She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (27 page)

The nature of that advantage became clearly apparent in the spring of 1185, when she was once again called to her husband’s side, this time – necessitating her first cross-Channel voyage in more than ten years – in Normandy. The occasion was an unprecedented and startling ceremony in which Richard was required to surrender Aquitaine back into his mother’s hands as its rightful duchess. The cause, however, was no sudden apotheosis for Eleanor, but a symptom of new tensions that were wracking her family. Richard was now the king’s eldest surviving son, and was expected
– not least by himself – to succeed his brother as heir to England, Normandy and Anjou. Henry did not seek to deny his son this royal inheritance, but he assumed that Richard would in turn cede Aquitaine to his youngest brother John, who would thereby be provided with the lands he had until now signally lacked. Richard, however, had not fought for his mother’s duchy simply to hand it over to a needy sixteen-year-old – especially if the proffered exchange was a status so insubstantial, while their father still lived, that it had provoked their dead brother to repeated rebellion.

And by 1184 it was clear that Richard was prepared, yet again, to fight for his right to Aquitaine. In an access of frustration at Richard’s recalcitrance, Henry declared that his youngest son should meet fire with fire and take the duchy by force – an outburst of fury rather than a declaration of strategy, given that John had no army and Henry no intention of supplying him with one. But that summer, the young prince did indeed launch a series of plundering raids into Richard’s county of Poitou. It was a provocative campaign made possible by an ally whose intervention in this conflict – like his previous participation in the Young King’s rebellions – was poisonously damaging to the cause of family harmony.

Geoffrey, the middle of Henry and Eleanor’s surviving sons, was, at twenty-five, the ruler of Brittany, the inheritance of his young wife Constance. He was an able soldier and, like the dead Henri, a brilliant tournament fighter, but his relentless and unprincipled ambition won him as many critics as he had admirers. He was ‘overflowing with words, smooth as oil’, according to the censorious observer Gerald of Wales; a prince ‘possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the apparently indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue, of tireless endeavour and a hypocrite in everything’. Geoffrey had fought by his eldest brother’s side against Henry and Richard at Limoges in 1183; now, with troops from his Breton duchy at his back, he shepherded his youngest brother into an assault on northern Aquitaine in the hope of winning a larger slice of their father’s empire for himself.

In the circumstances, Eleanor’s sudden emergence from her enforced seclusion just a few months later, at Christmas 1184, becomes a great deal less shocking. That autumn, once news reached the Old King in England that Geoffrey and John were ravaging Poitou while Richard attacked Brittany in retaliation, Henry summoned all three of his unruly sons to his side and knocked their heads together, imposing on them a formal ritual of reconciliation at Westminster before the court moved to Windsor for Christmas. There could be no doubt that their mother’s presence during these manoeuvres, and the authority over Aquitaine that she still embodied, prisoner or no, was a significant weapon to be deployed in Henry’s campaign to break his sons to his will and keep them from destroying one another.

Just how significant became apparent when winter turned to spring. After renewed sniping and snarling between Richard and Geoffrey, over Normandy this time, Richard was ordered to relinquish Aquitaine into his mother’s keeping. And the most extraordinary aspect of the ceremony, which took place in Normandy in April 1185, was not Henry’s command, but Richard’s compliance. Without Eleanor, an end to the wrangling had been nowhere in sight. Richard would not concede Aquitaine to anyone who threatened his rights as its duke. And Henry would not brook any substantive challenge to his lordship over his domains in the present, or any diminution of his entitlement to determine their future. In that context, the position of a controversial queen became uniquely uncontroversial, an oasis of calm amid a storm of contention. Richard could resign his duchy into his mother’s hands because her authority there had always underwritten his, and because the closeness of their relationship offered reassurance for his rights as her heir. Meanwhile, the rights that Henry derived from Eleanor’s role as his wife guaranteed his own overlordship of Aquitaine, and his claims on its future.

