She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (26 page)

The monastic historian William of Newburgh, for example, was in no doubt that young Henri was an ‘ungrateful son’ whose disobedience to his father had ‘violated the law of nature’. Even so, the very fact that his disloyalty could be fitted into the archetype of ‘the accursed Absalom’ meant that the impulses behind it were culturally understood; while the qualities that provoked it – ambition, aggression, unbridled self-assertion – were those which, differently directed, could be seen as proper to a king.

The same could not be said of Eleanor. There were no obvious historical precedents nor cultural archetypes to frame her rebellion. When the contemporary chronicler Ralph of Diceto, dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and a learned historian, scoured the annals for past parallels against which to compare the revolt, he compiled
more than thirty instances of sons rebelling against their fathers, but not a single case of a queen taking up arms against her husband. Not only that, but the traits Eleanor displayed in resisting Henry were the antithesis of those understood as queenly. A queen was a consort, a helpmeet, an intercessor in the cause of peace and justice. Above all, perhaps, she was doubly bound by a sacred duty to obey her husband – once as a subject, and again as his wife. Eleanor’s son Henri, William of Newburgh believed, ‘had sullied his early years by an indelible stain’, but Eleanor’s behaviour threatened the very fabric of society itself. ‘Man is the head of woman,’ the archbishop of Rouen reminded her in some alarm, quoting St Paul, in a public letter composed on his behalf by the scholar and stylist Peter of Blois. ‘We know that unless you return to your husband you will be the cause of a general ruin.’

But Eleanor had not been cowed by scurrilous rumour in Antioch; she had not acquiesced in the face of a papal prohibition on divorcing her first husband; and she would not back down now. With her sons safely in Paris under the wing of her jubilant ex-husband, she set about mustering military support in Aquitaine, which was readily forthcoming from those lords – Poitevins for the most part – who had always resisted the imposition of central control in the duchy and who had tangled with Henry before: the counts of Angoulême, their allies the Lusignan family and the Lusignans’ cousin Geoffroi de Rancon, at whose side Eleanor had braved the ill-fated ascent of Mount Cadmus a quarter of a century earlier. As she did so, Louis was assembling an intimidating coalition of allies in support of her sons in Paris. There was Mathieu, count of Boulogne, who had acquired his title by marrying the daughter of King Stephen and his queen Mathilde of Boulogne; the count’s elder brother Philippe, count of Flanders; Stephen’s nephew Thibaud of Blois; and William, the king of Scots. All saw the unmissable opportunity – together with other defectors in England, Normandy, Brittany and Anjou – to lay their eager hands on lands they had either forfeited, or never stood a chance of acquiring, under Henry’s uncompromising rule.

As her sons prepared to take up arms at the head of this great noble alliance against their father, Eleanor made ready to return for the first time in twenty years to the French court in Paris. It is impossible to know whether she had made a calculated decision to play the odds of this nerve-wracking game, or whether her fearlessness was born of an inability to contemplate the risk of failure. Either way, she was to find that – yet again – she had met her match in Henry. For once, this was a challenge from which she would not emerge unscathed. Before she could reach Paris, at some place and time unknown on the road north from Poitiers, she was captured by her husband’s forces – and found to be disguised for her journey in men’s clothing, according to the chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury. The story could well be the sensationalised elaboration of a disapproving monk, but at the very least it remains tantalisingly allusive, given that she had figuratively (if not literally) adopted the guise of a man from the moment she rejected her husband’s authority.

No tunic and hose, however, could now save her from her fate. By the end of 1173 it was apparent that Henry’s military genius, his cool head in a crisis and his hastily assembled army of ruthlessly professional mercenaries were holding firm against the onslaught of his sons and their allies. That autumn, with the rebel campaign faltering, Henry offered them terms for peace that were financially rewarding but conceded nothing of the power they craved. Encouraged by Louis, the boys fought on, with sixteen-year-old Richard mounting an impressively stubborn defence of his mother’s county of Poitou. By the autumn of 1174, however, it was clear that there was no alternative but to throw themselves on their father’s mercy. Henry loved his sons with ‘an inordinate love’, William of Newburgh believed, and certainly the king was generous in his victory. He exchanged the kiss of peace with his prodigal offspring, and gave them money and noble (if deliberately unfortified) residences in the territories they had claimed, to salve their battered egos. There would be no concession of jurisdiction, but this time they were in no position to argue. Others might accuse
them of breaking nature’s law, but Henry was prepared to be magnanimous: the treaty agreed at the pretty town of Montlouis in the Loire at the end of September offered not simply reconciliation, but reconciliation with honour. Not, however, to Eleanor.

For Henry’s captured queen there would be no forgiveness. Her name was not spoken at Montlouis. By then, she was far away in England, where she had already endured months of an imprisonment that would last as long as her husband lived. Revolt had brought her sons chastening experience, and a fresh start with their father. For Eleanor, on the other hand, the rest was impenetrable silence.

 

Ever since she was thirteen years old, Eleanor had stood at the heart of western European politics. For a decade and a half she had been queen of France; for two decades more she had been queen of England. Throughout, she had cherished her rights and responsibilities as duchess of Aquitaine. She had travelled to Jerusalem and back, and that dramatic voyage had been only the most extraordinary episode in a life lived in constant motion. Above all, perhaps, she had believed in her own agency. Though she could not command her husbands, she had an indomitable will and a tough political mind, and she had always had a choice about how she reacted to the circumstances, however difficult, in which she found herself.

