April Queen (44 page)

W
hile preparations for the crusade went ahead in England and France, Eleanor continued to worry about the succession for both personal and political reasons. As ever, Richard was elusive on the subject and could reasonably claim many more urgent priorities.

The rendezvous with Philip took place ten days late at Vézelay on 1 July. Both kings had already received the symbolic pilgrim’s staff and scrip; it was seen as a bad omen when the heavily built king of England leaned playfully on his and snapped it clean in two. Having sworn to be as brothers, neither to return before the other, and to share equally any profit from the joint enterprise, the two monarchs set out on 4 July 1190, travelling together as far as Lyon. The main contingents had already gone ahead. While Philip took the overland route to Genoa, Richard turned south to Marseilles, where his ships would have been waiting, but for contrary winds at the entrance to the Mediterranean.
¹
Instead, he hired some Pisan merchant vessels to take his immediate entourage to Genoa, where Philip requested the loan of five English galleys. Richard offered three. Insulted, Philip turned them down. It was the first overt sign of the tension between them that would undermine the whole crusade.

From Genoa, Richard made a leisurely Grand Tour of western Italy, sailing from one port to the next and then travelling by land to where the Pisan ships awaited him for the following stage of the journey. Arriving at the Sicilian port of Messina several days after the French and finding its gates closed to him, he invested the city in a rage, his artificers rehearsing the siege of Acre by assemb-ling a huge siege-tower from the parts stowed in his ships. These enormous structures were given humorously affectionate nicknames by the troops; this one was
Mategriffon
, or ‘Greek-killer’, because the majority of the inhabitants of Messina were Greek-speaking.

Proclaiming that any soldier who ran away would have a foot amputated and any knight guilty of cowardice would be reduced to the ranks, Richard deliberately let the defenders waste all their ammunition without firing a single shot.
²
From the tower’s platform, higher than the city walls, crossbowmen then rained bolts down on the defenders. The battlements thus cleared of defenders, his shock troops lowered the drawbridge and took Messina after only five hours’ fighting. The city served as Richard’s winter quarters with
Mategriffon
looming over it and a well-used gallows beside it reminding the natives to behave themselves.

On the death the previous November of Joanna’s husband William II, the Sicilian nobles had elected his bastard nephew Count Tancred of Lecce as their new ruler to prevent the German Emperor from claiming the throne by virtue of his marriage to William’s aunt Constance. Wary of the presence of two crusader armies on his island and rightly fearing Richard’s anger at his appropriation of Joanna’s dowry to line his own coffers, Tancred was holding Eleanor’s second daughter hostage in Palermo at the other end of Sicily.

Richard immediately demanded both his sister’s release and the implementation of William II’s promise to Henry of precious jewels and ships for use on the crusade.
³
Torn between this and the spectre of Constance reappearing on the island backed by her husband’s armies, Tancred chose the lesser evil, restored Joanna to her brother and made good the legacy by a payment of 40,000 ounces of gold, some of which was shared with Philip.

He was looking for a new wife to replace Isabelle of Hainault, who had died in childbirth at the age of twenty,
⁴
and saw in Joanna a suitable queen for France. A beautiful and spirited woman of twenty-five, polished by her upbringing in Fontevraud and at the court of Poitiers, she was ready for some other great destiny after thirteen years as queen of the cosmopolitan kingdom of Sicily. However, Richard
quenched the fires of Philip’s fancy with the waters of the Straits of Messina, by seizing the priory of Bagnara on the Calabrian mainland to serve as her palace so there could be no contact between them.
⁵

Tancred having sent Joanna’s bed with her, Richard now dunned him for the rest of her furniture, including a gilded table twelve feet long, a golden chair and a dinner service of twenty-four gold and silver plates and drinking vessels. Advised by his Muslim counsellors to play upon the mutual jealousy of his two unsought royal guests as Manuel Comnenus had done with the Germans and French in the Second Crusade, Tancred sent valuable gifts to Philip but none to Richard. Instead, he took him on a tour of holy sites near Mount Etna
⁶
to create an opportunity of showing him letters apparently bearing Philip’s seal in which Richard was painted as an untrustworthy cheat, against whom the Sicilians and Franks should unite.

Impetuously accepting the letters as genuine, Richard moderated his demands for Joanna’s dowry and signed a treaty acknowledging Tancred as rightful king of Sicily, in which he undertook to defend Sicilian possessions on the mainland against the German Emperor. After declaring Arthur of Brittany his heir, he betrothed him to Tancred’s elder daughter
⁷
and presented his new ally with a sword claimed to be King Arthur’s legendary Excalibur. In return, Tancred paid back the last 40,000 bezants of Joanna’s dowry and provided nineteen ships.

Dividing her attention between the government of England and the continental possessions and the hunt for a wife for Richard, Eleanor can hardly have been pleased when news of the treaty reached her. While she thought John would make a poor king, for the crown of England to pass to three-year-old Arthur was as good as handing it to Philip on a plate. And once John heard, she knew that his paranoid nature would regard it as carte blanche for treason, since his only reason to behave in Richard’s absence was a reasonable expectation of one day succeeding his brother without any struggle.

In Sicily, when Richard confronted Philip with the letters, they were declared forgeries created by Tancred’s Muslim counsellors to drive a wedge between two Christian monarchs. That Richard had taken them at their face value was yet another insult to his family, Philip insisted, reciting a long list of other grievances that inevitably included the matter of Alais and the return of Gisors. Having heard rumours of Eleanor sounding out various potential royal brides, he declared that a repudiation of his half-sister after all these years’ abuse of her would be an unbearable affront to the house of Capet and earn his undying enmity.
⁸
Richard retorted that it was contrary to Nature for a man to marry his own father’s mistress, who had borne him children.
⁹
They had come a long way since sharing bed and board in Paris.

