April Queen (51 page)

While he held his Christmas court in Rouen, Eleanor remained at Fontevraud, where a stream of clerical and lay visitors brought her news from all over Europe. Toulouse had been re-attached to Aquitaine fortuitously by Count Raymond falling out with Louis. When he died in the first days of the new year, his son Young Raymond had everything to gain by changing allegiance. Since neither of her
husbands had solved the long-term problem of the breakaway county by force of arms, Eleanor began exploring a different solution.

About the same time, while hunting in Normandy, Richard was advised by a hermit who recognised him in the forest to remember the destruction of Sodom and give up his forbidden pleasures before the hand of God fell on him.
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At Easter 1195 he fell seriously ill and took this as a warning to moderate his lifestyle. While most of his energy still went into warfare, something of the Plantagenet wild-ness had gone out of him. Although still as avid for taxes as ever, he also performed good works like feeding the poor from his own pocket at times of famine and making good to religious com-munities the debts owing for their treasures taken to pay his ransom.
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Inevitably, the truce was infringed – this time by Philip, who broke through to within 12 miles of Rouen. Alais was hurried away to Caen and moved from one fortress to another as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed. She was now thirty-four, an age by which most women of the time were dead. With her life's clock stopped on the day she had been handed over to Henry by Louis Capet as a girl of ten, she had never known liberty and was a stranger to her own family.

Under the Treaty of Louviers in January 1196, Philip gave back all the territory gained from Richard in return for the Norman Vexin.
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With Alais' dowry castles he also recovered his half-sister and married her off to Guillaume de Ponthieu, whose domains divided Normandy from the territory of Richard's ally Baldwin of Flanders. So Alais disappeared from history, after spending a lifetime captive in the gilded cage of a family that despised her as she was used and abused in turn by Henry, Eleanor and Richard.

Confirming the clause in the Treaty of Messina that had caused so much trouble, Richard again named Arthur his heir, but when he ordered Constance of Brittany to bring her son to Rouen, she was imprisoned by the husband Henry had imposed on her, Earl Ranulf of Chester. Hastening to his nephew's rescue, Richard found that he had been spirited away to Paris and was being brought up in Philip's household with Crown Prince Louis. For John, this was good news: it seemed that he must by default now be recognised as heir to the whole Plantagenet Empire. He kept a low profile none the less – as well he might, having had his estates restored to him the previous year on condition of good behaviour.

Like the Empress Matilda, 31-year-old Joanna had kept her title as queen of Sicily on being widowed. Killing two birds with one stone, Eleanor now dangled before Young Raymond of Toulouse the
idea of rejecting his second wife Bourguigne de Lusignan to become the husband of a titular queen. The match would restore Joanna's wealth, ruined by Richard spending all her dowry on crusade, and it would also wean Raymond away from the temptation of pledging fealty to Philip, whose cousin he was. The only complication was that Raymond was still excommunicate for the repudiation of his first wife and would incur the censure of the Church in sending away his second spouse, but there was always a complaisant churchman to sort out that kind of problem.

The marriage duly took place in Rouen during October 1196,
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witnessed by Berengaria, who otherwise lived quietly in her dower lands. So important in Eleanor's eyes was the clause in the marriage contract providing for Joanna's offspring to inherit the county of Toulouse that Joanna had no more say in the matter than when Henry dispatched her as a girl to Sicily. But what was love, except a game of
What If?
played by poets and virgins? Even that great romantic Bernat de Ventadorn, who had sworn to be true to his regal mistress until death, had written before he died,

Another arranged marriage that year ensured Richard the gratitude of his bastard half-brother William Longsword, awarded the daughter of the count of Salisbury.
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A hint of satisfaction can be read on the eroded features of Longsword's effigy in Salisbury Cathedral, despite that year going on record as one of famine and disease so rampant in England that corpses of the rural poor were shovelled into mass graves because there was no time to bury them individually.

So widespread was the misery and suffering north of the Channel that a social reformer by name of William fitz Osbern travelled to Normandy to lay before Richard the plight of the urban poor who were bearing an unfair share of the crippling burden of taxes. An educated man and ex-crusader, he pleaded his case so well that the king let him go, but once back in England he suffered the fate of those too good for their time. Archbishop Hubert Walter as chief justiciar ordered his arrest one
day when fitz Osbern's self-appointed bodyguard was absent. Claiming sanctuary in Bow Church, the would-be reformer was forced out when it was set on fire at the archbishop's orders. Dragged bloodily through the streets of London behind a team of horses, he was hanged at Tyburn with nine companions, his followers digging out so much ground beneath the gallows for souvenirs that they had to be kept at bay by armed soldiers.

Richard had decided to replace Gisors as a barrier to any Frankish move on Rouen by building an impregnable castle on a spur of rock at Les Andelys dominating the Seine Valley. Castle-building rarely took place on virgin land; it displaced existing population and disrupted the economic life of the area, such as food production and markets. Quarries had to be opened up, masons and other skilled labour brought in, local labourers impressed, the new chapel might disturb existing parish demarcations, vineyards and fields were ruined and forests cleared – as at Bures where Henry's rebuilding had required the felling of 1,000 mature oaks.

At Les Andelys an entire town was being constructed by the riverside to support the castle. The chosen site lay in the domains of the archbishop of Rouen, who refused his consent on the grounds that he was not being compensated for the loss of revenues to the see, and placed Normandy under interdict in retaliation for Richard's high-handedness. Appealing to the pope over the prelate's head, Richard ordered William Longchamp to lead an embassy to Rome, well provided with money for bribes. In order to avoid Frankish territory, the embassy travelled south into Poitou, where Longchamp fell ill and died in Poitiers early in February 1197, unmourned by anyone in England except his immediate family and his close friend, Richard's chaplain Milo.
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Another death that year was of Marguerite the Young Queen, who died on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, at Acre.

