Eleanor Of Aquitaine (57 page)

Flushed with pride in his sudden accession of honors and the grandeur of his mission, the young count led his knights to Tours to await the arrival of reinforcements from Brittany and the development of strategic plans. To Tours, where all roads met for the crossing of the Loire, the brothers Lusignan with a small force of their partisans came to join him with news and advice. They reported that Queen Eleanor, having caught the echo of distant rumblings in Normandy, had seemed suddenly to remember that the abby of Fontevrault was not a fortress, in spite of the enclosures with which she had provided it. She had bestirred herself and set out with a meager escort for the greater security of Poitiers.

Her journey obliged her to pass through that border region where, a half dozen times in her life, she had been ambushed and waylaid for forfeits. This time, proceeding with special caution, she had stopped on her way at the march castle of Mirebeau, The Lusignans urged a movement on that stronghold. The Frankish knights were cautious. They counseled waiting for the contingents from Brittany before taking on this diversionary scheme. But the Lusignans pressed their argument. The old Duchess of Aquitaine would be a hostage nonpareil. For her ransom they could, without the cost of strife, wrest from John every concession they required. They would thus capture the very ark of the Plantagenet confederacy. The queen's mind, reaching beyond the memory of most men living, had become a chronicle, an archive encompassing the history of more than three score years and ten; and it was common knowledge that it was from her that John (and his vassals as well) drew their counsels. Never again would she be so exposed; the distance was short; the duchess'
mesnie
was weak; the risks were small, the stakes high. The Lusignans bared their breasts.
¹¹
They would lead the expedition through roads over which they could find their way at midnight. And so, with some misgivings, the Count of Brittany and the Frankish knights put themselves under governance of the brothers Lusignan and set forth from Tours for Mirebeau.

*

The castle of Mirebeau in which Eleanor had taken refuge was an old landmark near the marches of Anjou and Poitou, a walled citadel and keep encircled by a small walled town. The forces of Arthur very soon battered down the gates and took possession of the bourg. Eleanor and her escort in the meantime moved into the keep and tower and lowered the portcullis. Since her assailants wished to take her alive, the preposterous young count opened parley with his grandmother, demanding her surrender. He even offered, if she would first assent to the disposals which Philip Augustus had recently made of her inheritance, to permit her to proceed on her way. Eleanor, who had found a means of sending word of her plight to Guillaume des Roches in Chinon, and to John, who was a good hundred miles away in Maine, spun out negotiations, weaving and unraveling her web, like Penelope, to drag out time.

Meanwhile the Franks and the Poitevins, confident of their quarry, devoted themselves to making the town secure against assault. They walled up all the gates save one, which they kept free to receive their supplies and the expected contingent from Brittany. When nightfall came, and the queen had not yet surrendered, Arthur's army bivouacked in the houses and streets of the town. It was the last of July and, the night being warm, they laid aside their armor and their vestments and fell into the fathomless sleep of soldiers.

John was in the neighborhood of Le Mans when news of the brilliant coup of the Lusignans reached his ear. He had apparently been scouting the marches and recruiting forces, and so was prepared to move without delay. The poet Guillaume le Breton tells the story for the Franks with a few details not found in the barer chroniclers. He relates that the night was magnificent. The great constellations of the Wain and the Herdsman wheeled in the heavens, and the midsummer moon poured light upon the roads, the fords, the bridges, as John's men took them at breakneck speed. Before dawn the king had reached the neighborhood of Mirebeau.

With him were Guillaume de Braose and other liege men, and Guillaume des Roches, who, as warden of Chinon, had probably joined him with some forces along the road. These men looked with proper dread upon the possible consequences of the night's work, whatever its issue might be. Especially they feared for Arthur if he should be exposed to the fury of John. They too had high stakes in the boy, for if he were lost, they themselves were no more than corn between the millstones of the two kings. Besides, many of their own baronial colleagues were among the forces of Arthur in the town. They stopped short of the walls of Mirebeau for parley. The poet reports the substance of their interview.

Said Guillaume des Roches to the king, "We will overcome your enemies this night, if you will swear that you will put no one of your captives to death, that you will receive your nephew in peace, that you will leave all those who are his partisans on this side of the Loire until a truce shall have been made between you."

"To this I agree," said John. "I swear that if I do otherwise, you and these nobles here present may leave my homage, and thenceforth no one of you shall hold me for a king."

It was further agreed that Arthur, if taken, should be given into the custody of Guillaume de Braose, who, as an intimate of John, must have been, among the barons, a candidate of compromise.

