She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (30 page)

Before their reunion in Germany, mother and son had not seen one another for three years. It had been four years in all since they had been in each other’s company for more than a few days. ‘On the king being set at liberty, all who were present shed tears of joy,’ Roger of Howden reported; but it was the power of Eleanor’s position during Richard’s long absence as crusader and captive rather than any display of maternal sentiment that was celebrated during his triumphal journey back to England. She was by his side as he rode first to Cologne, then to Louvain and Brussels. She took ship with him at Antwerp, and with him she landed at Sandwich on 13 March. Together the king and his mother travelled north to give thanks for his safe return at the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, before riding at the head of a glorious cavalcade into London.

Eleanor accompanied Richard to Nottingham too, where the king flexed the military muscles that had stiffened in the confines of his prison by leading an assault on the garrison holding the town’s castle in the name of his brother John. It took only two days before the soldiers accepted the reality that their sovereign was back, and surrendered. When Richard then convened a great council to overhaul the administration of his kingdom, the chroniclers named Eleanor first among the great lords who sat with him in the council chamber. And when the king processed into Winchester Cathedral on 17 April to consecrate his return with a ceremony of crown-wearing, richly robed and walking under a silken canopy borne above his head by four earls holding their
lances aloft, Eleanor sat in state opposite his throne, surrounded by a constellation of her ladies.

The prominence of the queen mother in this reassertion of kingly power was all the more striking for the fact that Richard’s wife, Queen Berengaria, was nowhere to be seen, staying as she was in Poitou after a protracted journey back from Acre via Rome and Marseilles. But that prominence made a significant political point, for Eleanor’s authority by now was far more than that of a consort. Not only was it sanctioned by, but it had come to buttress Richard’s own. Eleanor, after all, had had a consort’s share in the sovereign power of the man from whom Richard had inherited his own sovereignty, and the role she had played in securing the integrity of the realm while Richard was detained, voluntarily and involuntarily, so far away had made her an essential focus of unity – the mother of the kingdom as well as the king.

In that role, she had one task left to accomplish. It had to wait until she and Richard had completed their progress around England and had taken ship once more at Portsmouth on 12 May for the Channel crossing to Normandy. They landed, to scenes of wild excitement, at Barfleur, and rode via Bayeux and Caen to Lisieux, Richard moving steadily toward the war zone where his enemy Philippe of France was attempting to annex eastern Normandy town by town and castle by castle. At Lisieux, however, one of Philippe’s most valued allies came to kneel at Richard’s feet and beg for his grace. The king’s brother John had done all he could to support the French advance into the Vexin; his English lands had already been declared forfeit in consequence, and Richard had set a date for judgement to be passed upon him for his treachery. But now John was pleading for forgiveness, and Richard immediately embraced him, dismissing his twenty-seven-year-old brother’s repeated betrayals as the actions of an ill-advised child.

This unlikely reconciliation was achieved, Roger of Howden said, ‘through the mediation of Queen Eleanor’. And although there was pragmatism at work on both sides – John’s fright at his brother’s return finding common ground with Richard’s determination
to dismantle Philippe’s position in Normandy – it seems likely that Eleanor not only engineered her sons’ reunion but ensured its success. Her unyielding commitment to the future of their dynasty, as represented by both of her sons, allowed each to trust the assurances of the other, however implausible they might otherwise have seemed in the light of recent history.

Her work was done. Richard advanced at the head of his army to drive back the French king and his troops from the walls of Verneuil. John set about serving his brother with all the conscientiousness he could muster. And Eleanor rode south to the abbey of Fontevraud, on the frontier between Anjou and her own county of Poitou. From there she could keep in close touch with her sons and their concerns, and with her homeland of Aquitaine, while beginning at last to settle into a luxurious retirement.

