She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (31 page)

Aquitaine, however, was a very different matter. Richard, English-born though he might have been, had become a native Aquitainian duke: enthroned at Poitiers and Limoges at the age of fourteen, he spent years of his life and much of his political energy in the duchy. He made enemies as well as friends there – his death on campaign at Châlus in the heart of Aquitaine was no geographical aberration in his military career – but the fact of his power could not be ignored. John, on the other hand, had last set foot in the duchy fifteen years earlier when he and his brother Geoffrey had plundered Poitou in the attempt to snatch it from Richard’s grasp. No less than Arthur of Brittany or Philippe of France, John was an outsider in Aquitaine, and the risk he ran was that he would fast become an irrelevance there.

Not so his mother. Where Richard had depended on Eleanor to embody the authority of the crown in England, John needed her to inhabit the role into which she had been born – that of the ancestral ruler of her own duchy. She had expected to see out her days in the peace of Fontevraud; instead, within three weeks of Richard’s death she found herself at the head of an army, accompanying Mercadier – a mercenary captain who had been the king’s loyal military lieutenant for a decade and a half, and had been at his side at Châlus – on a campaign to devastate Anjou, beyond the northern border of Aquitaine, in retribution for the support its lords had offered to Arthur. Mercadier led the troops, but Eleanor’s presence at his side demonstrated that their ravages were predicated on claims of political legitimacy rather than indiscriminate looting.

Before the end of the month she parted company with Mercadier, leaving to him the further prosecution of the military campaign they had begun in Anjou, and began to move south into Aquitaine, charting a path through the great towns of her duchy – from Poitiers south-westward to Niort, then south to St-Jean-d’Angély,
westward to the port of La Rochelle, inland again to Saintes, and finally, in the heat of July, south to her city of Bordeaux. As she went she dispensed favours to the great men of Poitou and the Limousin, and privileges to the towns and religious houses she passed along the way. In doing so she marked the duchy yet again as her territory, and sought to bind its people to her side.

That accomplished, she turned north again, travelling two hundred miles to Tours to meet her son’s enemy, Philippe of France. It was to be an extraordinary encounter, and not simply because it brought her face to face with the son of her long-ago husband Louis, a man who had caused her own family so much torment. At Tours, Eleanor knelt before the French king to do homage for her duchy of Aquitaine. Sixty-two years after her father’s death, there could be no conceivable doubt of her right to her inheritance, but she had never before sworn fealty and done homage to her French overlord. This was a ritual from which women were routinely excluded: the political and military service owed by a vassal, it was assumed, could not be performed by a woman in her own person, and the place of an heiress would therefore naturally be taken by her husband or son. Henry and Richard had both previously offered their homage for Aquitaine on Eleanor’s behalf, and young Arthur had already become Philippe’s sworn vassal for Brittany, despite the fact that the duchy was the inheritance of his mother Constance. Why now, at seventy-five, did Eleanor choose to break the mould of feudal ceremony and assert the independence of her rights in Aquitaine?

The gesture was certainly not intended for public effect. We only know that it happened at all thanks to the French chronicler Rigord, since no mention of it survives in English sources. We must assume, therefore, that the meeting took place with the minimum of fanfare, Philippe presumably accepting the fealty of his enemy’s mother as a welcome recognition of the authority he was attempting to extend throughout the French kingdom. For Eleanor, however, this was a move in a complex chess game – a stratagem designed to secure the integrity of her duchy and the
inheritance of her son in the face of her grandson’s challenge.

After all, if she alone, swearing an oath of allegiance in person, was the French king’s vassal in possession of Aquitaine, then Philippe would have no right to summon anyone other than Eleanor herself to answer for the rule of the duchy in his court. Having accepted her homage, he could have no straightforward legal basis for intervening in Aquitaine himself, or for promoting alternative claims to its rule, whether from Arthur or John or anyone else. In feudal law, Eleanor now stood as a human shield between the king of France and her homeland. And she immediately set to work to capitalise on her position in order to establish John’s stake in Aquitaine’s future.

