April Queen (39 page)

Henry then sent Prince Geoffrey into Aquitaine to summon the barons to witness Richard’s very reluctant delayed act of homage to Young Henry on 1 January 1183. Geoffrey once remarked that the Plantagenets had from earliest times pitted brother against brother and son against father.
¹⁷
As usual, he was playing two games, having been clandestinely charged by the Young King to incite Richard’s many enemies in the duchy, of whom Bertran furnished a list, to rebel against their lawful duke.

By late February Young Henry was in Limoges, the heartland of the conspiracy which was about to be joined by the duke of Burgundy and 500 knights sent by the count of Champagne. Dispatched to Paris for her own safety and to beg Philip for his support, Marguerite was unable to get a personal commitment from her half-brother, who nevertheless announced that he would not prevent any vassal taking sides against Richard.
¹⁸

There can have been few conspiracies betrayed by a poem: secrecy was blown to the four winds when Bertran deliberately included the names of the main conspirators in a
sirventès
and then made sure it reached Henry’s ears as a way of ensuring they could not retract. Travelling light, he took the road for Limoges with a small force of trusted mercenaries,
¹⁹
determined to break the Young King’s conspiracy before it gathered more support. Outside the city he was attacked by a mob of armed citizens and only saved from death by an Englishman who recognised the king’s banner. His
cotte
of chain-mail pierced by a sword thrust that came within an inch of drawing blood – some said by an arrow fired at extreme range from the city wall that lodged in the cloak after being stopped by the mail – Henry retired to the castle of Aixe.
²⁰

Young Henry arrived fully armed that evening to plead that the townspeople had not known whom they were attacking. It was a feeble excuse for an act of the highest treason, but Henry invited him to dine in the hope of talking him out of this latest foolishness. Determined on a final trial of strength,
²¹
the Young King refused. Henry tried to parley again next day but was almost wounded a second time, after which he remained in the castle of Aixe until Richard arrived with reinforcements, having ridden two days and two nights without rest. On the way, he missed capturing a key rebel, his vassal Count Aymar of Limoges, only because his horses were too exhausted to give pursuit.

Besieging the castle of Gorre with Aymar was a band of mercenaries who were less lucky. Many of those taken prisoner were thrown with their arms bound into the River Vienne; others were executed by the sword; about eighty were blinded and released in a countryside where everyone was their enemy
²²
– all this on Richard’s personal orders.

Arriving at Aixe, Richard found himself in a bizarre triangle of power with his father and his half-brother, Geoffrey the Bastard. Together they besieged Limoges where Young Henry was in financial difficulties, his allowance having ceased at the outbreak of hostilities. He borrowed from the citizens to pay his mercenaries and those sent by Philip before plundering churches of their treasures, covering this infringement of the Peace of God by giving receipts for the loot. Other bands under Prince Geoffrey pillaged St Martin in Brive and held some of the monks to ransom. In Henry’s favourite monastery at Grandmont, the rebels hacked to pieces the altar vessels and distributed them as bullion. Only at Uzerche did the wily abbot outwit the rapacious prince by receiving him with such pomp and ceremony and protestations of respect that Young Henry was too embarrassed to steal the treasure.

After several months of this murderous free-for-all, in which the contingents from Champagne and Burgundy only added to the confusion and even the count of Toulouse changed sides to join the rebels, the end was in sight when Young Henry fell ill after looting the shrine of Rocamadour.
²³
A few days later, after confessing his sins, receiving absolution and taking communion, he lay dying in the house of one Etienne Fabri in the town of Martel in Périgord.

When the news reached Henry, he was dissuaded from riding to Martel by Richard’s reminder that the Young King had already received the last rites six years before and recovered. Should the king be killed en route by Young Henry’s mercenaries under their leaders Sancho and Curburan,
²⁴
the crown would pass straightaway to their master. Instead, Count Rotrou of La Perche and the bishop of Agen were sent, bearing the king’s ring as a token of goodwill.
²⁵

In Martel the dying prince dictated a letter for his father, begging his mercy on Eleanor after her ten-year imprisonment, asking him to provide an acceptable pension for the widow Marguerite and to pardon Count Aymar of Limoges and the other rebels.
²⁶
He also asked that the many thefts of Church property be made good and ended with instructions for the disposal of his mortal remains. Eyes, brain and entrails were to be buried beside the plot reserved for Henry’s grave at Grandmont, but the rest of his body was to be interred beside the tombs of the dukes of
Normandy in Rouen Cathedral. After receiving the
viaticum
from the bishop of Agen, he expired two years short of his thirtieth birthday with a cross on his chest, begging his friend William the Marshal to take it on crusade to the Holy Sepulchre.
²⁷
This, William swore to do.

The funeral cortège was a sorry sight. Young Henry having died in debt on all sides, a valuable destrier had to be sold to buy food en route and at least one of the prince’s household had to pawn his shoes to buy breakfast.
²⁸
At Uzerche, where the abbot provided bed and spartan board, himself paying for the candles at a service for the salvation of the departed soul, the collection among the dead prince’s entourage amounted to twelve pence, instantly pocketed by his chaplain for food.

