She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (29 page)

Her intervention was prompted by information that John – having been thwarted in his attempt to install himself as regent by the arrival of Walter of Coutances – had applied himself instead to conspiring with Philippe of France, who had returned from crusade after less than four months spent in the Holy Land. Philippe’s antagonism towards Richard was now unshakeable, and he saw in John’s amoral ambition the perfect vehicle for the destabilisation of his enemy’s kingdom. He made John a tantalising offer: take the hand in marriage of his sister Alix, Richard’s humiliatingly repudiated bride, and receive with her the Angevin lands in France of which Philippe was overlord. John did not hesitate; his existing marriage was conveniently consanguineous and easily cast aside for a prize of this magnitude. He sent word to Southampton that a ship should be prepared for his flight to France.

But he had reckoned without his mother. ‘And who could be so savage or cruel’, Richard of Devizes rhetorically inquired, ‘that this woman could not bend him to her wishes?’ Cruelty and savagery were John’s stock-in-trade, but even he could not override Eleanor. She was an anointed queen, who spoke with the authority of the absent king. The right to rule Aquitaine was hers as much as it was Richard’s. And John himself would need her support to claim the inheritance of which he dreamed if his brother failed to return from the east. Self-interest pure and simple, if nothing else, dictated that he could not afford to defy her completely. And, while the great men of England contemplated the risky business
of treading an uncertain path between the demands of loyalty to Richard and the reality that, given the dangers of crusade, John might in fact become king at any moment, Eleanor alone stood above the fray. She was mother to both men, and her insistence that the younger should not rule while the elder still lived had the compelling force not of political partisanship but of unquestionable royal legitimacy.

Eleanor’s actions were reported to posterity in acceptably feminine terms. She was, after all, seeking to preserve power for her son, not for herself. ‘Her maternal heart was moved and pained …’, Richard of Devizes wrote, and she succeeded in preventing John from leaving for Paris ‘through her own tears and the prayers of the nobles’. But it is clear nevertheless that her intervention was resolute and decisively authoritative. She convened four great meetings of England’s barons in rapid succession, at Windsor, Oxford, London and Winchester, to bring pressure to bear on her youngest child, that ‘light-minded youth’, as Richard of Devizes called him. Whatever the emotional resonance of any tears she shed at those gatherings, they only lightly veiled the steely threat that John’s lands and castles in England would be confiscated if he defected to France. John’s ambitions, his greed and his disloyalty, were still on open display; but, thanks to his mother, they were at least temporarily caged.

The bars of that cage, however, were soon to be broken. In the autumn of 1192 Richard agreed a three-year truce with his enemy Saladin and set sail at last for home, two years and three months since he had turned his horse southward from Vézelay with such expectation. He had not reclaimed Jerusalem from infidel hands, but he had won glory nonetheless, capturing Acre and Ascalon and securing the coast of the Holy Land from Tyre to Jaffa. He had also made enemies. Philippe of France had returned to Europe a year before him, humiliated by the rejection of his sister and smarting at the extent to which Richard had overshadowed him on their joint campaign. And, less obviously but no less significantly, the English king had earned the hatred of Duke Leopold of Austria,
who had fought at the siege of Acre with the tattered remnants of the dead Emperor Friedrich’s German forces. Leopold had raised his banner next to those of England and France to fly over the defeated city – and Richard’s soldiers had torn it down, their king refusing to contemplate the idea that an insignificant third party might have a claim on the spoils of his victory.

Acre was only the first of Richard’s triumphs, and in the burning heat of Palestine the hostility of a departed German duke seemed of little moment. A year later, however, it became clear that the incident had cast a long shadow. The returning king reached Corfu in November 1192 – too late in the year to pursue his homeward journey by sea even if he could have found a safe port on the western Mediterranean shore that was beyond the considerable reach of Philippe of France and the Emperor Heinrich of Germany. Richard can have been in little doubt of the consequences of his breach with Philippe, and Heinrich had been alienated by the English alliance with Tancred of Sicily even before the French king and German emperor met and made common cause at Milan in late 1191. Richard was a victorious crusader coming home to an empire that had held firm in his absence, thanks in no small part to his remarkable mother. But the profoundly uncomfortable fact of the matter was that his enemies now barred his way. One option remained. Heinrich of Saxony, husband of his sister Matilda, held north-eastern Germany in defiance of the emperor, and Richard could hope to find a secure passage home via the Baltic if he made his way through his brother-in-law’s lands and under his protection. To get there, however, he first had to pass through the territories of Leopold of Austria.

