April Queen (41 page)

And so it went on: skirmishing, revenge, campaigns, sieges, retractions and lies. At times supporting Henry, Richard on one occasion went so far as to kneel before Philip in his presence and swear allegiance for Normandy, Poitou, Anjou, Maine, Berry, the Limousin and every other land Henry held in fief on French soil.
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The game was complicated by Geoffrey the Bastard, always faithful to Henry since he had no entitlement except by his hand. But Henry’s health and vigour were failing. He was fifty-five, worn out and limping from his leg injury. With failing health went dwindling authority: many barons ignored the summons to the Christmas court of 1188 in Saumur.

During the winter Henry sent Cardinal John of Agnani to exhort Philip to be reasonable or threaten him with excommunication, to which the king of France replied that the dispute was not Church business and asked coldly how much English money the cardinal had smelled.
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At Easter, when the Lenten truce expired, Henry was too ill at Le Mans to attend a meeting with Philip.
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His condition worsened. Lesions of the vertebral discs and both internal and external haemorrhoids and their complications were common in men who had spent many hours every day of their adult lives thumping up and down on leather saddles, which is why most of his coevals had retired from warfare. In his case, untreated haemorrhoids worsened into what sounds like an anal fistula, possibly a side-effect of tuberculosis or Crohn’s disease, whose patterns of crisis and remission could account for his increasingly frequent and severe spells of ill-health.

Whatever the exact diagnosis, discomfort made it agony to sit on a cushion, let alone mount a horse. Yet his meeting with Philip at the end of May or beginning of June saw him still refusing to back down over Gisors while Philip repeatedly insisted that Alais be married to Richard before he left on crusade and Richard ranted that he would not go to the Holy Land unless John went too, so little did he trust his father not to give everything to the new favourite, once his back was turned.

With Richard’s help, and abetted by many of Henry’s vassals who thought him near death, Philip reopened hostilities, besieging him at Le Mans. When the defenders fired everything outside the walls to deny food and shelter to the attackers, the blaze got out of hand and ravaged the whole town. Exhausted and ill, Henry waited until the last moment before escaping via the nearest ford, held at great cost in lives by his Welsh mercenaries. Richard caught up with the rearguard, not having had time to don his armour. It was his good fortune to come up against William the Marshal, who disdained to injure him, and had the skill and forethought to drive his lance instead into the prince’s horse, which fell and placed Richard out of harm’s way as the fight moved on.

Henry’s fortunes had never sunk so low. On 3 July Tours fell to the Franks. The following day, Richard refused to believe that his father was unable to leave his bed until Henry arrived for the meeting with Philip suffering from septicaemia and with a high fever. It was so evident that he could neither stand nor sit unaided that Philip spread his own cloak on the ground, but Henry could not dismount. Swaying in the saddle and supported by his companions, he acceded to every demand, agreeing at long last to place Alais in the care of the
archbishop of Canterbury or of Rouen pending her marriage and to make good the costs incurred by his victorious adversaries in the recent fighting. In addition, he was to swear allegiance to Philip for all his possessions, pardon all the rebels and depart on crusade by Lent 1190. This last was patently impossible.

The only thing Henry had the strength to refuse was the ritual kiss of peace demanded by Richard, hissing into his ear instead, ‘May God let me live to avenge myself on you.’
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Succumbing at last to exhaustion and fever, he had to be borne the few miles back to Chinon on a litter, cursing Heaven for having given him such sons and refusing to confess himself despite the pleas of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Hereford, to whom it was obvious he had not long to live. On the following day, which was 6 July 1189, he finally allowed his bed to be carried into the chapel and there made confession, received absolution and took communion. The final blow for him was to hear his vice-chancellor Roger Malchat or Malcheal read out the list of his vassals who were to be pardoned under the treaty for siding with Philip. The first name read out was that of Prince John.
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Abandoned by both the princes, Henry was consoled in his last hours only by Geoffrey the Bastard.

In the same ritual of spoliation that had left the corpse of the Conqueror with nothing in which to be buried, the body of the count who had risen to govern an empire was abandoned immediately after death while his servants ransacked the castle for anything of value. Returning to prepare the corpse for burial, they found few suitable clothes, an imitation coronet having to be improvised from the golden tassels of a woman’s dress. It was to the nearby abbey of Fontevraud, where he had sought to confine Eleanor fifteen years earlier, that the body was conveyed for the funeral service. The poor from many miles around who were waiting along the route in expectation of the customary last alms were sent away empty-handed because the royal treasury was empty.

The community received Henry’s remains with the respect due to a great benefactor, and was shocked that the normally observant Richard paid only a brief visit to make sure his father was dead. Unaware that he would be lying in a coffin in the same abbey church in ten years’ time, he stayed kneeling by the bier for a few minutes before heading with no display of grief for Chinon, there to possess himself of whatever remained in the Angevin treasury.

The eulogies concentrated on Henry’s achievements as king of England, which were considerable in terms of legislation and stability.
In Eleanor’s lands of Poitou and Aquitaine, no one grieved his passing, for he had regarded her duchy as a source of revenue to be milked to the last
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and prevented the economy from developing outside the handful of great cities. The epitaph on Henry’s tomb at Fontevraud included these lines which seem to hint at the grand design:

Finding the treasury at Chinon exhausted by expenditure on weapons, fortifications and mercenaries’ salaries, Richard’s solution was to place Etienne de Marsai, Henry’s seneschal of Poitou, in a dungeon fettered hand and foot until he consented to hand over out of the fortune made during years of tax-farming, a quarter of the annual revenue of the duchy, amounting to some 30,000 pounds Angevin.
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Meeting William the Marshal for the first time since their encounter at the ford, Richard accused the master-at-arms of trying to kill him, and received the reply that the lance could just as easily have been aimed at the rider as the mount, had he chosen to do so. The honest rejoinder, so typical of the man, earned him several commissions in England, not least of which was liberating Eleanor.