As the news spread, the fighting stopped. Knights, men-at-arms and mercenaries made their ways home, as did the duke of Burgundy and the count of Toulouse. The cortège progressed slowly westwards towards Limoges, Young Henry’s fine friends melting away one by one, none wanting to be present when the king set eyes on the corpse of his favourite son. Finally only a few servants remained, led by the ever-faithful William the Marshal.

In the hot midsummer weather putrefaction had already set in. On arrival at Grandmont, the viscera were immediately removed and buried on the spot. Papal legates were present, bearing letters ordering a truce on pain of excommunication and interdict that were now superfluous. Before the funeral service could begin, the bishop of Limoges objected that Young Henry’s excommunication for pillaging the monastery was still in force. He agreed to lift it only after the prior of Grandmont had undertaken to obtain restitution in full from the king.

Embalmed in salt and aromatic herbs, the corpse was wrapped in a white winding sheet, itself enveloped in a leather tube covered by a green cloth. The eulogies evoked the deceased’s qualities of generosity and statesmanship, yet the chroniclers could not fail to observe that to die so soon after looting shrines, churches and monasteries was clearly divine retribution. Eleanor’s second-born son left behind only the reputation of a playboy spendthrift who had squandered enormous sums on the tournament.

The degree of his destitution became apparent when Henry ordered William to escort the body to Rouen for burial and the Marshal explained that he was unable to obey, having himself been mortgaged by the Young King to Sancho, together with his horse, weapons and armour for 100 marks – a practice Henry had made illegal five years earlier. Redeeming the debt, Henry also gave William horses and funds
for the pilgrimage to Jerusalem he had sworn to make for the good of Young Henry’s soul.
²⁹
But the body never reached Rouen, being kidnapped by the citizens of Le Mans on the way, so that it could be buried in their cathedral.

It was now the turn of Bertran de Born to pay for his role in the conspiracy. Surrendering the castle of Hautefort to Richard, he saw it given to his brother Constantin, from whom he had obtained it in the first place by trickery, endorsed by Richard before he went over to the Young King’s cause. Sent under heavy escort to Henry for justice, he pleaded the slender extenuation that it would have been disloyal of him to surrender before his own overlord Viscount Aymar had laid down his arms.

What saved his life was not that argument but a
planh
or lament for the Young King that Bertran had hastily composed as an insurance policy during the siege of his castle. The grieving father was moved to tears by it:

Pardoned, Bertran offered to take up arms against his recent confederates, and swore to do homage for Hautefort to Richard despite having previously maintained that it was in allodium, free of feudal obligation.
³⁰
Restored as co-seigneur with his brother, Bertran eventually sought to atone for all the mischief and misery he had caused by taking vows and dying a monk in the Cistercian abbey of Dalon. A hundred years later he was in the eighth circle of hell in Dante’s
Inferno
, carrying his severed head before him like a lantern and confessing what sin had earned this fate. ‘Like the biblical Achitophel who set Absolom against David,’ he says, ‘I set a son against his father.’
³¹

The news from Martel reached Eleanor officially through Henry’s messenger Thomas Agnell, archdeacon of Wells. He found her under
renewed strict guard at Old Sarum – a precaution ordered at the outbreak of the recent rebellion. Rumours of the Young King’s death had crossed the Channel before the worthy archdeacon, but it suited her to claim that she had been told of it in a vision. Of her sixty-one years she had spent eleven as prisoner of her two husbands. Her eldest son was dead, but he had always been Henry’s favourite and not hers, so what grief she felt was tempered by the knowledge that Richard was now heir to the throne of England. With Henry’s increasingly poor health, the gamble she had taken at the end of the great rebellion of 1173–4 was within a heartbeat of being won.

A
n even more radical improvement in Eleanor’s situation came when King Philip rightly insisted on the return of his widowed half-sister’s dowry, in particular the three Vexin castles.

No one can have been more surprised than Eleanor when Henry declared blandly that this was impossible because Marguerite’s dowry had passed to the captive queen in 1179, in compensation for her birthright passing to Richard. As ‘proof’ of this, she was brought from England in October under close escort
¹
to take possession of Gisors in particular, spending six months in Normandy with her daughter Matilda of Saxony as companion. This was not exactly freedom, but conditions were radically better than she had known since first being locked up in Old Sarum.

Philip was playing a long game. At a meeting on 6 December 1183 in the shadow of the castle where she was living out this fiction he shelved his first demand in return for an annual pension to Marguerite of 2,750 pounds Angevin, payable in Paris, where she was living as his protégée. No abstemious monk
manqué
like his father, Philip liked to eat and live well, to dress fashionably and
enjoy amusing company, but he was as persistent in negotiation and as swift in warfare as Henry. Shortly after coming to the throne he changed the title of the French monarch from king of the Franks to king of France.
²
It was an important difference. From the beginning of his reign, those who followed the fortunes of kings were prophesying that he would reverse the ascendance of the Angevin dynasty over the house of Capet, as indeed proved the case.