Some time in November Count Philip of Flanders, a vassal of Philip who was related to Richard by birth and marriage, brokered a settlement releasing him from his obligation to marry Alais. Under this, she was to be returned to Philip at the end of the crusade with her dowry enhanced by the sum of 10,000 marks which he could use to marry her off to whom he pleased. Philip accepted the settlement as the best he was likely to get, but it was no sudden change of heart on Richard’s part that had caused him to yield Gisors. He had heard from Eleanor that she had found him a wife.

Aquitaine had always had close links with its southern neighbour Navarre, whose King Sancho the Wise had a daughter called Berengaria. Flattered at the idea of becoming father-in-law to the king of England, Sancho agreed to the match despite Eleanor refusing to give up any of the English queen’s marriage portion, which she intended keeping for herself. Instead, she offered Berengaria the county of Gascony and the Ile d’Oléron, plus several towns on both sides of the Channel.

To finalise the arrangement, Eleanor travelled in person across the Pyrenees to make sure that Berengaria was of such submissive character as to give reasonable hope that Richard might perform his duty of getting her with child. Aged twenty-five, she was no pretty young thing to tease a sex-starved crusader into bed. She was educated, literate, docile and spoke a dialect of Occitan. Most importantly, she was not within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. As to her looks (see plate 24), all the chroniclers could find in her favour was that she was prudent, gentle and virtuous. Richard was said to have composed a poem in her honour while her father’s guest at the court of Navarre in 1177, but that was no more than gallantry.

Given the importance of speed in bringing bride and groom together, it is strange that Eleanor went to Spain instead of sending her bishops to agree the transaction and escort Berengaria to Poitiers. Whatever her reasons for going in person, Berengaria passed her scrutiny and rode back to Poitiers with her future mother-in-law, presumably receiving instruction from Eleanor on the way as to the by no means straightforward wifely duties expected of her.

Money never stayed long in her future husband’s treasure chests. Much of the settlement received from Tancred was spent over Christmas in a series of luxurious feasts and magnificent tourna-ments to persuade the other crusader leaders and their vassals who was the more
important of the two monarchs present. But Richard’s PR campaign turned sour when a Frankish knight by name of Guillaume des Barres unwisely wounded his vanity in a mêlée and was not forgiven. Because incidents of this kind were bound to occur with so many warriors pumping adrenalin and spoiling for a fight, Philip rightly wanted to leave as soon as possible. Bored by the long wait, some of Eleanor’s vassals, including Geoffroi de Rancon, swore to go with him to fight the infidel rather than wait any longer in Sicily with Richard. Others departed without their leaders, who were soon listening to the inevitable tales of their deaths from the climate, food poisoning, disease and internecine conflict.
¹⁰

Eventually trapped by the winter gales, Richard and Philip settled down to sniping at each other while an intermittent stream of clerics and
nuncii
or royal messengers rode and sailed between Sicily and France and England, some of them crossing paths with Eleanor. Putting her sixty-eight years behind her, she was risking the winter weather and the perils of an even longer journey than the recent expedition to Navarre in order to accompany Berengaria across France and through the Alpine passes with the whole length of Italy ahead of her. She knew her son too well to give Richard the chance of not going through with the marriage, were his bride to arrive alone when he had the dual alibi of his crusader’s oath of chastity and the papal prohibition on taking women to the Holy Land.

While his mother was exhausting herself on the continent, Prince John was exploiting the universal detestation of Longchamp to travel the length and breadth of the island realm, winning over the Anglo-Norman nobility and the common people, whose language he alone of the royal family could speak fluently. With only a one-in-four chance of a crusader returning from the Holy Land – and Richard was famous for being in the forefront of every fight – making friends with John was three times more likely to pay off than remaining obstinately loyal to a monarch who cared nothing for his English vassals.

Whether by accident or design, at Lodi, south of Milan, Eleanor’s path crossed that of the new German Emperor Henry Hohenstaufen on his way to Rome for his imperial coronation. A record of their meeting would be interesting, for Barbarossa’s successor was extremely displeased by Richard’s recent recognition of Tancred’s territorial pretensions in Sicily and southern Italy – and would exact a cruel price for it on Richard’s return from the Holy Land. But the meeting passed off with at least the usual courtesies, Eleanor being invited to witness one of the emperor’s charters before leaving his court.

From there the simplest route would have been to head for the coast and take ship to Sicily, but Eleanor continued her mission by land, buying safe-conducts as she went, since there had not been time to arrange the journey in advance. Richard currently had some 200 vessels at his disposal, not all of them simultaneously being careened and refitted for the onward voyage. That he did not order one to fetch the dowager queen and the future queen of England, or have his agents on the mainland reserve other shipboard accommodation for them may well have been his last attempt to avoid the marriage in the expectation that he would have left Sicily before Eleanor and Berengaria arrived.

If that was the case, he reckoned without his mother’s determin-ation. Pressing on by land until he sent a Sicilian vessel to collect them for the last stage of the long journey, she brought Berengaria across the Straits of Messina on 30 March. It was not a moment too soon, for the French under Philip had finally set sail the previous day. Their departure meant that celebrating the wedding in Sicily would have been more tactful than doing so after arrival in the Holy Land, where it would constitute a flagrant insult to Philip and his half-sister still locked up in Rouen Castle. Yet even the archbishop of Canterbury could not marry a king in Lent, so the wedding was postponed.