April Queen (56 page)

John could never control the temptation to borrow from whatever source presented itself. Once at Cognac, his treasury being exhausted, he was forced to borrow 100 marks from local merchants in order to replace the sick and exhausted mounts of his household so they could continue on their way.
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The payment of Richard’s ransom had been facilitated by the professional services of the main moneychanger in Rouen, Val Richer, who had also played a part in financing Château Gaillard. He now fed John’s hunger for money, available at a price from a banking network that stretched from Rouen to Genoa and Cologne. Another Rouenais who lent money was Laurent du Donjon, who shrewdly secured his repayment from the English, not the Norman, Exchequer. And there were always of course the Jews, whose high rate of defaults in payment by their royal clients must have been offset by reinsurance in order for them to stay in business.

The result of all this borrowing and unproductive royal spending was inflation. In a decade, livestock prices had doubled and those of grain almost tripled,
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exaggerating the food shortages. Scutages were levied annually from 1201 to 1206.
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Although all this money flowing in from England helped to pay garrisons of the marcher castles, John made little other preparation for the next onslaught apart from constantly declaring that when he was ready he would retake in one blow everything Philip had conquered so far.

His most important prisoner, Arthur, was clearly guilty of treason, but Henry had pardoned his three elder sons after the rebellion of 1173–4 and John had himself been pardoned by Richard for conniving with Philip to keep him in prison more or less indefinitely. The ‘reasonable’ solution would have been that of Henry I, who had kept his better-entitled elder brother Robert Curthose prisoner for twenty years. But John was paranoid. In January 1203 he interviewed his nephew at Falaise, when Arthur refused to back down even after six months’ solitary confinement in chains, insisting instead – if one believes the accounts – that John renounce in his favour all the territories which he should have inherited on his uncle Richard’s death.

While Arthur may have had the courage to refuse homage to his uncle, it is unlikely that he would, after so long a period of sensory deprivation chained in an unlit dungeon on a near-starvation diet of bread and water, have invented such a dangerous claim. Had he too somehow learned of an oral testament by Richard while dying at Châlus, giving him some legal title to what he was demanding?

It would seem that John thought so, for shortly afterwards he decided to make Arthur irrevocably unfit to rule Brittany or anywhere else. It provides a little perspective that in the same month he wrote to his chamberlain Hubert de Burgh, ordering him to exchange a prisoner in his charge for an engineer named Ferrand, captured by Philip. Observing the
lex talionis
or law of retaliation, he instructed Hugh that ‘if Ferrand be delivered whole, let Peter be delivered whole also. But if Ferrand be lacking in any limb, Peter must first be deprived of the same limb and then delivered in exchange.’
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It was a violent age: husbands beat wives, parents beat children, monks beat each other to improve their souls, courts of justice ordered flogging, mutilation, death
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and ordeal by hot iron and water.

John ordered Arthur to be blinded and castrated. Of the three men-at-arms detailed for the job, only one agreed to go through with it and so botched the start of his grisly task that Hubert de Burgh countermanded the king’s orders and later defended his action by
claiming that if he had carried them out the king himself would have been riven by remorse.

Meanwhile, Isabella was besieged at Chinon by Amaury de Thouars. From Le Mans John sent a mercenary force under Pierre de Préaux, which relieved the siege and escorted the queen of England back to John. Relief at her deliverance had not softened her husband’s heart. Not even the Channel could protect John’s other captives from his malevolence. Twenty-four of them were murdered or starved to death at Corfe Castle in Dorset on his orders. After spreading rumours that Arthur had died of a mysterious illness and having his clothes distributed to the poor as a way of sounding out public reaction, John had him secretly removed to Rouen where his new custodian Robert de Vieux Point was given the castles of Appleby and Brough in faraway Westmorland as reward for his silence.

On 2 April, the Wednesday before Easter, John was staying at the fortified manor house of Molineux a few miles downriver from Rouen when Guillaume de Braose, whose captive Arthur technically was, declared that his own affairs obliged him to resign from John’s service. In front of witnesses, including three justiciars, he added that the young count of Brittany had been in good health when handed over to the king’s custody and that he washed his hands of any further responsibility for him.
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The following night, John is alleged to have taken his nephew out of the citadel of Rouen by a postern gate with a few accomplices. Forced into a small boat, Arthur was stabbed to death either by his own uncle or an accomplice and the body thrown, weighted, into the middle of the Seine.
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Whatever the precise truth, the story comes close because he was never seen again.

There are two records that differ little in essentials. The
Philippide
, an account of Philip’s reign written by his chaplain Guillaume le Breton, might well have been black propaganda to besmirch the name of an enemy, but the annals of the abbey of Margam in Wales were almost certainly based on information from Guillaume de Braose,
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who held estates near there among many others with which he was richly rewarded by his unstable king until suddenly divested of them in 1208 after his wife Matilda indiscreetly referred in public to John’s role in the murder. Seizing their estates, John attempted to silence the whole family. With his wife and sons – one of whom had been made bishop of Hereford by the king – Guillaume fled to Ireland and took refuge with relatives. John sent a large force after them, capturing Matilda and one son, who were both starved to death in one of his prisons.

Within a fortnight of the fateful Thursday evening in April 1203 Eleanor received a messenger at Fontevraud bearing an oral
message too confidential to be put in writing. With it came a cryptic letter from Guillaume de Braose attesting to the truth of what the messenger, Brother John of Valerant, had to impart.
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With the furious Bretons encroaching from the West and the lords of Maine going over to Philip, Normandy was cut off from Anjou. Guillaume des Roches captured Saumur on 23 April 1203 for Philip and the castle of Beaufort only a few miles from Fontevraud.
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John’s most respected emissaries, including the archbishop of Canterbury and William the Marshal, were unable to negotiate any terms from Philip. Eleanor’s wisdom in denying Aquitaine to John for her lifetime was now evident: technically, the duchy was not yet his. With Chinon still holding out against him, Philip swung away to the north.

