuting barons who had supported the rebellion, razing their castles to the ground and having salt strewn over their lands to render them uncultivable. For the moment, Henry dared not trust the Young King out of his sight in case another coterie had it in mind to place him on the throne prematurely.

All three of the older princes were therefore summoned to the Easter court of 1176 when ‘the old king’ talked openly about divorcing Eleanor, for which purpose he had been negotiating with the papal legate Cardinal Uguccione or Huguezon for the last six months.
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Grounds for dissolution were simple to find: treason, plus consanguinity closer than had been the case with Louis.
First, however, Henry insisted Eleanor renounce all her titles and retire from the world, since otherwise he would have been repeating what Louis still bemoaned as the greatest error of his rule.

It was therefore up to the good cardinal to talk the queen of England into becoming abbess of Fontevraud.
²
This was a suitable job for a rejected queen of fifty-three, even if she was not yet a widow, and the abbey’s position inside the county of Anjou gave Henry confidence that she would behave herself there.
³

The only problem was that Eleanor refused. Over my dead body, was the gist of her reply to king and cardinal alike. Henry might lock her up and deprive her of all her privileges and even money for clothes, but she was determined not to give up the two trumps she still held. One was the argument that as duchess of Aquitaine she was the direct vassal of the king of France, who would never consent to her renunciation. The other was her knowledge that Henry wanted to marry again. There was talk of him wedding Richard’s fiancée Princess Alais, who was his current mistress, in order to father a new brood that would enable him to disinherit her sons. Frustrating this plan seemed to her the only way of regaining their support.

Henry, however, was confident of getting his way in the end by keeping Eleanor in Old Sarum and a series of other cities and fortresses
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under conditions which would make even the prospect of abdicating and spending the rest of her life in a convent seem attractive. In his game of cat and mouse, from time to time she was moved in the custody of high officials from Salisbury to Winchester, Ludgershall and elsewhere.

Young Henry, forever chafing at the bit, finally escaped to France on pretence of making pilgrimage to Compostela.
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Landing at Barfleur with Marguerite at Easter 1176, he left her in Paris at her father’s court, where Louis provided horses and armour to enable him to fill his empty pockets in the Flemish tournaments with William the Marshal’s help. The costs of this regal indulgence, including reparations for damage to people, dwellings and crops, staggered Louis’ advisers.
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The season ending on Midsummer Day, Young Henry rode south to Aquitaine, where Richard was campaigning against his vassals the count of Angoulême and Viscount Aymar of Limoges, both sides manoeuvring large forces of mercenaries across the tortured landscape of south-west France. The jealousy and mutual mistrust of the princes preventing them spending long together, the Young King installed himself in Eleanor’s former quarters at Poitiers where, as was his wont, he charmed the barons now disenchanted with Richard.