April Queen (43 page)

During the long days and nights with only her maid and her own thoughts for company, she had acquired a worldview that commanded the same resentful respect accorded to such other great women as the Empress Matilda and that other Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, who had governed Normandy for years to leave her husband free to complete his masterly subjugation of the English. Most importantly, Eleanor was immune to the crusading fever that distorted so many political priorities, having learned at first hand the pointlessness of expending so much wealth and so many lives in pursuit of an unattainable goal. Yet to speak out openly against the call to the cross was impossible; all she could do was counsel Richard to take precautions before leaving his realm.

Among many measures enacted early in his ten-year reign, for which the credit has gone to him by default, yet which owe more to his absence, were the institutions of a single currency and standardised systems of measuring length and weights. The last, known by its Norman-French name ‘avoirdupois’, continued to be used for everything except precious metals and medicines – measured by the Troy system that had originated in Troyes and apothecaries’ weights respectively – until replaced by decimalisation in the latter half of the twentieth century.

If Eleanor showed less concern for the government of England than for the continental possessions, it was because they were vulnerable both from without and within, and especially to the friend of yesterday who was now Richard’s principal enemy. The house of Capet had suffered so many wrongs both political and personal at Henry’s hands that it was inevitable Philip would seek revenge once released from his crusader’s vows. History was to prove her fears justified. The empire built by Henry had reached its apogee; ahead lay a process of attrition and erosion which began with the loss of Normandy a few years after her death and continued for so long that it came to be called the Hundred Years War, ending with the English defeat at the battle on the banks of the Dordogne outside Castillon in July 1473 and the surrender of Bordeaux to the French in October of that year.

Richard had originally made his participation in the crusade conditional on John accompanying him. To this, Eleanor would not agree. Should they both die in Outremer, the consequences for the
succession would be unthinkable. Before saying goodbye to England on 11 December, hoping that this would satisfy John’s hunger for power and land, Richard bestowed on him a total of six English counties – Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, with a string of honours, towns and fortresses running across the breadth of England.

This made him dangerously rich and constituted a state within the state. More prudent would have been to give him fewer honours and fiefs well separated by lands held by loyal vassals, or alternatively to lock him up for the duration of the crusade. As precedents, there was not only Eleanor’s long confinement, but also Henry I’s twenty-year incarceration of his elder brother Robert Curthose. However, Richard had so little respect for John that he considered him incapable of mounting a rebellion.

Deciding not to use the safe-conducts from the king of Hungary and the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople which Henry had procured for the overland route to the Holy Land
¹⁸
on which Eleanor had suffered so much during the First Crusade, and refusing to be dependent on the profiteering Pisan and Genoese shipowners for the crossing of the Mediterranean, Richard set sail from Dover on 12 December 1189 with a considerable fleet of his own, assembled by requisitioning every suitable ship from Hull to Portsmouth, plus dozens more from the ports of his French possessions. The accounts kept by Henry of Cornhill, controller of the expedition’s budget, reveal that most of the ships cost between £50 and £66, the top price being paid for a vessel the king presented to the Hospitallers. Forty ships were purchased, thirty-three of them from the Cinque Ports, partly in cash and the balance by remitting taxes.

Paymasters gave each ordinary seamen in the crews, numbering from twenty-five for the smaller vessels to over sixty for Richard’s flagship
Esnecca
, a wage of two pence per day for one year in advance. The skippers received twice that. The logistics operation was enormous: dismantled siege engines, missiles, arrows, hand weapons, armour, supplies of comparatively long-lasting food such as salted fish and meat, dried beans and cheese all had to be purchased and loaded aboard, including thousands of nails and 10,000 horse shoes of the type with which the heavier European horses were customarily shod and which were not easily obtainable in the Holy Land.
¹⁹
All was loaded aboard in a fever of activity.

There was nothing Eleanor could do to restrain Richard with the crusading bit between his teeth. He had dismissed the most efficient
administrator in England and was leaving his realm in the care of two old men, neither of whom had experience of the task ahead. He had disrupted the tax machinery by replacing nearly every sheriff with a newcomer who knew nothing of the job. He had weakened the monarchy in a hundred ways and given John such power that he virtually ruled a principality already. Not content with making Geoffrey the Bastard the second most powerful churchman in England, he was taking his hierarchical superior the archbishop of Canterbury on crusade with him.

It was a recipe for disaster. On the very day Richard left England, trouble broke out between Hugh of Durham and William Long-champ, each convinced the other was his subordinate.

Putting in at Calais, the crusader king sent the English fleet onwards to join up with ships lying in ports from Caen to Bayonne while he enjoyed Christmas in Normandy at Bures, so obviously delighted to have left the island that he would visit only once more in his ill-fated reign that rumours circulated among the Anglo-Norman nobility to the effect that he intended giving John England and keeping only the continental possessions for himself.
²⁰
Having already spent 70 per cent of the money raised in England on preparations for the crusade, he turned to fund-raising in the continental possessions and the feudal administration of the dual realm; over two-thirds of all his charters as king are dated within the twelvemonth after his accession.

On 13 January 1190, he agreed with Philip that the truce of Villandry be converted into a peace binding on all their vassals, as was fitting between two monarchs who were fellow-crusaders. A month later even Richard was having second thoughts about the mess in which he had left England. Mandeville having died in December, it was plain that Hugh of Durham could not govern alone, even with Eleanor overseeing him. And although William the Marshal was among those appointed justiciars, being honourably excluded from the preparations for crusade by the two years he had spent in the Holy Land in fulfilment of his deathbed promise to Young Henry, he was convalescing with his bride in Surrey and unable to wield much authority.