Then John's men crept furtively upon the town, "the armed upon the unarmed." Light was breaking, and inside the walls Hugues de Lusignan with some of his men were dispatching an early breakfast of pigeon pie, while most of the force lay still half dressed and snoring in the streets. No trumpet sounded the attack. Guillaume des Roches and the
routiers
burst in at the one free gate and thus shut off all hope of escape. A wild melee ensued as men drunk with sleep roused themselves in dead-end streets and doorways, a hand-to-hand encounter in which John himself gave his nephew a show of knightly exercise. Not a man of Brittany's force escaped. Guillaume de Braose, who himself took Arthur, brought his captive to the king — Count of Brittany, Maine, Anjou… Lord of Touraine… Count of Poitou indeed!

The captives were almost too many to handle. The Lusignans and their partisans, among them many of the noblest Frankish and Poitevin seigneurs, including even some of the queen's relatives, were put in chains and, as a special mark of shame, were bound to ox wains, their faces turned disgracefully to the carts' tails, and thus they were paraded for the next few days through their own countryside to the crossing of the Loire. There were far too many prisoners for the dungeons of the marches, so there was no question of John's keeping the oath he had made with respect to his captives. Convoying the most precious of his prizes, the king went forward as quickly as possible to the fortresses of Normandy, and among these he distributed the prisoners secretly so that rescuers would be baffled, not knowing where any particular person might be hidden.

Hugues le Brun he consigned to a special tower under special custody in Caen. Many of the others he sent to England where, in the next few months, some were starved and some were blinded and a few in the course of time escaped. Among those who went to captivity in England was Arthur's sister, the "pearl of Brittany." What had happened to her was a mystery to the Franks for years.
¹⁴
Treaties made more than a decade later were based upon the contingency of her survival. About August 10 John placed his capital prize in the grim castle of Falaise, whose dungeons had since the time of William the Conqueror engulfed generations of Angevin captives in oblivion. He cleared out other prisoners from the fortress to prevent any contacts and placed there the "Hope of Brittany" under the sole responsibility of his chamberlain, Hubert de Burgh.

A crooked thing is ruined and fit only to ruin everything else. (Chose tournée est corrumpue et popre à tout faire tourner par suite.)

Guillaume le Maréchal, III,

PHILIP AUGUSTUS RECEIVED THE NEWS from Mirebeau while his forces were engaged in the siege of Arques, the capture of which was to be the climax of his exploits in Normandy, for its fall was to uncover the ramparts of Rouen itself. The monk who brought the disastrous tidings from the west trembled for his life as he approached the king.
¹
To Philip the news was incredible from end to end. The folly of the hothead Lusignans! The simplicity of Arthur! The stupidity of the Frankish mentors of the count! The demonic fleetness of the Plantagenets! The Count of Brittany, the instrument of all the Frankish imperial plans, dungeoned in the rock of Falaise! Elect barons of France to the number of more than two hundred in Angevin fortresses beyond hope of rescue! And all this for the prize of the superannuated queen, who might have been left, at eighty years of age, to sleep herself away in her dotage. And that crafty beldame, the root of all evil, for whom so many pawns had been wasted, had moved triumphantly, like a queen in chess, within the safety of her own bourne! No such irretrievable disaster had marked the whole struggle of the rival dynasties. The flower of chivalry was in chains. The Carolingian dream, a week before so rosy and so palpable, retreated to the horizon and faded to mirage. Overdepressed in defeat, as oversanguine in victory, the King of the Franks ordered the catapults and mangonels he had brought to the siege of Arques dismantled, and retired to seclusion to put his mind in order and recast his shattered plans. His only gesture for the moment was to send forces down the Loire valley to Tours, where they despoiled the royal portion of the city. Thereupon John sent his
rentiers
to burn the ecclesiastical portion in a bootless reprisal; so that rich and beautiful city, with its noble monuments, was, like Angers and Le Mans, reduced to desolation, and its citizens turned away from the ruthless Plantagenet and his Angevin furies.

After Mirebeau, Guillaume des Roches followed John some way into Normandy, hoping to mitigate the ferocity of the king's lust for vengeance on the captives whom the barons had taken under his own leadership and under the king's oath. When he found John implacable, he turned from him, as from a crooked one impossible to deal with and fit only to ruin all those with whom he treated. He sacrificed the custody of Chinon to his honor with his peers and drew to himself the other seigneurs who were dismayed by the king's faithlessness and inhumanity. Among these was Amaury of Thouars, who had seen his younger brother Raoul tied to an ox cart on his way to Normandy. And now barons of the western provinces, many of whom had relatives or friends among the captives, withdrew in numbers from John's allegiance, says the chronicler, and joined the forces of resistance.