As reward for the Marshal’s services to Henry and in expectation of similar loyalty in the future, Richard also confirmed his father’s promise to William of one of the richest heiresses in England,
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despite having already bestowed her on Count Baldwin of Béthune, who saw his fortunes diminished in favour of a man more useful to Richard. Aged thirty-five, with his best tournament years behind him, William’s high destiny was now assured. A member of the mighty Clare family that was said to be related by blood to everyone who was anyone in England, his bride was sole heir to vast estates on both sides of the Channel, for which reason she had been kept thirteen years a ward of the Crown. William departed for England, well pleased with his reward, and turned out to be as loving a husband as he was a loyal knight.

While requiring loyalty of others, Richard merited once again Betran de Born’s nickname for him, Aye-and-Nay. His fellow rebels of
yesterday found he had no intention of restoring to them possessions confiscated by his father during the early stages of the recent rebellion despite the specific provisions to this effect in the peace treaty of Villandry. What had been Henry’s was now his, and was going to stay so. In their first encounter at Gisors, King Philip found that his formerly intimate friend now refused just as adamantly as his father to hand back the castle in whose shadow they were talking – on the grounds that he would marry Alais after his return from crusade, on which even wives were forbidden, and then be entitled to it as her dowry after all.

At Sées the archbishops of Canterbury and Rouen gave Richard absolution for the mortal sin of bearing arms against his father in defiance of the Peace of God while both of them were bound by their crusaders’ oaths. This formality accomplished, he was installed in the presence of 21-year-old Prince John on 20 or 29 July as plenary duke of Normandy. Among his first acts were the confirmation of his younger brother’s possessions on both sides of the Channel and the marriage Henry had arranged for him to the count of Gloucester’s daughter Hawise or Isabelle, despite Henry I being their common great-grandfather.

After giving up his chancellor’s seal, Geoffrey the Bastard was appointed by Richard to the vacant see of York, a measure intended to cool any ambition he might have to wear a crown. Six weeks after Henry’s death, Richard was at Barfleur, taking ship to England for the all-important ritual of coronation. The Norman and Angevin kings of England did not immediately succeed, so for him to be recognised as king it was necessary for him to be crowned and seen to wear the crown.

William the Marshal, after stopping only to take a proprietorial look over some of his bride’s estates near Dieppe, had found Eleanor at Winchester the previous month, not in prison but already liberated on her own authority, her status having risen overnight on the news of Henry’s death from the status of VIP prisoner to that of dowager queen of the dual realm. Although she had not been kept in irons in a dungeon like Etienne de Tours or starved on half rations of bread and water like Robert de Sillé, she had nevertheless been subject throughout to Henry’s chief justiciar Ranulf de Glanville as his master’s whims relaxed and then reimposed the many restrictions under which she had lived for the last decade and a half. Even during the intervals of house arrest and the two journeys she had made to France, she had been under guard.

She was sixty-seven years old and had spent nearly a quarter of her life a prisoner. Virtually everyone of her generation had died; Bernard
of Clairvaux was not only dead but had been recognised as a saint for over a decade. Most released prisoners or hostages of half her age who have suffered only a few weeks’ confinement have one thought only: to go home. Home in her case was a land where people spoke her mother tongue, a land of vines and olives where valiant men composed poetry for fair ladies and she was the virtual queen by birth of a proud and independent people. She had surely merited to live in peace and tranquillity for whatever span was left to her, but Eleanor was an extraordinary person by the standards of any age. She had taken a bet with fate that her will would hold out against all the tricks Henry could play, and she had won out in the end.

But that was not enough for her. She had her sights set far higher than mere retirement and inactivity. Henry had cheated her of the power, the dignity and the privileges that were the prerogative of the queen of England, and she was determined to regain them now.

T
he readjustment period after long confinement can last years; many ex-prisoners remain institutionalised for life. While Eleanor had not been physically maltreated, nor latterly imprisoned, her mental and physical vigour on release were extraordinary for someone so long deprived of the right to make decisions. She ordered a wardrobe fit for the queen she was, secured the treasury at Winchester and London for Richard so that it could not be used to fund a rebellion against him, and then set off on a regal progress through England such as she had not enjoyed since the early years with Henry, staying in the royal palaces as she wished and with no one daring to lift a hand against her or mouth a word of protest. Her erstwhile jailer, the corrupt but capable Ranulf de Glanville, was still chief justiciar, but answerable now to her.
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Having as consort neither sworn a coronation oath nor received pledges of loyalty from Henry’s vassals, she turned the ambiguity of her position to advantage. Authority undefined, she travelled from city to city and castle to castle, demanding in the name of ‘the Lord Richard and the Lady Eleanor’
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oaths of fealty from every free man in the realm. A similarly assertive interregnal title had been used by
Empress Matilda, who styled herself ‘Lady of the English’ in 1141 when she confidently expected to be crowned after capturing Stephen.