England no longer needed her, despite the fact that its king was once again absent, back in his military element on campaign against Philippe and against his own rebellious vassals in Touraine and Aquitaine. His administration in England had been left in the fiercely able hands of Hubert Walter, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard himself was close enough to keep a steady stream of missives and directives hurtling across the Channel. Both the kingdom and its justiciar knew that these royal letters would swiftly be followed by the king’s royal person should urgent need arise. England’s centralised systems of law and administration – which had developed to new heights of sophistication because of Henry II’s constant travels around his continental empire – meant that the kingdom was well suited to government by royal deputy in the temporary absence of the monarch, but its very tractability was what had made it so vulnerable when the king was far away and feared lost for good. A centralised government, when summarily decapitated, could be taken over wholesale – as John had calculated in launching his bid for power in England – by contrast with the piecemeal annexation required to seize control of Normandy, Anjou or Aquitaine. And that circumstance was what had made Eleanor’s role in England so vital and her power so real.
Only a royal ruler of unquestioned legitimacy – as Eleanor had been, in embodying the authority of one son against the pretensions of another – could hold together a kingdom that relied for its security on the universal guarantees of royal law.

Now, though, she could rest. She made no move to reclaim the rule of Aquitaine, where Richard emphatically reasserted his control in the summer of 1194. (‘The city and citadel of Angoulême we took in a single evening’, he told Hubert Walter, before adding, with a casual exaggeration born of supreme confidence, that ‘in all we captured three hundred knights and forty thousand soldiers’.) Eleanor had no doubt that his commitment to the duchy was the equal of her own; and she was happy instead to install herself at Fontevraud, a residence replete with material and spiritual comforts, strategically located at the heart of her son’s French territories.

For the next five years she remained quietly at the abbey, a revered presence in her own rich apartments within the convent community. She raised no protest when Richard decided, in the autumn of 1196, to secure the south-eastern frontier of his lands through an alliance with Ramon VI, count of Toulouse, son of that count of Toulouse whose treaty with her husband had helped to spark her ill-fated rebellion in 1173. Perhaps she was prepared now to accept her son’s abdication of her own dynastic claim to Toulouse because she identified more closely with his political judgement than she had done with Henry’s; perhaps any objections were overcome by the fact that the alliance was sealed by Ramon’s marriage to her daughter Joanna, the widowed queen of Sicily, through whose offspring Eleanor’s claim might at last be made good, even if not quite in the way she had hoped. Nor did she demur when Richard named as count of Poitou his twenty-year-old nephew Otto, son of his sister Matilda and Heinrich of Saxony, a trusted lieutenant to keep a watchful eye on his treasured maternal inheritance (albeit that this delegation of authority was quickly superseded by Otto’s election as king of Germany in 1198). All the evidence suggests that Eleanor was adopting a role akin to that played by her mother-in-law Matilda during her last
years at Rouen – an astute observer of international affairs, retired now from the political front line, turning her thoughts increasingly to the needs of her soul while still offering the benefits of her accumulated wisdom to a son whose exceptional abilities she had done so much to foster.

Unlike the empress, however, Eleanor was to be wrenched from the peace of her retreat by sudden and violent tragedy. In March 1199, Richard was in Aquitaine to suppress yet another revolt led by the count of Angoulême and the viscount of Limoges. Towards the end of the month he brought his troops to besiege the viscount’s castle of Châlus-Chabrol, less than twenty miles southwest of Limoges. The small fortress held a garrison of only forty, of whom just two were trained and armed knights, and Richard was in relaxed mood as he waited for the castle’s inevitable fall. On the evening of 26 March, he rode out after supper to inspect the day’s progress, protected only by a helmet and shield against the shots of a solitary crossbowman on the ramparts, a bravely ludicrous figure wielding a cooking pan to ward off missiles from below. Richard appreciated the defiant courage of this lone enemy, and cheered good-humouredly as the man loosed his next bolt, but he was too careless of the reality of the threat. He miscalculated the arrow’s speed and trajectory by a fraction of a second, and felt the iron barb tear into the flesh of his left shoulder.

The king returned calmly to his tent, giving no public hint of his injury, and tried to wrench out the arrow himself. The wooden shaft broke off in his hand; a surgeon removed the rest, but at an impossible cost. The butchered wound quickly showed signs of infection. As the gangrene spread, Richard knew that death would follow surely and swiftly. By the time the fortress of Châlus fell a few days later, the victory had become an irrelevance. A messenger arrived at Fontevraud, desperate and dishevelled; and Eleanor rode south to watch her son die.