By the middle of October these had gathered strength to seize Angers, whose citizens had first acclaimed Arthur of Brittany as Coeur-de-Lion's heir for the Angevin provinces; and at the end of the month they came very near to bringing off a coup that would have forced John to negotiate for the release of Arthur himself. The agents of Guillaume des Roches marooned Isabella of Angoulême in Chinon, where John had left her for safety, and it was only by sheer good fortune that the queen succeeded in rejoining the king in Le Mans under the adroit escort of one of his knights, Jean of Preaux. Thenceforth the huntsman's art in the Angevin provinces became the pursuit of hostages. In reprisal for the threat to Isabella, John's forces, under the ferocious
routier
Louvrecaire, carried off the wives and daughters of his enemies. Then, says the chronicler, from day to day miseries were multiplied in Maine, Poitou, Anjou, and Brittany, as villas, castles, towns were looted and burned, and the ravagers spared neither age, nor sex, nor condition.

King John had reason to fear Guillaume des Roches who, besides being an excellent strategist and a fearless knight, had served on both sides of the conflict and had recently been privy to his own counsels and knew too much about the poverty of his resource in men and treasure and the deviousness of his contrivings. The autumnal maneuvers of the barons under Guillaume brought the king back from Normandy to secure the marches of Anjou. Through November he kept cautiously to the strong fortifications of Saumur and Chinon, whence he could survey events both north and south of the Loire. His presence was enough to dissuade the barons from overt acts. But his castles were surrounded by enemies he had made at Mirebeau, and the emptiness of his treasury forbade his taking strong measures to repress the growing sedition. His stark necessities were revealed in November, and the barons were astounded at the recklessness with which he met his crisis. After having secured custody of their castles and taken hostages for their good faith, he freed for ransom two of his richest prizes and most irreconcilable foes, the brothers Hugues le Brun and Raoul of Eu, who speedily, notwithstanding their pledges, joined the baronial party.

In the meantime not much transpired regarding the fate of the Count of Brittany, and lack of news bred dark rumors.
⁴
As fall wore to winter and horrors seeped like ooze from the dungeons of certain of the captives, the barons dared no longer postpone efforts for their release, even at the peril of exposing Arthur or other individual prisoners to extreme hazards. They decided, in spite of the risk of reprisal on some of the prisoners, to bring pressures to bear on John. Around Christmas time Philip Augustus in their name called upon the Plantagenet king to account for the well-being of his nephew.

The impatience of Philip Augustus to grasp the prize of his Carolingian forebears had exposed the Count of Brittany to the utmost danger. The youth,
⁵
who had been bred on the bitter rancors of Constance and inflated by all he had learned in Paris concerning his pretensions, had been thrust at Mirebeau upon the open field between the two kings at feud and had become himself the object of the direst intrigue on either side. The moot titles with which Philip had endowed him marked him for the Plantagenets as the dupe and tool of the Capet's imperial plans and so a fit prey for vengeance. For the Franks, he was the indispensable counter in all negotiations to squeeze and harry John into acceptance of Capetian claims. For many of the barons of the western provinces, the young count, malleable, still innocent of the perfidies that had made both kings infamous to their vassals, seemed a more hopeful overlord than either Capet or Plantagenet; and to many his claims to the inheritance of Coeur de Lion appeared more just than John's. To have custody of Arthur rose to prime importance.

John's sudden success at Mirebeau found him unprepared to profit by his victory. Plantagenet luck had put the stakes in his hand; but the barons observed no perspicacious plan to end the feud that weekly consumed the fairest provinces of Christendom. Instead of directing the course of affairs, the king merely improvised, ransacking each event as it occurred for his advantage, and taking meantime such occasions as he could to slake his thirst for vengeance.

The prisoners from Mirebeau were hardly disposed in their dungeons when some of Arthur's own household sought a rendezvous with John to secure the count's release, but nothing came of it. Barons tried to intercede for the youth "for fear he would disappear." Some of John's own vassals offered their homage to Philip Augustus for the duration of Arthur's imprisonment. But none of these tactics produced the desired result. However, Philip's summons to John in December to account for Arthur found the King of the English ill at ease.

At the end of January he made a visit to Falaise for a parley with his nephew, who had now had six months to reflect upon his position as Count of Maine, Anjou, and so forth. By this time John appears to have been seized with the idea of reattaching his captive to the destinies of his own house. But his overtures failed. He found in the youth a stouthearted Plantagenet infused with the Scotch blood of his mother and the wild strain of Brittany.

When offered reinstatement in his inheritance on condition of homage and obedience, the count became possessed of the Angevin demon. He replied with a vehemence that ill became a captive with three iron rings on his feet that there could be no peace until John rendered up to him not only Brittany, of which there could be no question, but Maine, Anjou, Touraine… Poitou… England… everything of which Richard was possessed or of which he was heir on the day of his death.

