Eleanor Of Aquitaine (30 page)

Their journeys included no tournaments, no courts of love, no lavish banquets, none of those pomps that had brightened civilization in Normandy, Poitou, and the Ile de France. Henry apprenticed his son to the somber royal business of putting England in order after the anarchy. He supervised the destruction or sequestration of the fortresses that had withstood him; he saw to the filling of long vacant sees and the election of abbots, and made sure there were no Beckets among the new incumbents; he regularized and concentrated the courts of justice, and dealt severely with those who had taken advantage of the rebellion to trespass on his forests. He received the envoys of foreign states, who sought his arbitration of their conflicts. The succession of synods and assizes, which went round the calendar, was broken only by occasional hunting forays in the vast gaine preserves that were Henry's pride, or by the loosing of falcons beside English streams. When they came to hall at night, three dishes sufficed for their evening meal. If young Henry had been capable of benefiting by his tutelage, he might have learned the elements of statecraft and caught some vision of his kingly role, for great Henry, freed for an interval from the threats and thwartings of the past decade, now gave England the stoutest fabric and the most ordered government in the western world.

But the elder king's providence was lost upon his son. To the prince the shallowness of the procedure to engage him in kingcraft seemed obvious, for not one tittle of authority had been relinquished to him. Though equipped and rehearsed for the part, he still had no kingly role, no tasks of his own, no realm, no subjects — only a crown, a trumpery seal, regal trappings, and a stipend inadequate for the grandiose pretensions to which the heir of the Plantagenets and the son in law of the King of France had been bred. His favorite academy was not the sober and practical one of synod and assize in Britain, but the romantic court of Poitiers, or Paris with its swarms of young men always imagining a new thing; his favorite companions not those legists and men of affairs in London and Rouen, but the impecunious gallants bred on Arthurian romance and Ovidian sophistries in the entourage of the Countess of Champagne.

The deepest bitterness of the young king was rooted in the fact that, after the peace of Montlouis, while he was held in leash, Henry had sent Geoffrey and Richard off to their own prospective provinces with some show of administrative authority. The Count of Poitou had found an outlet for his hardier genius in the substantial business of subduing the feudal anarchy that was perennial in Aquitaine and that had latterly found occasion, in the embarrassinent of the elder king, to flare up with unwonted fury. In the south the chief feudatories were individually too strong to be held in a common vassalage. Each sought to get a regional control, and all were restive under the oppressive stewardship of their duchess' foreign consorts. With the job of reducing these barons, Richard proceeded with a savagery and success worthy of the Conqueror himself. One after another the rebel strongholds fell into his hands, and his reprisals spread terror and desolation in the land. He took the fortresses of his enemies razed their castles, burned their towns, uprooted their orchards and vineyards, sowed their fields with salt, ordered the hands of his captives cut off and their eyes gouged out, and dishonored the women of his hostages with a very sovereign severity
²⁰
No person, no property was safe from roving bands of
routiers
who lent their aid without scruple to the highest bidder on either side, and in the intervals of unemployment made their livelihood by pillaging the countryside
^.21
Geoffroi de Vigeois reports that the people of the Limousin, despoiled of all means of living, were obliged to join the brigands to get a share of their own provisions. Husbandry came to a standstill and the four horsemen stalked the land. The queen's provinces were desolated from end to end. Though Henry never dealt so harshly with conquered foes, this effective work of crushing anarchy was something he could appreciate in a scion of his house. When Richard's resources were not enough for the mercenaries and the siege engines required, the elder king subsidized his son's enterprise.

Before the first breath of spring, the fever to get abroad and rejoin his boon companions took possession of the young king Richard's reports on his exploits at the Easter meeting of the brothers in Winchester inflamed his zeal. He sought leave to take up his residence in his own titular domains, and when Henry dared not loose him, as he had loosed his brothers, in those old centers of intrigue, the young king declared himself suspicious because Henry had received the homage of Richard and Geoffrey at Montlouis, but had excluded him from this rite. Had this been a plot to deny him his portion by excluding him from the king's allegiance?
¹
Was he not, as the Capets had warned him, a captive in his father's palaces'. He was sick with suspicion. He railed at the dullness of routine, his meager revenues, his diminished household, his shadow role.