In a document sealed probably that summer, Eleanor formally recognised her son John as her successor in Aquitaine. She had accepted his homage, she declared, and now transferred the allegiance of her vassals to him, ‘the king their liege’, as her own ‘right heir’ and their lord. John, meanwhile, sealed a charter of his own which again recorded his homage to his mother, and went on to acknowledge her authority over him as
domina
– ‘lady’, the same title that Matilda had once enjoyed, implying the exercise of female lordship – ‘of us and of all our lands and possessions’. Mother and son were now explicitly locked into a political relationship of mutual support and interdependence. Neither partner, John’s charter added, was to give away lands or rights without the other’s consent, unless it should be to the Church ‘for the salvation of our souls’. Eleanor had once before exploited the political possibilities of feudal homage, in helping to secure her older son’s release from his German prison by suggesting he swear an oath of fealty to the emperor. If that had been a feint, this was a master stroke – reciprocal recognition between mother and youngest son that simultaneously guaranteed John’s rights in Aquitaine and deprived Philippe of the opportunity to assert himself there.

Her duchy, for the moment, was safe, but John’s position in Anjou and Maine was much less certain, and likely to depend more on might than on right. Here, however, fortune seemed to
be smiling on John. In the autumn of 1199 Guillaume des Roches, Arthur’s chief supporter in the region, was persuaded to defect to John’s cause, forcing Philippe to the negotiating table; and in January 1200 the two kings came to uneasy terms, by which Philippe formally recognised John as his brother’s heir in the Angevin dominions, in return for John’s homage and for continued French possession of the parts of eastern Normandy that had already been overrun. As so often before, the treaty was to be concluded with a marriage: this time a union between Philippe’s twelve-year-old heir, Louis, and one of John’s royal nieces, the daughters of his sister Eleanor and her husband Alfonso VIII of Castile.

Which niece, however, had not yet been decided – and the task of selecting the bride fell to the girls’ apparently indefatigable grandmother. Eleanor had already covered something approaching a thousand miles in her whistlestop political tour around her domains in the summer of 1199. Now, in January 1200, she took to the road once again. In Poitou she was forced to negotiate a passage through the lands of the Lusignans, pacifying their aggression with a grant of the county of La Marche. That political challenge behind her, she then faced the physical test of vertiginous mountain paths as her cavalcade gingerly picked its way over the snow-drifted passes of the Pyrenees and into Navarre. She had been to that kingdom before, a decade earlier, to collect a wife for her beloved older son; but that wife was now a widow, and Eleanor pressed on southward into Castile.

At the elegant Castilian court she was reunited with her daughter Eleanor, who had left her mother behind at Bordeaux more than thirty years earlier to embrace a new life in the country of which she was now queen. This younger Eleanor shared her mother’s shrewd intellect as well as her name, and perhaps their meeting offered consolation to both women after the losses of that year: Richard’s sudden death had been followed in September by that of his sister Joanna of Sicily and Toulouse, who did not survive the birth of her second child at Rouen in September 1199. The elder Eleanor could also find comfort in meeting her Castilian
granddaughters for the first time. Thirteen-year-old Urraca and eleven-year-old Blanca were both accomplished girls, but Eleanor, to the surprise of many observers, chose the younger as the future queen of France, seeing in her some combination of temperament and talent that would equip her for the Parisian court over which Eleanor herself had presided at an almost equally early age. Urraca was promptly betrothed instead to Afonso, heir to the Portuguese throne, while Blanca prepared herself for the long journey north with her formidable grandmother.

The steepling route through the mountains was easier in the spring warmth, but for the first time the exertion of her travels began to take a perceptible toll on Eleanor. After spending Easter week in Bordeaux, she rode on with her granddaughter as far as the valley of the Loire, but there she gave Blanca into the care of the archbishop of Bordeaux for the last stage of the route to Normandy. When the little Castilian princess married her French prince, a wedding lavishly celebrated with jousts and feasting, her grandmother was not present to see it. Instead, ‘wearied by old age and the labours of her long journey,’ Roger of Howden reported, ‘Queen Eleanor withdrew to the abbey of Fontevraud and remained there’.

