A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (14 page)

Then I began a uniform system of weights and measures for the whole country. What an aggravation to have a piece of cloth measured by one system in Nottingham and by an entirely different system in Oxford. That made the merchants very happy.

And I did the same for coins. I made a uniform system of coins to be used throughout the country. That made everyone but the money changers very happy. It benefited no one but the money changers for a merchant traveling from the city of Sandwich to have to change money at the borders of Canterbury, a few miles away. And to show that Richard was responsible, I had his face engraved on the coins.

And everywhere I went, I listened to the people, and I served justice. In castle after castle, I set free all those poor souls who were waiting for Henry to finish his wars with his sons so that he could hold court. In his last years Henry had become a fanatic about people who hunted on his royal grounds. Henry would kill a man for killing a deer. I stopped that, too.

And I did all this in Richard’s name.

For entertainment I planned Richard’s coronation. The people of England were entitled to a festival, and they had it. There is nothing like a lavish display to give people pride in their country. Governments still do it; they call them
World Fairs
or
Inaugurations
, but they are what a coronation was—an acceptable form of showing off.

By the time Richard arrived on the shores of England, he was everyone’s hero. Right after his coronation, he announced his desire to go on Crusade to Jerusalem. The Holy City had finally been captured by the Turks, and Richard thought it was time for a Plantagenet to take the cross. King Philip Augustus was to go, too, and so was Frederick Barbarossa, King of Germany. My son with the sons of the two kings who had led the Second Crusade, the Crusade that I and my Amazons had gone on.

Richard was outfitted according to his tastes and mine; both of us shared a love of splendor. Philip Augustus was no match for Richard the Lion Heart. He was not handsome, and he had only one eye that worked. Richard was richer, handsomer, and more popular. Philip was jealous.

Shortly after the men started their journey, I made a journey, too. I went to Spain, and there I fetched a princess. I took her to Sicily where Richard was waiting for some ships that would carry him to the Holy Land. Richard liked my choice, and so he married the princess.

I had to do that. Richard had no heir, and if he should die on Crusade, I wanted someone other than my son John to claim the throne.

The Third Great Crusade ended with the following results: Frederick Barbarossa drowned. Philip Augustus got sick and lost all his hair, his fingernails and toenails, and he was less than handsome to begin with. After he lost those parts, Philip Augustus went home—before the real fighting began. Richard was shipwrecked on his way home and was captured in Austria and held for a king’s ransom; it took me two years to raise the money to set him free.

While Richard was prisoner, Philip began attacking our castles in the Vexin. Before they had left for the Crusade, Philip had asked for the return of the Vexin. He had argued that since Young Henry was dead and Marguerite had returned to the Capets, the Vexin should, too. The Vexin had been given to us only as her dowry. Richard had stalled him. “Let us settle these differences after the Crusade,” he had said. “Let us not talk of distributing the Earth. Let us first save it. For Christianity.”

Philip Augustus was not the man that his father was. Louis would never have broken the Truce of God; he would never have attacked another man’s castles—especially when that man had been captured fighting a battle that he had run out on.

Richard returned at last as a conquering hero. Even though Jerusalem was still in the hands of the Turks, he had made a treaty that would allow Christians to visit the Holy City. Philip was more jealous than ever of Richard’s popularity and reputation. And the fighting over the Vexin got more serious.

It was not in any great battle that Richard met that arrow. It was not in any important siege that my son met death, and it was not any famous warrior who fired the arrow that killed him. Richard’s death was brutal and painful. And meaningless. But I must tell of it to show that my son Richard earned his name, Lion Heart.

A young man, not an important young man, was defending the walls of a castle, not an important castle, that was under siege by Richard’s men. The young man used a fry-pan for a shield, and he used as weapons the arrows he could pull from the castle walls, those very arrows which Richard’s men had fired at him. The young man fired at a mounted knight, and the arrow pierced the knight’s shoulder, and it went deep. The boy did not know that he had felled a king.

No one, except the men immediately near him, knew that Richard was hurt. Richard finished his round of inspection and went to his tent and there, at last, he allowed the men to pull the arrow from his shoulder, but it had gone deep, too deep. As the men pulled, the shaft broke. The men gouged at Richard’s flesh in an attempt to cut the barb out. They plunged searching fingers into the raw meat of my son’s shoulder, but their fingers could not pry loose that sharp triangle of iron. It stayed to rust, to rot. Richard knew he would not live. He asked to have the young man who fired the arrow brought before him.

“Why,” asked Richard of the scared young man, “why did you wish to injure me?”

“Because,” the boy said, “you killed my father and my brother. I do not repent. Do with me as you like.”

“Go in peace,” Richard said. “I forgive you for my death.” The Lion Heart commanded that the boy be unchained. Then he died.