Now, for the first time, she had no choice at all. How can we begin to imagine her response as weeks of captivity became months, and months became years, until it became clear that in this, as in so many things, Henry would be relentless? Her isolation was such that imagination is all we have. Even the place of her confinement is not known for certain, bar the fact that it was in England, where expenses for her keeping were periodically allowed at the exchequer. We know nothing of how she spent her days while the years of her middle age – the time she had hoped to spend ruling her homeland of Aquitaine – ebbed fruitlessly away. Nor can we be sure how much she knew about what was happening outside the walls of her prison (for that is what it was, however comfortable her accommodation). It is likely that Henry made every effort to restrict her contact with the outside world; it is equally likely that Eleanor did her utmost to subvert his orders.

We can only guess, therefore, what news she heard of her sons as they grew into adulthood without her. Was it a source of distress or consolation to know that her favourite, Richard, was ruling Aquitaine in her stead, and showing his worth as a soldier and a strategist? Her sons, at any rate, did not forget her. Henry must have hoped that her incarceration would serve to coerce their loyalty – although that was a happy side-effect of a policy rooted in his own rage at the perversion of his wife’s betrayal and the intolerable public humiliation it represented.

If Eleanor was a hostage for her sons’ co-operation, her plight did its work in harnessing Richard to her husband’s cause. His first task as his father’s lieutenant in Aquitaine, in command now of the troops and revenues Eleanor had never been granted for her own government there, was to raze the castles of his recently abandoned allies, those Poitevin lords who had backed his rebellion. The biting irony of the campaign did nothing to deter the eighteen-year-old duke from executing his task with grim efficiency. His next eight years were spent in the saddle at the head of his soldiers, suppressing a succession of revolts by Aquitainian lords unhappy with Henry’s imposing regime and its incarnation in their midst in the person of Richard himself. There could have been no more rigorous practical training in the art and science of military command, and it forged Richard into a leader of such implacable single-mindedness, such nerveless courage and pitiless brutality, that, despite his devotion to his mother’s homeland, he was loathed by many of his vassals there.

His elder brother Henri, meanwhile, was putting his military talents to more frivolous use. The Young King’s passion was for tournaments – the wild excitement and violent glamour of the mêlée – which he pursued across France and Flanders at the head of a following largely composed of landless knights, the younger sons of younger brothers who reaped the rewards of his careless extravagance. He had neither the application nor the stamina to learn from his father’s attempts to school him in statecraft and the harsh lessons of real, rather than counterfeit, warfare, but repeated
demonstrations of that fact did nothing to dent his conviction that he was the victim of outrageous injustice in being kept from the exercise of power. At first his father placated his tantrums and threats – Henry rendered indulgent in this, as in no other area of his life, by his love for his son and his blind determination that Henri would, in time, come to appreciate the scale of his future responsibilities. But by 1183 it had become starkly apparent that no moment of self-realisation – nor any concern for his incarcerated mother – would restrain the Young King from following the dictates of his bloated ego.

By the spring of that year Aquitaine had emerged as his chosen battleground. Having failed to persuade his father to hand Normandy or Anjou into his control, Henri had toyed with the idea of leaving for Jerusalem in a fit of flamboyant pique, before deciding instead to pick a fight with his younger brother. Richard, in Aquitaine, already had the independence Henri craved; and the hostility of those Aquitainian lords who resented their imperious duke seemed to offer the Young King a chance to oust his brother from power, and to supplant him. At an extraordinary gathering of the royal court at Christmas 1182, with more than a thousand knights crowding his hall at Caen, the Old King sought, yet again, to broker a truce by which he might unite his fractured family. But once the extent of Henri’s disloyalty became known – once it was clear that he was mustering for war at the very moment he pledged his commitment to peace – even Henry had to concede that his heir could be indulged no further. The king summoned troops to the Limousin to fight alongside Richard and his forces, while Henri rallied the rebels of Aquitaine to defy them. Once again – and this time without Eleanor’s help – her husband and sons stood on the brink of the abyss.

But this time there would be no reconciliation. At the end of May, after an inconclusive siege of the Young King’s encampment at Limoges by his father and brother, Henri fell gravely ill with dysentery. When his doctors realised that he was beyond help, he sent urgently to his father, begging forgiveness and the privilege of
a last meeting. But he had abused Henry’s trust too many times, and the king, fearing some new treachery, would not go. Henri died on 11 June 1183, at the age of just twenty-eight. The celebrity of this most glamorous and shallow of princes was such that the people of Le Mans kidnapped his corpse en route to its last resting-place at Rouen; only under threat of force did they disinter it from a new-made tomb in their cathedral and send the cortège on its way. And with his death, his revolt collapsed, along with his grief-stricken father’s plans for the future of his empire.

Eleanor, hearing in faraway England of the loss of the son she had not seen for a decade, was now fifty-nine. It was said that the dying Henri, overwhelmed with remorse and seeking absolution from his absent father, had entreated that his mother should be dealt with less severely for her part in his first mutiny. If the reports were true, his petition may help to explain the shock of Eleanor’s appearance at court almost eighteen months later. Dressed in gowns of fur-trimmed samite for which special funds were released from the exchequer, she spent Christmas of 1184 at Windsor with her sons Richard and John and her daughter Matilda, newly returned to England with her husband, Duke Heinrich of Saxony, who had been exiled from Germany by the Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. But this unexpected show of family unity did not foreshadow any greater liberation for the queen, nor any more general pardon granted by her estranged husband. Eleanor remained in Henry’s custody, to be summoned when there was advantage in doing so, and otherwise kept sequestered.