She was seventy-six years old; she was ill and she was tired. But still she could not rest completely. Though John had settled one conflict, he lost no time in precipitating another, this time in her duchy of Aquitaine. In the summer of 1200 John celebrated a second wedding – his own, to Isabelle, the young daughter and heiress of the count of Angoulême. The chroniclers came to believe that John was obsessed with lust for this girl, who was no more than twelve when they married, and there was further scandal to be found in the troublesome detail that John already had a wife, although he had taken care never to obtain a papal dispensation to regularise his first consanguineous marriage to Isabella of Gloucester. But, whatever the gossip, the political fact of the matter was that there was sound strategic sense in an alliance by which John would secure control of the unruly territories of Angoulême that separated Poitiers from Bordeaux.

Or, at least, there would have been, had Isabelle not already been formally betrothed to Hugues de Lusignan, whose lands to the north of the Angoumois had so recently been bolstered by Eleanor’s grant of the county of La Marche to the east. This union between two of the most insubordinate dynasties among his vassals was an alarming prospect for John, to which his own impulsive marriage to the child-bride Isabelle put an effective stop. But the cost of curbing this expansion of Lusignan power was the creation of a profoundly dangerous enemy.

Eleanor saw the threat only too clearly, and made strenuous efforts from her sickbed at Fontevraud to counter it. In the early spring of 1201 she achieved an unlikely triumph in securing the compromised allegiance of Aimery, viscount of Thouars, a powerful but disaffected lord in the north-west of Poitou, whom John had deprived of the stewardship of Anjou in favour of the defector des Roches, and whose brother Guy had just married Arthur of Brittany’s mother, Constance. The letter Eleanor wrote to her son in the wake of Aimery’s visit to Fontevraud, advising John on how to handle the viscount’s proffer of renewed loyalty, is full of the acute political insight that hard-won experience had brought to her forceful intelligence. ‘I want to tell you, my very dear son’, she began,

John was not a stupid man – no son of Eleanor and Henry was likely to be – but he had not inherited his mother’s strategic brain. Despite his mother’s subtle warnings, he treated Hugues de Lusignan with punitive contempt, confiscating La Marche in order to grant the county instead to his new father-in-law, the count of
Angoulême. Lusignan appealed to Philippe as John’s overlord, and by the spring of 1202 the renewal of war was inevitable. The French king declared John’s lands forfeit and accepted Arthur’s homage in his place for all his French territories – including Aquitaine, Philippe proclaimed, ‘if God grants that either we or he shall acquire it by any means whatsoever’. It could hardly have been clearer that John’s provocation had dismantled the legal protections Eleanor had so carefully established to shield her homeland from the conflict over the Angevin inheritance.

Yet again Aquitaine and her son stood in need of her help. At seventy-eight, she summoned what reserves of energy she could muster to leave her retreat at Fontevraud once more for the defence of Poitou. She had reached the castle of Mirebeau, fifteen miles north of Poitiers, when the menace that had been implicit in Philippe’s edict took concrete form in the shape of her fifteen-year-old grandson, Arthur, marching with Hugues de Lusignan at the head of a force of French soldiers. Thirty years earlier, Mirebeau had been one of the fortresses over which her eldest son Henri had gone to war with his father; now it was the place where Eleanor faced a future as a hostage as her family tore itself apart once again. As Arthur’s troops advanced, Eleanor was trapped. She did not panic; nor did she surrender. She had suffered the loss of her freedom before: did she fear it more or less, now that she had so little time left? While her grandson’s forces seized control of the town, she disposed what defences she had behind the walls of the stone keep, and covertly despatched a messenger who slipped silently into the twilight, heading north to Le Mans, where John was gathering an army of mercenaries.