When practical pretexts for getting abroad failed to move the elder king, the prince sought leave to make a Lenten pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostella. Henry saw the youth was frantic to rejoin the malcontents who in the rebellion had put the whole Angevin empire in jeopardy. The elder king had his suspicions too. The young king proved incurably Poitevin and was perhaps at the very moment in the service of the queen. In her school for cavaliers his heir had learned to love the spring not for its summons to pious pilgrimage, but because, as the trouvere Bertran de Born put it, when Lent was over, knights took to the road and the ground trembled with the quake of tournaments. The centers where the flower of chivalry forgathered were the rendezvous of those old enemies who "found more profit in turmoil than in peace." Somehow the elder king stifled the project of pilgrimage, but, as a sop to the young king's discontent, he gave him leave to visit Paris with Marguerite and promised that he should later lend his aid to Richard in his warfare in Poitou.
²⁴
At the same time he kept his hand on the prince's revenues to limit the young man's enterprise.

After a brief stay in Paris, the prince, foot-loose and sour, took his way through Flanders and poured out his spleen to his cousin Philip, whom he found in Arras.
²⁵
The season of tournaments was at hand and heralds were proclaiming the rendezvous and the champions of the lists. Meanwhile the young king, prince among cavaliers, had not the wherewithal to muster his
mesnie
and lead his knights upon the field. Philip of Flanders wiped out this shame at great expense. The heir of Britain was brilliantly equipped by his old associate in the rebellion, and little time was needed to gather again some of those
preux chevaliers
who had fared ill since their banishment by the elder king. The queen's champion and the prince's master-at-arms, Guillaume le , flew to his summons. There ensued through the spring a succession of tournaments that revived chivalry from its recent languishment — such splendid affairs as gave some luster at last to the young king's vain titles. Not only rival champions vied with each other in the lists, but squadrons of cavaliers of Normandy, Brittany, Flanders, and the Ile de France met each other in heroic contests on the fields. The royal entertainments, the taxes for damage to the countryside, staggered the imagination of prudent men.

When Saint John's day put a term to tournaments, the young king again visited Paris and then journeyed down to Poitou to give that promised aid to Richard, who was still struggling with his barons in the deep south. The young king had no idea of employing himself strenuously to increase the prowess of the Count of Poitou, of whom he was already outrageously jealous. But among Queen Eleanor's fiefs he found again many of his whilom familiars, the portionless "younger sons of younger brothers" whom the elder king had once sent flying from his household, together with sundry outlaws from Anjou and barons from France who had been ruined in the late rebellion. With these the young king found himself a hero, a patron, a prince indeed. These faithful friends courted his magnanimity, nursed his jealousy and wounded pride, awakened dozing suspicions of Angevin treachery. In Poitiers, where the sun lay warm on old roofs and walls, Britain seemed, as it had seemed to the queen, far away on the foggy edges of the world.

In that safe place sedition grew so fast and became so open that the deacon Adam Chirchedune, whom the elder king had set, in guise of vice-chancellor, to keep an eye on the doings of the young king, was on the point of dispatching letters of warning to Henry in Britain; but he was discovered by counter spies with the letters on his person.
²⁷
He was dragged for judgment before the tribunal of the young king and his followers, and the fury of that council at the treachery of the elder king was without bounds. Some held that Henry's agent should be put to death, others that he ought to be flayed alive. The Bishop of Poitiers, interposing, plead Adam's immunity as clerk, so the most drastic suggestions could not be carried out. The young king gravely considered what might be the utmost penalty he could exact from his father's servant for such betrayal. Gathering himself together after a long silence, he said,

"Take him and bind his hands behind his back and have him flogged naked in the squares and outskirts of Poitiers and follow him with a crier that all may know his perfidy. Then take him to Normandy and imprison him in Argentan, and flog him in the public squares of all the towns through which you pass."