In a desperate attempt to undo some of the mischief the sale of offices had caused, Eleanor crossed the Channel to Normandy with Prince John, Geoffrey the Bastard and a squabble of prelates that included both the bishop of Durham and Longchamp. Also with her was Alais, a prisoner of the house of Anjou for twenty-one of her thirty years and now, as a pawn in the power-game that would be played out with Philip after the crusade, to be incarcerated in the grim fortress of Rouen.

To resolve the conflict between Durham and Ely, Richard gave the jurisdiction of England north of the River Humber to Bishop Hugh with Longchamp responsible for the rest, but without specifying exactly what were to be their respective powers. Longchamp could always get what he wanted from Richard; at his request, messengers were dispatched to Rome asking that he be named papal legate, which would automatically make him senior to Bishop Hugh. Backtracking over Prince John and his half-brother Geoffrey, Richard forced them to swear not to return to England without his permission during the next three years. Fearing what John might do in collusion with Philip’s vassals if he were penned up in the continental possessions, Eleanor persuaded the king to relax this obligation. Geoffrey the Bastard was, however, to remain in exile – an archbishop of York who was forbidden to set foot in England!

North of the Channel crusading fever was rife, with knights reluctant to go and those without any skill at arms who were sneered at as ‘Holy Mary’s knights’
²¹
being sent a distaff as a hint that they should take up women’s work instead.
²²
A more unpleasant form of the disease was a rash of pogroms in several English towns. At King’s Lynn, Norwich and Stamford, a mob of both sexes looted Jewish property, ostensibly to pay for the expenses of men going on crusade. The wealthiest Jew in Britain, Aaron of Lincoln, was on friendly terms with the sheriff of Lincolnshire, who arranged for the community in Lincoln to be given shelter in the castle until the danger was past. But the worst excesses were at York, where the Jews were besieged in the castle and committed a Masada-style mass suicide when it became obvious that they could expect no mercy from their persecutors, and at Bury St Edmunds, where fifty-seven Jews were murdered on Palm Sunday.

Richard was angry that their taxable wealth had been stolen or destroyed. Together with his brother Osbert, newly arrived with a convoy of money from the Exchequer, Longchamp was dispatched to England to pursue the wrongdoers. His other brother Henry had bought the sheriffdom of Herefordshire. At the head of a large force, he travelled north and deposed certain office-holders for failing to stop the riots but could not possibly catch all the rioters, although sixty pairs of iron fetters were purchased for those he imprisoned at Lincoln.
²³
Among them was William Longchamp’s rival, the bishop of Durham.

Instead of settling these affairs himself, Richard agreed with Philip at Dreux to postpone the departure on crusade until July, so that he could punish some dissident vassals in Aquitaine. With him went his young nephew Henry of Saxony, Matilda’s son who was to accompany
him on the crusade. To give the lad a foretaste of the sport ahead, they took the castle of Chisi in Gascony, whose seigneur had been indulging in the long-established local practice of robbing and holding to ransom pilgrims and other travellers, and hanged him from his own battlements
pour encourager les autres
.
²⁴
Other preparations, interspersed with hunting in the Talmond, included laying down strict rules for shipboard behaviour on the voyage to the Holy Land and splitting his fleet into five squadrons, of which two were to be commanded by bishops and three by laymen – only one of whom was an experienced mariner.

Judging by the number of charters issued over her own seal in the area, Eleanor spent this time at or near Chinon where her long incarceration had begun.
²⁵
But the relatively minor matters she was settling in those charters did not justify her long absence from England where the new chancellor was exceeding his functions in ways that would make life difficult later on. Appointed as a man who had no friends to favour and therefore everything to gain through assiduously taxing everyone to the hilt, Longchamp epitomised Talleyrand’s maxim that performing public office with too much zeal was dangerous. So grasping was he that William of Newburgh described him as having two right hands, while Geraldus Cambrensis painted an even less attractive portrait: swart, mal-formed, low-browed, small of stature, lame and stammering.
²⁶

Yet Eleanor stayed in France, intent on something she considered more urgent than putting a power-hungry chancellor in his place. The odds were higher that Richard would die from disease in the Holy Land or on the journey there than in combat, but if he succumbed from whatever cause without an heir, there would be another civil war in England between the supporters of Prince John and those who considered that Geoffrey Plantagenet’s three-year-old son Arthur of Brittany had a prior claim as the son of John’s older brother. There could even be a tripartite war, for although being an archbishop disqualified Geoffrey the Bastard in theory from succeeding as king the father he had loyally served, he was too old and temperamentally unsuited for preferment in the Church and might well renounce the privileges of clerical office to make a bid for the crown.

Not least of the risks, in Eleanor’s view, whether or not a civil war broke out in England, it would be no more than natural for Philip to hasten homewards and invade Normandy and the other continental possessions in defiance of the Peace of God, which protected the possessions of a crusader even after his death.

Concluding Richard’s long-postponed marriage to Alais was the easiest solution. She was available and known to be fertile,
having borne Henry two children; and she had a strategically valuable dowry. But Richard refused this idea point-blank on the grounds that his pride would not let him stoop to marrying soiled goods – a view with which Eleanor concurred. Despite her own years of confinement, she showed not sympathy but contempt for Alais, even though that unfortunate princess had been brought up with her own children and had had no choice in the matter once Henry decided to indulge his lust. Nor would Richard release Alais to begin her life because that would mean handing back Gisors.

But one way or another, Eleanor decided, it was essential that Richard produce an heir before setting foot on the dangerous soil of the Holy Land.