For Eleanor, this was no moment of political resurrection or practical restitution. She was allowed no initiative, no freedom of movement or action; she was the static fulcrum around which
her husband and sons could reorder their unstable relationships. But still, the measured dignity with which she played her part – betraying no public sign of bitterness at the confinement in which she had been kept for ten years – told its own story. At sixty-one, she had lost none of the instinctive political understanding that had always animated her steps through her public life, but there was a new patience, a new appreciation of risk to herself and her sons, behind her acquiescence when grants in Aquitaine were made in her name ‘with the assent and will of my lord Henry, king of England, and of my sons Richard, Geoffrey and John’.

More patience would be required of her yet. Her participation had helped to suppress the nascent conflict of 1184, but her husband and sons could not be kept at peace for long, and their divisions were lovingly fostered by the new king of France, Philippe II, the son and heir for whom Louis had waited so many years that the boy had been nicknamed ‘
Dieudonné
’, ‘God-given’. Young Philippe had suffered a life-threatening illness in the autumn of 1179, and Louis, in desperation, had crossed the Channel to pray at the Canterbury shrine of Thomas Becket, whose martyrdom had made him a saint little more than two years after his murder. Louis was accompanied on this pilgrimage by his ‘most dear brother’, King Henry – the two kings finding unlikely common ground at last while the woman they had each married was enduring her protracted imprisonment. But on his way home to France Louis suffered a debilitating stroke. He clung to life for another year, until in September 1180 Philippe found himself in possession of his father’s throne at the age of just fifteen.

The new French king had met Henry’s sons Henri and Geoffrey when they attended his coronation at Reims, which had taken place, as was customary, during his father’s lifetime. His closeness to them was undoubtedly infused with the warmth of personal affection, but it was underpinned by the cold steel of Philippe’s implacable ambition to pick apart the English king’s empire and fashion the kingdom of France into a great power in its place. Henri was now dead, but when Geoffrey, chafing at the peace
imposed on him in 1185, rode into Paris in 1186, Philippe welcomed him with open arms. Geoffrey’s capacity to make trouble was extinguished that summer with sudden violence, when he was unhorsed and trampled to death in a tournament mêlée; and at his funeral the French king made an extravagant show of his grief – by one account having to be restrained from casting himself into the open grave in the choir of Paris’s new cathedral of Notre-Dame. However, Geoffrey’s abrupt exit from the political stage presented Philippe with a new opportunity to disturb Henry’s hold on his territories, by claiming custody, as overlord of the duchy of Brittany, of Geoffrey’s two young daughters and the baby son, Arthur, to whom his widow gave birth seven months after his death.

By June 1187 conflict over Brittany and renewed tensions over the perennially controversial lands of the Vexin, the frontier between Normandy and France, had intensified to the point of open confrontation. Henry and Philippe drew up their armies in battle array at Châteauroux, 150 miles south of Paris, and for two weeks envoys moved between the enemy lines in search of a settlement. Neither the two kings, nor the noblemen they commanded, were eager to face the indiscriminate dangers of a pitched battle, accustomed as they were to the controlled risks of warfare by siege and raid, and after intense negotiations a two-year truce was agreed. But when Philippe retreated northward to Paris, he carried away an unexpected prize: Henry’s son Richard rode with him.

Richard could not have made his disaffection more plainly manifest. Philippe, already at twenty-two a master of the telling political gesture, kept his royal guest constantly at his side. ‘Every day they ate at the same table and shared the same dish,’ observed Roger of Howden, a clerk at Henry’s court, ‘and at night the bed did not separate them’ – this last a striking public demonstration of political, not sexual, intimacy. The cause of this overt estrangement between the king of England and his eldest surviving son was a familiar and familiarly intractable one: Henry’s refusal to make a settlement of the succession that was acceptable to his heir, and his heir’s refusal to accept the possibility that his younger
brother John might have a claim on their father’s territories.