Compared to the might of France and Germany, the resources of the Austrian duke were limited – which meant that, in the absence of a viable alternative, the route was a risk worth taking. Richard travelled under cover in the guise of a long-bearded pilgrim, attended by only a small handful of servants. But disguise proved difficult to sustain for a king who was accustomed to unquestioned command and expenditure on a scale that attracted
attention wherever he went. He was still fifty miles from safety when he was arrested by Duke Leopold’s men at a village outside Vienna. By Christmas Day, he was a prisoner in the forbidding fortress of Dürnstein, perched on a craggy rock above the raging waters of the Danube.

This was extraordinary news, and it travelled fast. By 28 December Leopold’s lord, the Emperor Heinrich, was dictating a letter in delight to Philippe of France. ‘We know this news will bring you great happiness’, he wrote, ‘… in as much as he is now in our power who has always done his utmost for your annoyance and disturbance.’ While England waited expectantly for Richard’s arrival, Philippe wrote in his turn to the one man among the English king’s subjects for whom the revelation that he would not return would be a cause of unalloyed joy. John immediately set off for Paris, where he did homage to King Philippe for Richard’s French lands and promised to marry poor discarded Alix. Together, John and Philippe now planned to seize this unexpected moment by launching an invasion of England.

Eleanor, at sixty-nine, might have been forgiven for feeling as tormented by the activities of her living sons as by grief for her dead ones. In the prosecution of her public responsibilities, however, she showed no sign of frustration or exhaustion. And although she worked in close co-operation with the justiciar Walter of Coutances, the monastic chronicler Gervase of Canterbury was in no doubt that orders for the defence of the coast against the threat of a French fleet were given ‘by the mandate of Queen Eleanor, who’, he said, ‘ruled England at that time’.

While the king of France gathered his ships at the port of Wissant in the county of Boulogne, John returned to England to raise a revolt, justifying his insurrection with the spurious claim that Richard was dead. But both invasion and rebellion sputtered into nothing in the face of Eleanor’s composed resistance. She knew her youngest son every bit as well as did his elder brother: ‘my brother John is not the man to win lands by force’, Richard supposedly remarked when told of his treachery, ‘if there is anyone at
all to oppose him’. And Eleanor was not just anyone. By the end of April John had met such concerted military opposition that he was forced into a truce: its terms permitted him to keep his castles at Nottingham and Tickhill but required him to surrender three more – Windsor, Wallingford and the Peak – to his mother. At Richard’s request, meanwhile, Eleanor secured the election as archbishop of Canterbury of Hubert Walter, the formidably able bishop of Salisbury who had been the king’s right-hand man on crusade and the first of his subjects to reach him in his German prison. She then addressed herself to the urgent task of raising the staggeringly large ransom – one hundred thousand silver marks – which Emperor Heinrich and Duke Leopold had between them agreed to demand in return for Richard’s freedom.

Gold and silver began to pour into St Paul’s Cathedral, where money from a levy of a quarter of the value of the movable goods of both clergy and laity, and treasure and plate from England’s churches, was collected in great chests under the seals of Eleanor herself and Walter of Coutances. Eleanor’s authority and the depth of the trust confided in her by her son were everywhere apparent in the letter concerning this ransom that Richard sent from the imperial palace at Haguenau, just north of Strasbourg, addressed to ‘Eleanor, by the grace of God queen of England, his much-loved mother, and to his justices and all his faithful servants throughout England’. The money gathered was, the king ordered, ‘to be delivered to our mother and such persons as she shall think proper’ – an instruction followed by the backhandedly intimidating request that Eleanor should send him a note of the individual sums contributed by his nobles, so that he might know how great were the ‘thanks’ (or something less palatable, reluctant donors might surmise) he owed to each.