The stiff-necked intractability of the youth after six months of imprisonment infuriated John. But his fury was half fear. Had this preposterous boy some assurance of rescue that he dared be so bold? Were some of his own barons in collusion with the heir of Brittany? The moth of suspicion began to prey upon the mind of the king and gradually spread its work of corruption. He who knows not whom to suspect, says the Poitevin proverb, ends by suspecting everyone. The prisoner became too hot to hold, far too precious to deliver. John revolved schemes for disposing of the torment of his anxiety. His counselors, says Coggeshall, persuaded him that no peace could stand while Arthur lived as a potential menace, and urged that he put an end to intrigue that was certain to continue interminably in behalf of the count by having the youth blinded and so maimed as to render him forever unfit to be a royal figurehead.

From the fierce interview John remanded Arthur to his dungeon. Leaving Falaise for Rouen, he ordered three sergeants to the prison fortress to carry out the mutilations. But only one, reports the chronicler, kept his stomach for his dastardly assignment; and this one raised such an outcry from Arthur that Hubert de Burgh himself intervened, and the young count, limp with terror and exhaustion, was left to his custody alone. Hubert, when taxed for preventing the crime, asserted that he had done it to save John from the consequences of an act which the king himself would disavow when his passion was spent; that the repercussions among the barons would break the loyalty of men still attached to him, so that he would presently be unable to man his castles with faithful knights.

However, there had been too much smoke to conceal the fire that had been kindled in the castle of Falaise, and something had to be done to obscure the situation. It was given out that Arthur had pined away of chagrin in his captivity. His knell was rung in the town and his garments were distributed to the lazar house.
⁸
But this report, spreading from the fortress, produced such fierce resentment against John that presently a second rumor followed the first, to the effect that Arthur was not really dead, but had recovered from a desperate illness and was still in custody.

The incident, as it turned out, taught John a helpful lesson. He discovered how to turn the anxiety that had tormented him upon his enemies. He observed the value of mystery. He neither denied nor affirmed, and the confusion of rumors respecting Arthur paralyzed the enterprises of the latter's partisans. If he were dead, should they support a "regency" of Guy of Thouars for the infant daughter of Constance of Brittany? Or go over to Philip Augustus? Or cleave to John?
¹
If he were not dead, to stir might be to procure his death or invite reprisal upon captive barons. They could only wait and see. To the Plantagenet who knew his "matter of Brittany," there was something sardonic in the disappearance of the "Hope of Brittany," who, like his legendary namesake, appeared to have cast Excalibur away and betaken himself to Avalon. The doubts gave John time to wait on fortune. In the next weeks various stories were current among the Bretons. Their count had been slain at the behest of the king by one Peter of Malendroit; he had been secretly buried in the abby of Saint André de Gouffern in the diocese of Sées; John with his own arm had pushed him off a cliff at Cherbourg and drowned him in the sea.

Soon after the failure of the plot in Falaise, John, perhaps suspecting that the loyalty of Hubert de Burgh would not go so far as to dispose of Arthur, caused his prisoner to be removed to Rouen,
¹⁰
where through Lent he made his own chief residence. On the eighth of March the king gave the tower of Rouen with its garrison into the custody of Robert de Vieuxpont, who thus became the surety for Arthur;
¹¹
and on the thirty-first he made a very considerable grant to Robert — the two castles of Appleby and Brough in Westmoreland with all the bailiffry of that district — and ordered these properties to be delivered to two servants of Robert, who were authorized to take them at once in his name.

On Wednesday of Easter week (April
2)
John betook himself to Molmeaux, a fortified manor a few miles down the river from Rouen, to which he was wont to retire frequently from the commotions of the capital. With him were his loyal Norman baron, Guillaume de Braose, and three of his justiciars from England, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, William Briwere, and Reginald of Cornhull, perhaps others Guillaume le Breton relates that at about this juncture in the affairs of Arthur, Guillaume de Braose appeared before John and his barons and publicly disclaimed further responsibility for the captive he had taken at Mirebeau.

"I know not," said Guillaume, "what fate awaits your nephew, whose faithful guardian I have been. I return him to your hands in good health and sound in all his members. Put him, I pray you, in some other happier custody. The burden of my own affairs bids me resign."

The king's associates at Molmeaux can hardly have been unaware of the agitation of John's mind during the rendezvous, nor uncertain about the root of it. But what occurred in the next days of Holy Week was of such import that knowledge was dangerous. They disclosed nothing, and the chroniclers of events in Normandy dared not set down in their annals any of the circumstances that may have come to their hearing. However, in spite of the strictest secrecy, almost at once new and sinister reports spread from Rouen. All that subsequently emerged in the chronicles was the fact that, after the eve of Good Friday, the young count was seen no more by any man with a tongue in his head or the ability to scrawl a message to the world. Says Matthew Paris, "It was not safe to write of him even when he was dead." The tongues of suspicion wagged, however, and certainly those who talked had access to testimony whispered from ear to ear. The reports accused the Plantagenet king of foul play, of the impious crime of murdering with his own hand his nephew, a youth tender of sinew and unarmed, and of committing this dreadful sin on the eve of Good Friday in Rouen.