She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (28 page)

That much was clear from Eleanor’s rapid progress around the country in the month before Richard’s arrival in Portsmouth that August. She travelled ‘from city to city and castle to castle just as it pleased her’, the chronicler Roger of Howden reported, at the head of her ‘queenly court’ – the unusual Latin adjective
reginalis
emphasising the rare spectacle of a woman alone at the helm of English government. And the measures she took demonstrated the breadth of her authority. She ordered the despatch, Howden wrote, of ‘a body of trustworthy men, both clergy and laity … throughout all the counties of England’ to reform the abuses of local officials, to extract from all free men an oath of loyalty to Richard, and to empty the kingdom’s jails – the newly liberated Eleanor remarking with delicate understatement, according to Howden, that ‘she had learned by experience that confinement is distasteful to mankind, and that it is a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be set free therefrom’.

This was independent action on a scale and of a kind that the Empress Matilda would have viewed with incredulous envy. Yet – unusually for Eleanor, whose career had hardly been uncontroversial – it did not attract critical comment. Her authority, unconstrained though it might be, was so completely identified with that of her son that the fact of her sex was barely noticed: power in the hands of an anointed queen mother, it seems – as opposed to an anointed queen regnant – challenged no fundamental political preconceptions. At sixty-five, moreover, she was an elder states
woman, not the flighty foreign presence that a queen consort could all too easily appear. And, perversely, the long imprisonment that had been her punishment for rebelling against her husband had turned her into a figurehead for loyalty and unity. The only part she had played in fifteen years of bitter conflict between her sons and their father was to make possible the transient peace settlement of 1185. As a result, she now stood above the fray, uncontaminated by more than a decade of treachery and warfare, and unbendingly committed to the continued existence of her husband’s empire under the government of her son.

For as long as Richard was absent from English soil, then, Eleanor ruled in his name; and she helped plan the coronation by which he became England’s king. In Westminster Abbey on 13 September 1189, the queen mother stood draped in a costly new fur-trimmed gown to watch as her favourite son was touched with holy oil upon the head, breast and hands in the rite that transformed a man into a monarch. Then, newly dressed in the richest of ceremonial vestments, Richard was crowned with a massive diadem of gold encrusted with precious stones, a crown so heavy that two earls stood by to support its weight.

But this formal inauguration of Richard’s reign did not mean that Eleanor could step back into retirement. Instead, she remained by the king’s side, noted by the chroniclers as an influential presence in his councils. She was closely involved, for example, in her son’s attempt to find a settlement to a viciously protracted dispute between the archbishop of Canterbury and the monks of his cathedral priory. For eighteen months the monastic community had been barricaded within the priory’s walls, kept alive only by the townspeople’s gifts of food, while the cathedral itself fell silent and empty. Richard was determined not only to enforce a compromise (an unlikely outcome, it seemed, given how much vitriol had already been expended in the debate, but one which he achieved within three months of his coronation) but, crucially, to do so without intervention from Rome; and it was on Eleanor’s authority that the pope’s legate, Giovanni da Anagni, was detained
when he stepped off his ship at Dover in the autumn of 1189 to prevent any possibility of papal meddling.

While Richard was in England, then, his mother was at his right hand, her power unmistakable in the politics, as well as the ceremonial, of his court. But the king remained in England for only seventeen weeks. On 12 December 1189, he took ship for the continent, where he began raising the men and money needed to launch the crusade to which he had committed himself two years earlier. The scale of his task was almost unimaginably vast, but Richard set about it with irresistible purpose and unprecedented speed. ‘He put up for sale everything he had,’ Roger of Howden reported; and by the summer of 1190 he was ready. His father had taken the cross in 1172, as part of his penance for the death of Thomas Becket, but had never set out for the Holy Land. It was in his mother’s footsteps, therefore, not his father’s, that Richard rode to Vézelay to undertake a perilous journey that Eleanor had completed more than forty years earlier. His starting-point and his destination were the same as hers, but, unlike her, he eschewed the overground route across Europe in favour of travelling south to Marseille and on by ship to rendezvous in Sicily with his own huge fleet and that of his crusading ally, Philippe of France.