Not since Louis Capet, in the ardor of his youth, had come down from Paris to hack off the hands of the queen's rebellious vassals and send their heirs to exile, had Poitiers seen such spectacles in its streets. When Henry had his servant brought to him from Argentan more dead than alive, he suffered an Angevin fury. But he knew beyond peradventure that the rebellion had been reborn.

In the early summer of 1177 Henry was sojourning in Woodstock when a flood of disquieting news reached him from overseas to add to his anxiety over the errantry of the young king. Henry received "unwelcome tidings" from his heir.
²⁹
It is very possible that these concerned the removal of Marguerite from Argentan to Paris to bring forth her first born, not in Anjou or Normandy, but in the city of the Capets. He presently likewise heard that, in spite of the price he had paid for it, his appeal for divorce had failed in the
curia;
and he was warned that a papal legate was hastening from Rome, at the instance of the Capets, to lay an interdict on all his lands unless he speedily celebrated the marriage of Alais and Richard in accordance with the terms of Montmirail.

Henry, who had been at such pains to restore his relations with the church after the Becket tragedy, saw a dire shape in these portents. How was he to contrive simultaneously to keep peace with the church, make sure of the dowry of Alais, so indispensable to his frontiers in Tourame and Poitou, and prevent nevertheless her marriage to the Count of Poitou? It seemed to the Angevin of prime urgency to get Alais's dowry in hand in order to confront the legate with a
fait accompli
, which would shift his own position from that of the aggressor party to that of the aggrieved. With his foot on the soil of Berry, Henry might seem to be merely vindicating long deferred claims to the property against the dilatory Capets; while the legate would be in the inferior position of showing reason why the King of England should withdraw, instead of forbidding him to proceed. The urgency of the situation in Berry was aggravated by the fact that Raoul of Déols, the chief magnate of the province and seigneur of the stronghold of Châteauroux, had lately died (1176), leaving as his sole heir a daughter three years old. It was obviously necessary for Henry to get this marriage prize into his possession as hostage for his demands.

With his baffling program in mind, Henry got together a considerable army, and with this at his back to give weight to his dialectic, he crossed early in September to Normandy. He was later than he meant to be because the outbreak of an old wound from a horse's kick had detained him for a month in Winchester.
³¹
In Rouen he was met by Richard and the young king, and he found the fulminous legate already beating at the gates with threats of interdict. As always in a dilemma, Henry labored to postpone conclusions. He now asked only for a parley with his overlord with a view to a reasonable settlement of the issues between them.

This interview took place near Ivry on the borders of Normandy late in September.
³²
With Louis, besides the legate who had journeyed from Rome to bring the Angevin to justice, were the highest magnates of France — Guillaume, Archbishop of Reims, Philip of Flanders, Thibault of Blois, and others. Louis spoke in his own behalf with deep emotion, charging Henry with a long chapter of unjust encroachments on his domain reaching back for years, but declaring the matter in Berry the most unmitigated affront in that unhappy history. He acknowledged that, because of creeping age and waning strength, he could not with arms vindicate his rights, but he did not therefore renounce them. Appealing to heaven with flowing tears, he charged the heir that had been vouchsafed him and the vassals of his realm to enforce his just claims at a future time. So saying he drew back among his kinsinen.

The moment had come for bringing the wily Angevin to book. But it so befell that the legate had come to the parley consumed by another matter in which the good offices of both kings were required. He had been charged to bear down on the calamitous tidings from Jerusalem that were pouring in flood into the western world and upon a violent upsurge of heresy nearer home in the County of Toulouse. These matters captured the foreground of the parley to the disparagement of the original program. There was never any difficulty in persuading Louis to subscribe to a crusade; and Henry grasped in the project a blessed meed of time for the completion of his own particular designs. What resulted from the conference at Ivry was not the chastisement of the Angevin, but a commitment of the two kings to a joint crusade, the articles for which were hastily stipulated. In the light of this vast project the matter in Berry seemed paltry, thwarting the larger enterprise. Louis agreed to submit his grievance to arbitration; and Henry said he would, after the dowry had been completely resigned to him, look to the promised marriage.