She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (25 page)

The king was not minded to capitulate in the face of this petulant outburst. Whatever the merits of his son’s case, they were outweighed not only by Henry’s own reluctance to cede control in any fundamental sense, but also by the fact that young Henri had so far spectacularly failed to prove that he was ready for the responsibility. Quite apart from the questionable judgement revealed by this public foot-stamping, the Young King, as he had come to be known, was engulfed in debt. Though he could, with some measure of justification, argue that this was unavoidable given that he had no lands with which to support his household, such reasoning was badly compromised by the profligacy of his spending on tournaments and banqueting. Two months earlier, according to the chronicler Robert of Torigni, he had held a Christmas feast so extravagant in its conceit and lavish in its execution that one room alone had been filled with 110 knights all named William.

But the bruised
amour propre
of a vain adolescent took on a more threatening slant in the light of the probability that the Young King’s father-in-law, Louis of France, had encouraged or even instigated his demands, and the certainty that he would support them. And the alarm of the Old King – ‘old’ only in relative terms, since Henry was still a few days short of his fortieth birthday, and as remorselessly energetic as ever – was immediately compounded by a private warning from Ramon of Toulouse that Henry’s younger sons, Richard and Geoffrey, were conspiring with their brother against him.

Henry responded with characteristic swiftness. On the plausible pretext that he was going hunting, he left Limoges at speed, giving covert orders that his castles in Aquitaine should be put on a war footing. Richard and Geoffrey remained behind in the custody of their mother, while Henry decided that the Young King should travel with him, under close supervision, on his journey north. But when the royal party paused to spend the night at the massive fortress of Chinon, one of the castles in the Loire that had precipitated the confrontation at Limoges, young Henri made his escape silently under cover of darkness in the brief hours while his father slept, and rode furiously for Paris.

It had been entirely foreseeable that Henri would seek to defect to his father-in-law’s court, and the Old King’s immediate frustration lay not in the fact of his desertion but in his own failure to pre-empt his son’s flight. It was a much more brutal shock, however, to learn a few days later that Henri’s younger brothers had also made the hurried journey north to join him under Louis’s protection. Richard and Geoffrey, at fifteen and fourteen, were still too young to be acting entirely on the basis of independent political calculation, and they had been left in the apparent security of their mother’s keeping. There was only one conclusion to be drawn, and it was the most shocking of all: Eleanor too was now in open revolt against her husband and king.

One Limousin chronicler, Geoffroi of Vigeois, reports that Eleanor’s name had been included with those of her younger sons
in Ramon of Toulouse’s warning to Henry about the treachery he now faced. If Vigeois is correct, then – given that Henry had left Richard and Geoffrey in Eleanor’s care – either the king had not believed the count’s warning, or he had calculated that Eleanor would not risk pursuing the conspiracy once its existence had been exposed. Either way, he was profoundly mistaken.

Henry’s difficulty in giving credence to his wife’s betrayal is mirrored by that of historians in attempting to explain it. Eleanor herself, of course, left no account of her own motives, nor did contemporary chroniclers, who tended to keep themselves at arm’s length even from their own narratives of her involvement in the rebellion, shielding themselves behind allusions to hearsay from persons unknown with a constant refrain of ‘so it is said …’. The vacuum of information has been filled, as so often in Eleanor’s life, with speculation focusing on her emotional experiences. Just as her personal incompatibility with Louis played a part in the ending of her first marriage, so it has been argued that the private dynamics of her second – which was, after all, a much more potent partnership between two extraordinarily forceful people – lay behind the breach between Eleanor and Henry in 1173. And, as so often with Eleanor, centuries of conjecture have borne fruit in legends of remarkable complexity and persistence. She was violently incensed, so the story goes, by Henry’s passion for a beautiful young woman named Rosamund Clifford, ‘Fair Rosamund’, the ‘rose of the world’. In her jealousy and anger, the queen roused her sons to rebellion against her unfaithful husband, before (in a plot-twist worthy of this granddaughter of a troubadour) procuring the death by poison of her hated rival for the king’s love.