Throughout the spring and summer the tide of war swung steadily in his favour as one after another of John’s vassals deserted him. Where was he? they asked time and again. The answer was a mystery, for the king had become so paranoid that he travelled at night, telling no one his destination and moving his treasury, his hostages and his chancery so often that even his own clerks could not find out where he had gone. By August, he had lost the eastern third of Normandy, including Vaudreuil, 12 miles from Rouen, protected now only by Château Gaillard, under siege by Philip. Stung at last into action, John attempted to relieve the fortress by river but failed with heavy casualties because someone miscalculated the tides.

To add to its other miseries, Normandy lay under interdict, the conduct of the mercenary troops on whom he was now totally dependent having alienated the bishops. William the Marshal’s biographer blamed this on John’s inability to control the troops of his mercenary commander Louvrecaire, who ‘maltreated the people and pillaged them as though he were in an enemy’s country’.
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By December John held only Rouen and Château Gaillard, with the counties of Mortain and Cotentin and a stretch of the coast.

By now all his Norman vassals wished the conflict over. Towards the end of the month, their disaffection was fuelled by rumours that he had left Rouen and crossed the Channel with William the Marshal, saying that he was going to seek aid and counsel from the English barons but leaving the garrisons in Rouen and Château Gaillard to fend for themselves. That he had gone was true, although whether he had intended to return with money and men for the defence of Normandy remains a mystery. In any event, few Anglo-Norman barons were prepared to supply men for the war; those who had more to lose
south of the Channel declared for Philip. Nor could John continue to pay the mercenaries, for his coffers were empty.
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Although he continued to delude himself that all he had lost would be regained by one masterstroke,
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his Christmas court at Canterbury was a sad affair.

In Fontevraud and Poitiers Eleanor was still attended by her small household of faithful relatives and followers who had been with her for years. Seemingly, she wished to play no further part in the affairs of the world, but the world would not leave her alone. Early in March 1204 she received news of the fall of Richard’s ‘impregnable’ Château Gaillard at the end of a five-month siege. During the winter the local villagers had been rounded up and driven into it by the besiegers, but then expelled as useless mouths by the defenders, who included many of their own relatives. Trapped between the lines, where one woman gave birth in the open air, they were driven to eat grass and roots to calm the pangs of hunger, starving to death in the winter cold until Philip at last took pity on the survivors and let them through the lines.

Château Gaillard’s loss signalled more clearly than any other event the end of Normandy as a fief of the English Crown. At this stage, not even Bertran de Born could pretend war glorious or that the desolation was other than total. He wrote:

Three and a half weeks later Eleanor closed her eyes for the last time, on 31 March. At dawn next day not all the chambermaids in France could awaken the April Queen. Whether this was in the palace at Poitiers or in Fontevraud is a matter on which the chroniclers differ, but all agree that she was dressed in nun’s robes at her request and laid to rest in the crypt of the abbey church
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between Henry and Richard, not far from Joanna’s grave. The tombs were desecrated during the Revolution, and subsequently restored in the abbey church with their effigies, but empty. Moved again during archaeological excavations in the 1990s, they are a target for tourists’ cameras as the sunlight, filtered
by the stained-glass window of Richard’s shield, shafts through the dust of ages (Plate 27).

It is the nature of eulogies to proclaim only the good things of a life spent, but Eleanor’s in the necrology of Fontevraud is an understatement: ‘She improved on her high birth by the honesty of her life, the purity of her morals, the flower of her virtues and by her life without reproach she surpassed almost all the queens of this world.’
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As to honesty, she was true to Aquitaine all her life and stood regardless of the price to herself between the duchy and Louis and Henry, its overlords by marriage to her – and continued to protect it from John and Philip to her dying day.

The tribute to her morals is a subtle reminder not to credit the slanders so typical of her time, by which her many enemies sought to diminish her. Women of her class knew that indulging their emotions other than in fantasy unfitted them for the high destiny to which they had been raised since infancy. That is why they needed the courts of love and why the compositions of
trobairitz
and
trobador
still have the power to move the hearer. As to a life without reproach, Eleanor was guilty of many acts morally reprehensible to modern minds, but within a few weeks of her death Rouen had fallen, and with it the last hope of John regaining Normandy. Since Poitou had passed to John on Eleanor’s death, Philip sent Guillaume des Roches to conquer it in his name. Only the ungovernable province of Gascony would remain a fief of the English Crown for another two and a half centuries.

It is conventional for biographers to claim that theirs is the definitive work on the subject, yet the closer one gets to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the more certain it is that she was a far more extraordinary person than the chroniclers even hint at. The richest woman in her own right ever? Yes, she was. One of Europe’s most courageous and powerful queens? Indubitably. The first ‘grandmother of Europe’? The title does not do justice to a queen whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren sat on thrones from Ireland to the Holy Land.

But Eleanor was more than all that. She was a woman frequently obliged by birth and circumstance to act the traditional male role in government, diplomacy and war – and to stay clear-headed and decisive when inwardly riven by grief.

There is a terrible poignancy in the two carved heads on the wall of the nuns’ kitchen at Fontevraud, whose construction was paid for by her and Joanna (plates 1, 5, 28). Still stylish with her turban headdress, still of commanding presence yet with wrinkled brow and face marked by eight decades, the aged duchess–queen gazes with inner regret for
her own lost youth and sacrificed dreams at the girl she was in the full flush of youthful beauty.