She was at his side when he took his last breath as dusk fell on 6 April. She was seventy-five, and had expected her favourite child to attend her burial, not she his. Richard’s heart was taken to
Rouen, to be interred next to his brother Henri, but his body had less far to go: his cortège retraced his mother’s steps back to Fontevraud, where his corpse was laid to rest at his father’s feet. But Eleanor would not be there for long to keep vigil over his tomb. Her one remaining son needed her, as his brother had before him.

For all the effort Richard had expended on the present security of his empire, he had exerted himself remarkably little to safeguard the future of his own bloodline. He had one illegitimate son, Philippe of Cognac, but no legitimate offspring to inherit his throne. Not only had his wife, Berengaria, never set foot in the kingdom of which she was queen, but she had spent only a few months of their eight-year marriage with her king; it had been four years since Richard had made time to see her. At forty-one, Richard had been in good health, despite the extra weight his stocky frame was carrying, and perhaps, after the trials of crusade and imprisonment, this superlative soldier had come to believe that he was invulnerable, that the future was his to command. Instead, it now seemed that the future belonged to John, the brother who had served him faithfully since their reconciliation at Lisieux, but who had coveted his throne since before their father’s death.

John’s inheritance, however, was far from certain. Enemies within and without the Angevin lands could not believe their good fortune as news of Richard’s death spread, and they had a rival candidate immediately to hand, in the twelve-year-old form of Arthur of Brittany, son of John’s long-dead elder brother Geoffrey. This posed a nice challenge to the nascent principles determining the succession to England’s throne: did a younger brother have a greater or lesser claim to the crown than the son of a dead older brother? Even if agreement could have been reached on this elusive theoretical point in English law, the precedents at work in Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine would not necessarily support the same conclusion. And, in any event, the practical fact of the matter was that the successful claimant would be identified by the political support he could muster, not simply by the technical merits of his case.

No one knew that better than Eleanor, and there was no question
in her mind that the throne belonged to her son rather than her grandson. Arthur’s very name emphasised his Breton identity rather than his Angevin heritage. He had been brought up in Brittany under the care of his mother, the duchy’s heiress, until the tensions between the Breton regime and Arthur’s royal uncle Richard had resulted in 1196 in the boy making a lengthy stay at the court of Philippe of France. There could be little doubt now of how the cards would fall. Philippe launched another invasion of eastern Normandy as soon as he heard of Richard’s death; the rebellious lords of Anjou, Maine and Touraine, led by Guillaume des Roches, declared that Arthur was their king; and the count of Angoulême and the viscount of Limoges persisted in the revolt that had claimed Richard’s life. Eleanor, meanwhile, made it clear that Arthur, or his advisers on his behalf, had forfeited any claim on a grandmother’s loyalty.

John arrived at the great fortress of Chinon three days after his brother’s burial, where he took possession of the treasury of Anjou, and then rode on ten miles to the west along the banks of the Vienne to take counsel with his mother at Fontevraud. From there he turned his horse northward to Normandy, narrowly escaping capture en route by the French king, who swept into Le Mans with Arthur and the rebel lord Guillaume des Roches only hours after John had left. At Rouen – where there was little sympathy for Philippe or Arthur, enemies to the east and west of the duchy – John was invested with a circlet of golden roses as duke of Normandy on 25 April. After a brief detour to sack Le Mans in punishment for the city’s support for his rival, he made for the Norman coast, and by 27 May he had reached Westminster, where he sat in state in the soaring space of the abbey for his coronation as king of England.

It made sense for John to focus his immediate attention on Normandy and England. There he was a known quantity – one viewed with a certain ambivalence, perhaps, after his repeated displays of extravagant duplicity during the years of Richard’s long absence, but then again those five years of treachery were now balanced by five
more of redemption in his brother’s service. In England, certainly, Arthur of Brittany’s claims to be Richard’s heir had little purchase, and the solemn ceremony at Westminster, which was well attended by the great English lords, gave sacred sanction to John’s rights.