The absence of a single shred of evidence to support this tale – beyond the fact of Henry’s liaison with Rosamund Clifford, who died in 1176 and was buried at the king’s command in a magnificent tomb at the Oxfordshire abbey of Godstow – need not prevent us from taking it seriously, in essence if not in detail: it is not the first or last event in Eleanor’s life of which that is true. But a lack of basic plausibility might. Whatever the reality of Eleanor’s
relationship with her husband – which is impossible now to recover, any more than we can know what really happened between Eleanor and her uncle Ramon of Antioch twenty-five years earlier – there is a banality to the fact that kings had mistresses, and Eleanor was certainly worldly-wise enough to know it. There is no incontrovertible evidence that she and Henry had even seen each other for two years between 1170 and the Christmas court they held together at Chinon in 1172. Instead, Eleanor had been spending her time engaged in a project which offers much more fertile ground in explaining her alienation from her husband in the spring of 1173: the rule of her beloved Aquitaine.

There are indications – fleeting, but suggestive nonetheless – that Eleanor had been seeking to intensify her independence as de facto ruler of her duchy in the year before the crisis of 1173 began to unfold. In June 1172 she had received diplomatic visits from the kings of Navarre and of Aragon-Barcelona; the complex process of attempting to stabilise the geopolitics of southern France, in other words, was one in which she, as well as Henry, had been personally involved. During 1172 she had also addressed three charters not ‘to the king’s faithful followers and hers’, as she had always done previously, but ‘to her own faithful followers’ alone. In interpreting such faint traces of political activity we are reading crumbling runes rather than a clearly incised script, but even this tentative impression of Eleanor’s increasing self-assertion is significant in a context where – for all her apparent authority in her own duchy – her practical powers were constrained by the fact that she controlled neither the bulk of Aquitaine’s revenues, which clinked instead into her husband’s coffers, nor the military resources needed to impose order there. In 1171, when the monks of St Martial’s Abbey in Limoges faced a revolt at their nearby town of La Souterraine, it was to Henry – rather than Eleanor, the duchess on their doorstep – that they appealed for help; and it was Henry, not Eleanor, who sent soldiers to their aid.

The overriding political circumstance, therefore, that shaped Eleanor’s actions in 1173 was the fact that she, no less than her
sons, had been promised power by her husband and then denied it in practice. Or, at the very least, she had achieved some measure of authority in her own duchy, only to find that the fundamentals of political control still lay beyond her grasp. If her son Henri was brimming with resentment at his father’s refusal to relinquish the rights he believed were his due, then Eleanor had no less cause for frustration – and, in fact, much more, since the elaborate diplomacy at Limoges in February 1173, which for a brief instant had seemed such a triumph for Henry, had also represented a dramatic affront to Eleanor’s territorial ambitions.

Henry’s goals in tackling the intractable rivalries of southern French politics had always been to guarantee the frontiers of his empire, to extend his influence beyond them, and to protect access from the Atlantic port of Bordeaux via Toulouse to the lucrative trade routes of the Mediterranean. In 1159, that had meant waging war on Count Ramon of Toulouse; in 1173, it meant receiving his homage. For Henry, with his steely pragmatism and his absolute capacity to inhabit the present moment, it was a political recalculation so obvious that it did not warrant a second thought. Eleanor, however, did not find it so easy to take this strategic about-turn in her stride. When Henry had led his formidable army against the city of Toulouse in the midsummer heat of 1159, he had done so in the name of his wife’s claim to be the rightful heir to the
comté
. Eleanor’s grandmother Philippa, the long-suffering wife of Aquitaine’s troubadour duke, had been the only child of Guilhem IV, count of Toulouse, but – in a scenario that would have been instantly familiar to Henry’s mother Matilda – she had not been accepted as her father’s successor. The Toulousain inheritance had passed instead in the male line to Guilhem’s younger brother, Ramon IV, whose grandson, Ramon V, now held the title. But the dukes of Aquitaine had never conceded the legitimacy of this succession, and Eleanor’s counterclaim had been pressed at sword-point first by Louis of France in 1141, and then by Henry in 1159.

Neither campaign had been successful, and by the end of 1172 Henry had concluded that his interests were better served by
cultivating Ramon’s friendship than by renewing the attempt to bludgeon the count into submission. In February 1173, Eleanor was therefore forced to stand by in impotent silence while the husband she had scarcely seen for two years stormed at his customary speed into her city of Limoges in order to contract a peace with the man who had usurped her right to her grandmother’s territories. Henry, meanwhile, gave no hint of doubt or hesitation about the propriety of his actions; he seems to have suspected nothing awry as Eleanor watched Ramon kneel before him amid the splendour of his court to be publicly confirmed in possession of Toulouse.