The humiliation of the confinement in Germany had played a part in Richard's personality change. It was there that he learned to moderate the arrogance that had made him so many enemies before and during the crusade and there too that he first became Good King Richard,
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winning the hearts of most of the Emperor's vassals who met him – which was why they approached him to resolve the knotty problem of succession when Henry Hohenstaufen died suddenly in Messina on 28 September 1197 after releasing Richard from the oath of fealty given under duress at Mainz.

Of the two contenders for the imperial throne, the infant son of Constance of Sicily was unacceptable to the German electors by virtue of his minority and although Philip of Swabia, the late emperor's
brother, had much support in the south he was not well thought of in the north or by the bishops of the empire. In this dilemma the hero of Christendom seemed an ideal compromise candidate to many of the northern barons and bishops of the empire, who had come to know him personally.
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His father must have turned in his grave when Richard failed to leap at their invitation, which would have enabled him to close a vice around Philip by constructing the greatest empire since Rome, comprising England, Wales, Ireland, all France and the German Empire north and south of the Alps.

Richard lacked the strategic vision, but looking after his friends was another matter. As he had used his influence in the Holy Land in favour of his nephew Henry of Champagne, so he now proposed Matilda's son Otto of Brunswick in opposition to the election of Philip of Schwabia. Otto had served Richard loyally after remaining in France when his father returned to Germany. He had even been named count of Poitou – a post for which his youth and haughty disregard for local customs and laws made him a disastrous appointment, despite Eleanor's tutelage.
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That apart, he was now a knight of proven valour, schooled in the arts of warfare by his famous uncle, and well thought of by the Church, to capitalise on which Richard borrowed 2,125 marks from a Lombard banker to grease palms that could be influential on Otto's behalf at the papal court.
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He also outfitted his nephew in considerable splendour for his return to Saxony. Endowed with a liberal supply of money for bribes and presents to the German electors, Otto departed with Richard's blessing en route to Liège. Unwelcome there, he continued with the archbishop of Cologne to that city before leading the archbishop's knights at the assault of Aachen, which surrendered on 10 July. Within twenty-four hours he was married to the infant daughter of the duke of Lorraine, whose head was too small and whose neck too weak to wear a crown at the coronation next day.
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To Philip the Otto–Richard alliance was a new menace. In addition, the Church had forgiven neither his invasion of a crusader's lands nor his violent rejection of his Danish wife Ingeborg immediately after the wedding night on 14 August 1193. Contemporaries hypothesised that he had discovered she was not a virgin, or that she was sexually deformed or had bad breath. Unable to plead consanguinity in this case, he eventually adopted the humiliating argument that she had unmanned him, since admitting impotence enabled him to argue non-consummation. Whatever the truth, she remained confined in the convent of Soissons so that he could live in sin on the Ile de la Cité with his German mistress Agnès de Méranie and their children.
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With the whole world and Heaven too against him, there seemed nothing to lose by invading Normandy at its weakest point, adjacent to the lands of Ponthieu, united to his cause by poor Alais' body. Before he was driven back by Richard with help from Mercadier and William the Marshal, Philip had taken several castles and refused to give them up. Once again he was within minutes of capture when a bridge collapsed under the weight of too many men and horses fleeing from their pursuers close behind, and dumped him in a river, drowning twenty of the armoured knights riding with him.
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Richard had taken a calculated chance in leaving his main force far behind. The confusion of the skirmish at the bridge is evident from these lines in the ‘life' of William the Marshal:

Three knights unhorsed with one lance; the Marshal was not boasting. It is interesting also to note that the Flemings under Mercadier kept their own captives for ransom in addition to their pay.

From Rome at Christmas 1197 came Cardinal Peter of Capua on a peace mission. William the Marshal's squire described him as having been to a school where he had learned to prove black was white,
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but not all the dialectic in the world could have reconciled Richard with the suzerain who had betrayed him during the exile. Nor was he amused when the cardinal argued that under canon law a bishop could not be imprisoned, and therefore he should release the battling bishop of Beauvais, who had been unlucky enough to be captured by Mercadier in May 1197 and was held in the tower of Caen.

For the mercenaries who took him prisoner, the bishop represented a source of ransom, but although offered 10,000 silver marks, Richard refused to accept it. The reason was not that the prisoner was Philip's uncle, but that he was one of the many in the Frankish host with whom Richard had fallen out personally in the Holy Land. A war of words had ensued between them, with each blistering
sirventès
from Richard answered by an equally well-composed poem from the bishop.

To the idea that he should release so arrogant a cleric, he furiously compared the inaction of the Church on his behalf when a prisoner in
Germany to its lively interest in the bishop's problems.
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His ears ringing with a furious reminder that the prisoner had not been arrested as a bishop but captured in battle as an armed knight, unidentifiable with his visor closed,
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the cardinal was dismissed with a warning never to return.

On a visit to Caen, Eleanor tried to solve the impasse diplomat-ically by asking to have the captive brought before her during one of Richard's many absences on campaign. The guards did not dare refuse. On the way, the primate, fettered hand and foot, managed to break away from them and hurl himself at the door of a church. The door being locked, he clung to the ring handle of the latch desperately invoking the Peace of God at the top of his voice. Eleanor's plan came to nothing with Richard's refusal to recognise the Bishop's right to sanctuary, after which he was transferred to even stricter confinement in Chinon.