Richard’s ostentatious closeness to Philippe did not last, and by the end of the summer he was back in Anjou with his father. But the question of the succession continued to spread its venom. True, other concerns emerged to occupy Richard’s attention: in the autumn of 1187 he took the crusader’s cross, as his mother had done forty years earlier, to commit himself to the future rescue of Jerusalem (which had just fallen – in a catastrophic reverse for the cause of Christendom – to the Muslim forces of Al-Malik al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Yusuf, known to his enemies in the west as Saladin). But the fact that Richard omitted to consult his father before promising to fight in the Holy Land only served to emphasise the tensions between them, to such an extent that when revolt erupted yet again in Aquitaine in 1188, Henry was suspected of having a hand in encouraging the rebels. With his usual talent for manipulation, Philippe of France worked tirelessly to exploit the divisions between father and son, until at the beginning of 1189, once again, the Angevin dynasty was at war with itself.

By the late spring, Richard and Philippe were in the field together, attacking and overrunning a chain of Henry’s castles in Maine. The English king, hamstrung by his fear that Richard would betray him, had succeeded only in alienating his heir to such an extent that Richard now believed the rumours that Henry planned to disinherit him in favour of his youngest and favourite son, John. And Henry, at fifty-six, had at last exhausted the prodigious stores of energy that had kept him in almost constant motion since he had first begun to accumulate his vast territories more than thirty years before. His health had been faltering for months, and, in the oppressive summer heat, he could fight no longer. In his fortress of Chinon, he lay racked with fever, agonised by the failure of his plans. He was unable to forgive the son who would succeed him, and at the last his spirit was broken by the news that even John, the son on whom he had lavished his love, had deserted him. On 6 July 1189, Henry II turned his face to the wall and died.

When the news reached Richard, he rode as hard as he could to meet the cortège that carried his father’s corpse a few miles westward from Chinon, across the river Vienne to Fontevraud. It was dusk when the new king stepped into the silence of the abbey church where the royal bier lay. He stood for a moment, looking down for the last time at his father’s face. Then he turned on his heel and walked away; and sent word to England that his mother was now a free woman.

 

Eleanor was sixty-five years old. Fifteen years had passed since she had last enjoyed any significant autonomy in her own life, beyond the day-to-day distractions permitted in her captivity. She was no longer young, by any measure, and she had lost two of her sons while she waited for the liberation of her husband’s death. No one who had witnessed her earlier lives as queen first of France and then of England could have been in any doubt of her uncommon calibre, but in the circumstances few could have predicted that she would re-emerge into the political world with an urgency and momentum that would have been remarkable in someone half her age. And she did so with a composure of judgement at which her fortitude in enduring the indignities of her imprisonment had already hinted. The monastic chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, in recounting the tale of the rebellion that had cost her freedom, described the queen as ‘
prudens femina valde, nobilibus orta natali
bus, sed instabilis
’ – ‘an extremely astute woman, sprung from noble stock, but unsteady’. Unsteady she might have been, once, in her lack of matrimonial loyalty and her willingness to take spectacular risks; but now she brought a judiciously calm control to the business of working to establish her son’s regime.

For weeks after his father’s death, Richard was occupied in Normandy, stamping out the disorder that he himself had done so much to unleash. And so, along with the order for his mother’s release, the new king despatched to England a command that Eleanor (in the words of the historian Ralph of Diceto) should have ‘the power of doing whatever she wished in the kingdom’. This was not only a stunning reversal of fortune, but a transformation
unprecedented even in a life marked out by overwhelming upheaval. Eleanor’s years as a queen in France and in England had been spent as a consort, her authority, such as it was, acquired as a satellite of her husband the king. Even in Aquitaine, which was properly her own, she had not controlled the levers of power, in the form of money and men. Now, however, she would exercise the power of a king in England. This was not an official regency: her role was not defined or circumscribed in any technical form. Instead, her son had given her the same freedom to command that he himself enjoyed.