The form of that ceremony too, had Henry but recognised it, supplied yet more grist to the mill of his wife’s grievances. Even if Eleanor could have been persuaded that Ramon was rightfully the count of Toulouse, there could be no doubt of the duke of Aquitaine’s claim to the overlordship of the
comté
. In that sense, at least, Ramon’s homage to Henry was unexceptionable, since the king was also duke of Aquitaine in his role as Eleanor’s husband. But the homage that Ramon performed that day to Henry and Eleanor’s son, the Young King Henri, was a different matter. True, Henri had been named heir to England, Normandy and Anjou, but he had no claim to Aquitaine, which had been apportioned as the inheritance of his brother Richard. For Count Ramon to do homage to Henri, in other words, forcefully suggested that Aquitaine was no longer an independent part of Henry’s empire but a dependent one, subsumed under the overarching authority of the Anglo-Norman crown. That would have been anathema to Eleanor’s ancestors; it was unacceptable to many of her Aquitainian vassals; and there is no reason to think that it was any more tolerable to Eleanor herself.

For all that the devastating rupture of 1173 was precipitated by her son Henri’s adolescent posturing, it was Eleanor’s grievances that constituted a coherent critique of her husband’s strategy over the previous few years. It is understandable, perhaps, that the story of this most charismatic and unconventional of queens has been clouded by an enveloping aura of romance and myth, but
if we jettison the presupposition that her estrangement from her husband must have been rooted in emotion, we can find ample grounds for the alienation of a focused political mind. Henry had not delivered the measure of political autonomy he had promised Eleanor or her sons. He had abandoned her claim to Toulouse, a cause for which he, and her first husband before him, had previously been willing to fight. And, in doing so, he had appeared to threaten the autonomy of Aquitaine itself. The triumphant ceremonial at Limoges in February 1173 – an unwelcome political ritual performed at the heart of one of Eleanor’s own cities – could not have been a more stark reminder of the gulf between her hopes for the duchy and her husband’s obliviousness to the aspirations he himself had done so much to foster.

That is not to say that Eleanor’s response was either predictable or well-judged. Rebellion against one’s king – and particularly a king as near-impossible to resist as Henry had proved himself to be – was an intensely dangerous path. But Eleanor had already shown herself to be capable of the apparently unachievable: her almost seamless translation from the crown of France to the crown of England was demonstration enough of that. She had engineered her own escape from one unacceptable royal marriage, and she had proved more than once that she would not be constrained by fear of the consequences of her actions. It might seem scarcely credible that she should send her teenage sons to conspire with her ex-husband against their father, but it is clear nevertheless that that is what she did. Neither Richard and Geoffrey, who were still too young to act with any significant degree of independence, nor the Young King, more of a strutting peacock than a political thinker, were capable of co-ordinating such a threatening coalition between the heirs to Henry’s empire and the king of France. Eleanor was. And it soon became clear quite how much she was putting at risk in doing so.

There could be no surprise, of course, that Louis of France – never the wiliest of politicians, but acquiring some greater worldliness with the advancing years – would take any opportunity to
discomfit his rival and destabilise Henry’s empire. But the spectacle of a ruling family imploding into treachery and recrimination caused horror, among Anglo-Norman commentators at least. It was a ‘deplorable betrayal’, one chronicler said, and it served only to feed the sinister (and deliciously scandalous) tale that Henry’s Angevin dynasty was the ‘Devil’s Brood’, descended from Melusine, daughter of Satan himself.

Whatever the outrage it provoked, however, the story of hot-headed young men resorting to violence and treachery in their unseemly haste to seize their inheritance was a familiar one to contemporary observers. It was a cause for sorrow, regret and anger, but it was far from unprecedented. Louis of France’s ill-fated elder brother Philippe had done little else but provoke their father with his insolence between his coronation at thirteen and his death two years later. A closer parallel still was provided by the travails of Robert II, king of France a century and a half earlier, who had spent the last six years of his life embroiled in a bitter war with his three sons, in which the eldest, the young king Hugues, had died at the age of just eighteen. And there was a ready biblical identification against which clerical chroniclers could measure Henry’s misfortune, in the rebellion of the unhappy Absalom against his father, King David.