Once arrived in Sicily, Richard stayed for six months, delayed not only by the closure of the Mediterranean shipping lanes in winter, but by two pressing political problems. The first was the status of his sister Joanna, who had been queen of Sicily until the death of her husband, William II, in 1189, and who was now the unwilling hostage of the new king, William’s illegitimate cousin Tancred of Lecce. A briskly successful assault by Richard’s forces on the city of Messina rapidly secured not only Joanna’s freedom but payment of her dower, a store of gold of a size to gladden the heart of a crusading king who had already liquidated the assets of the kingdom he had left behind.

The second problem, meanwhile, required political finesse rather than the application of force. Richard had been betrothed to Alix, half-sister of Philippe of France, for more than twenty
years, but he had never shown any particular urgency about the business of marrying her – not least, perhaps, because the two decades she had spent as his wife-in-waiting at his father’s court had given rise to persistent rumours that Henry himself had made her his mistress. Whatever her personal entanglements, the French princess had been the plaything of Anglo-French politics for the whole of her adult life – her betrothal summarily cancelled or abruptly revived by each new sequence of negotiations – and Richard, it transpired, had now tired of his own part in this diplomatic merry-go-round. He saw a new opportunity to protect the southern frontier of his territories through an alliance with the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, and had spent some time in Aquitaine laying the groundwork for a marriage with Berengaria, daughter of the Navarrese king Sancho VI. Philippe initially resisted this public slight to his long-suffering sister; but now – with the crusade already under way, and Richard threatening to expose Alix’s supposed liaison with his father – the French king had no option but to abandon her cause.

And while Richard negotiated his escape from his former fiancée, his mother set off to bring him his new one. Eleanor, who had spent fifteen years all but immobilised as her husband’s captive, now seemed to have limitless reserves of energy to expend in the service of her son. In the autumn of 1190 she was in Bordeaux, luxuriating in the great city of her childhood for the first time since she had regained her freedom. From there she travelled nearly two hundred miles south across the Pyrenees to the Navarrese capital of Pamplona, where she was welcomed in great state to the court of King Sancho. There she met her prospective daughter-in-law Berengaria, described from afar as ‘more prudent than pretty’ by the chronicler Richard of Devizes, and more blandly as ‘a wise maiden, a fine lady, both noble and beautiful’ in the first-hand account of Ambroise, a Norman poet in Richard’s crusading company.

From Pamplona the two women, with a train of bodyguards and attendants, rode north and east, crossing the Pyrenees once again in order to reach the greater challenge of the western Alpine
passes. As the Empress Matilda had discovered before them, a crossing of the Alps in the middle of winter was not to be undertaken lightly. More than a hundred years earlier, when the Emperor Heinrich IV, Matilda’s father-in-law, had crossed the Mont Cenis pass in the freezing temperatures of an especially bitter December, his queen and her ladies had been forced to make the descent sitting on sledges improvised out of ox-skins on which they could slide down the steeply treacherous ice. The chroniclers tell us nothing of what Eleanor and Berengaria endured, which suggests that their journey, in less extreme weather, was less dramatically dangerous. Still, it can only have been a relief to reach the foggy and monotonous flatness of the plain of Lombardy.

At Lodi, twenty miles south-east of Milan, the once and future queens met the new German king, Heinrich VI, who had inherited his crown six months earlier when his father, Friedrich Barbarossa, died en route for the Holy Land in the vanguard of the crusade. This encounter necessitated a delicate diplomatic dance, since Heinrich had come to Italy not only for his coronation as emperor at the hands of the pope, but to claim the throne of Sicily in the name of his wife, Constance, legitimate sister of the dead king William II and aunt of the bastard-born Tancred. And, as both Eleanor and the emperor were well aware, her son was currently a guest and ally – a forcefully imposing one, but an ally nonetheless – at Tancred’s court. Eleanor herself, however, skirted elegantly round this impromptu meeting – perhaps assuring Heinrich as she passed that Richard had no interest in staying to defend Sicily when he could be leaving to attack Jerusalem – and rode on to Naples, where she and Berengaria intended to take ship for Messina. Instead, they were required to wait for a few weeks at Brindisi while Richard broke the news to Philippe that he would not, after all, be marrying his sister. When the two women finally disembarked at Messina harbour on 30 March 1191, it was to discover that the king of France had pointedly sailed away a few hours earlier, his former intimacy with the king of England now turned to bitter rancour.