Richard was not the only one writing letters. Peter of Blois, the scholar who had once, in the name of an earlier archbishop of Rouen, berated Eleanor for her rebellion against her husband, now took up his pen in the service of his queen. The letters he composed to be sent to Pope Celestine in Eleanor’s name, appealing for
the pontiff ’s help in securing Richard’s release, cannot be read as an intimate outpouring of maternal grief. It is possible that they were not even commissioned by the queen; certainly, they were exercises in rhetoric, laced with scriptural quotation, and designed to give the greatest possible emotional and political weight to the argument they made. But their intensely passionate style does serve as a demonstration of the strength of Eleanor’s position. The irreproachable and spiritually resonant role of the afflicted mother now underpinned her actions just as much as the culturally unacceptable one of the rebellious wife had undermined her attempt at self-assertion twenty years earlier. One letter begged the pope ‘to show himself a father to a suffering mother’; the anguish of another draft, meanwhile, explicitly echoed the psalms of King David and his lament for the lost Absalom: ‘I have lost the staff of my old age and the light of my eyes … Would that I had died for you, my son.’

The aged Pope Celestine did not respond to these missives, if ever they were sent, but the diplomatic and military manoeuvres across Europe continued without him. Richard worked hard from his prison quarters to keep his chief captor, the Emperor Heinrich, at a safe distance from Philippe of France, who had failed to instigate revolt in England but had made alarming inroads into eastern Normandy, so that the French flag now flew for the first time over the great frontier stronghold of Gisors. Knowing Philippe as he did, Richard realised that his hope of freedom would be extinguished forever should he one day find himself in a French rather than a German prison. As a result, he was prepared to offer another fifty thousand marks of silver, on top of the hundred thousand already pledged, to agree a settlement with Heinrich that would keep the emperor away from a conference with Philippe that had been planned for June 1193. ‘Look to yourself; the devil is loosed,’ Philippe told John when he heard of this new pact; and John fled to France in fear of his brother’s imminent return.

In practice, it took Richard several months more to free himself of his bonds. It was not until 20 December 1193 that Heinrich
received a down payment on the king’s ransom collected by Eleanor and her advisers that was substantial enough to persuade him to set a date for Richard’s release. With the approach of the appointed day – 17 January 1194 – the emperor found himself lobbied frantically by Philippe and John with a counterbid: they would pay
£
1,000 a month into imperial coffers for as long as Richard remained in his custody, or a hundred thousand silver marks if Heinrich kept him captive until the following autumn (giving them a full campaigning season to further their plans), or 150,000 marks either to hand him over into their control or at least keep him prisoner for another year. ‘Behold, how they loved him!’ Roger of Howden remarked with withering sarcasm.

While the emperor contemplated this new offer, the ceremony planned for 17 January was cancelled and a new gathering of German princes summoned instead for 2 February to consult on the increasingly convoluted question of Richard’s fate. To that meeting, too, came Eleanor, ‘desirous’, said a chronicler in Salzburg, ‘of freeing the son she especially loved’. At almost seventy, she faced yet again the rigours of long-distance travel as she moved eastward across the Low Countries with Walter of Coutances and Guillaume de Longchamp in her train, and with the chests containing the gold and silver of Richard’s ransom piled high on heavily guarded baggage carts. She reached Cologne by 6 January, and ten days later was reunited with her captive son when she reached Speyer in time to discover the unwelcome news that his formal liberation on 17 January would not, after all, take place. Another journey lay ahead, taking her fifty miles north along the Rhine to Mainz, where the imperial court and the increasingly fretful English delegation assembled at the beginning of February.

The negotiations were ‘anxious and difficult’, Walter of Coutances reported. But the German princes were determined that Heinrich should honour his existing agreement with Richard rather than commit himself to a duplicitous alliance with the dangerously subtle Philippe of France, and Eleanor herself clinched the deal by persuading Richard to surrender the kingdom of
England to the emperor in order to receive it back from his hands as an imperial fief. This was a finely calibrated gesture of pragmatic politics – a ritual acknowledgement of the emperor’s authority that would oil the wheels of Richard’s liberation, but make negligible difference to the reality of his powers once he was free (and efforts were made, in fact, to prevent news of the bargain even reaching England). At last, on 4 February 1194, the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne escorted the king to be delivered from captivity, Roger of Howden noted, ‘into the hands of his mother Eleanor’.