Despite the arrival of the bride, there was no immediate prospect of a royal wedding, since the Church did not allow marriages to be celebrated during the penitential season of Lent. Berengaria therefore joined the travelling establishment of Richard’s sister Joanna, the widowed Sicilian queen, when the immense crusading fleet headed eastward to Cyprus on 10 April. By then, however, Eleanor was long gone. At sixty-seven, she had needed only three days to recuperate from a journey that had taken her over two mountain ranges and across half of Europe. While Richard set his sights on the Holy Land – a voyage in the course of which he married Berengaria and conquered Cyprus – Eleanor returned, as Ambroise noted, ‘to look after his land that he had left’. And the king knew that it would be in safe hands. Her status could not have been clearer when, visiting Rome on her way northward through Italy, she intervened with the newly installed Pope Celestine III to secure approval for the consecration of her dead husband’s illegitimate son Geoffrey as archbishop of York. Geoffrey’s election to the see had been controversial, and Eleanor’s involvement did not damp down the furore, but the fact that she could act with such authority at the papal curia spoke volumes about the power she now wielded.

Quite how much that power was needed had already become obvious in England while Eleanor herself was away. Archbishop Geoffrey was not the only one of Henry II’s sons causing trouble there. For Eleanor’s youngest child, John, the knowledge that he was his father’s favourite had done nothing to counteract the baleful effects of the fact that he was last in line when it came to the partition of the Angevin territories. The question of what political provision should be made for John had been a cause of repeated familial conflict ever since the rebellion of 1173 that had led to his mother’s imprisonment, and his insubstantial title as ‘lord of Ireland’ had provided him with predictably little satisfaction. Richard had now given his brother the Norman county of Mortain and a generous portion of lands and revenues in England, to which John’s marriage in the summer of 1189 to the heiress Isabella of
Gloucester added still more. But for John – who was clever, insatiably grasping and implacably narcissistic – it was not enough.

That Richard knew his brother well was clear from the king’s insistence, before his departure from Vézelay, that John should swear an oath to stay away from England for three years during his own absence in the Holy Land. Eleanor, too, was under no illusions about John’s ambitions, but disagreed about the best way of containing them. At her urging, the oath was modified to allow Richard’s chief minister in England, the Norman-born Guillaume de Longchamp, to decide when and if John should be admitted to the country. In all probability, neither plan would ever have kept him in check, and in practice it took only a matter of months before the cracks began to show.

The catalyst of the crisis was a twofold threat to John’s hopes of inheriting his brother’s crown encapsulated first in the treaty Richard agreed at Messina with Tancred of Sicily – which named the king’s three-year-old nephew Arthur of Brittany as his heir presumptive, for the diplomatic purpose of marrying him to one of Tancred’s daughters – and second in Richard’s own marriage to Berengaria of Navarre, which promised in time to give him sons of his own. Simultaneously, John was presented with an irresistible opportunity to make his own bid for power in England by the unpopularity of his brother’s justiciar Longchamp, who was fast alienating the great English lords with high-handed exactions that were resented all the more for being imposed by a low-born Norman.

By the summer of 1191, both John and Longchamp were in the field at the head of armed troops. Longchamp laid siege to John’s supporters in Lincoln Castle, while John himself seized the royal fortresses at Nottingham and Tickhill in reprisal. But by that time Eleanor had arrived back in Normandy, accompanied by the Cornish-born archbishop of Rouen, Walter of Coutances, whom Richard had despatched from Messina with the express task of resolving the hostilities that had erupted in the kingdom he had left behind. Eleanor remained at her manor of Bonneville-sur-
Touques, a couple of miles inland from the Norman coast between Caen and Rouen – a station from which she could hope to oversee Richard’s domains on both sides of the Channel – while the archbishop sailed for England. There he negotiated a fragile peace, which was reinforced that autumn when Coutances himself took over the justiciar’s duties from the discredited Longchamp. In February 1192, however, Eleanor herself took ship for Portsmouth. John’s unique capacity to undermine the stability of his brother’s kingdom, it transpired, was such that it required his mother’s unique authority to curb his excesses.