Richard died. He was forty-two years old; he had no son. I would now have to construct a king out of John Lackland.

THERE WAS MUCH
to be done. I was seventy-seven years old, and I did not know if I would have enough years to do something with John. That spoiled, reckless John.

The narrow slits of prison walls had sharpened my focus on my times. I realized that there was rising a new class of people, something between noble and peasant, a middle class. They were merchants, they had money, and they would be heard. So as I rode through the towns of my native lands, my Aquitaine, I granted charters to these towns. The people then became responsible for their own government—and for their own defense. I knew that I could not expect these people to be loyal to John. But, I could expect them to take pride in a town they could call their own, and I gave them their freedom. For a price.

I also visited abbeys and made arrangements for my body to rest in Fontevrault next to Henry’s and Richard’s. Of course I chose Fontevrault; it was the only abbey in all of France that housed both nuns and monks, but which had a nun not a monk as its head.

I established hospitals, another important good work that makes one popular. And I saw to it that the roads were in good order; the merchant class needed to transport their goods, and I needed them on my side.

And then to insure peace, I went to King Philip Augustus and there in front of all the court of Paris, I swallowed my pride, bent my rusty knees and paid homage to a Capet. A gentle reminder that I wanted peace; I was reminding Philip that he was my overlord and was sworn to protect me. Me and mine. John was mine.

THE QUESTION
of the Vexin was still not settled. It was, as it had been, on and off for forty years, a raw sore between the lands of the Capets and the Plantagenets. I had a plan for that, too. I thought it would be a good idea if Philip’s son became engaged to one of my granddaughters. The Vexin, which we still held, could then go to Philip’s son as dowry for my granddaughter. What a strange fate for that land. That same Vexin that had brought Henry to the court of King Louis and that Louis had traded back in exchange for the marriage of their Marguerite to our Young Henry would now be the parcel of trade for the marriage of one grandson of King Louis for one granddaughter of mine.

At that time I had outlived all my children but two: John, who was King of England, and Eleanor, who was Queen of Castile. The daughter who was my namesake had lived in Spain since she was in her early teens.

And so it was that at the age of eighty, I crossed the mountains between France and Spain in the middle of winter. I arrived to fetch a granddaughter of mine as a bride for a grandson of my ex-husband. I found my daughter Eleanor worthy of my name. Her court was gay and beautiful, and so was she. My daughter Eleanor had eleven children, one more than I had had, and it had taken me two husbands to do it.

Of Eleanor’s eleven children, two girls were eligible to be wives for Philip’s son. They paraded the girls before me, and the girls bowed and curtsied and performed. It was expected that I choose the elder, the one named Urraca.

We were at the table, and the two girls were sitting on either side of me. Both of them had manners that were tidy and serene. “What do you like best to do?” I asked them.

Urraca, the elder, answered, “There is nothing I like better than the songs of the troubadours. I love to listen to the troubadours.”

“And you?” I asked Blanca, the younger of the two.

Blanca answered, “I like to read, and I like to ride. Both reading and riding allow me to go as far and as deep as I choose.”

I picked Blanca as the future queen of France. When my daughter asked why, I told her, “The French could never like someone with as foreign a name as Urraca. We’ll make Blanche out of Blanca, and the French will love her.”

And so I marched back over the mountains to France with my bounty, Blanca, Blanche of Castile. I was delighted. I was still enough of a judge of people to know that a girl who wants control over her spare time can control a kingdom: Time proved my judgment to be correct.

There was peace in England and France when I died. I did not die without cares, but I did die without regrets.

My life was marked by good happenings, bad happenings and sad ones, too. There were times when the bad and the sad could have weighed me down. But to drink life from only the good is to taste only half of it. When I died in that year 1204, I smiled, knowing that I had drunk fully of both flavors. I had wasted nothing.

“HOW DID YOU
feel when you learned that your son King John is considered the worst king that England has ever had?” Abbot Suger asked.

“I am not too impressed with such ratings,” Eleanor replied. “John was spoiled and fickle, but he had wit and fits of generosity. After Richard died, I got to know him better. I was only sorry that I didn’t have more time to develop his better nature.”

“How did you feel when you learned that the barons made him sign the great charter, the Magna Carta, at Runnymede?”

“I was annoyed.”

“Where is Young Henry?” Matilda-Empress asked. “He should be here to greet his father.”

William the Marshal cleared his throat. “Young Henry sent me in his stead.”

“I see that even in Heaven my grandson needs a marshal,” Matilda-Empress said. She then turned to Eleanor and asked, “What did you mean when you said that time has proven you correct about Blanche of Castile? Blanche has a reputation for being the worst mother-in-law in all of history. She hasn’t even come Up yet.”

Eleanor answered, “She was bad as a mother-in-law, but as a queen she did very well. When her husband died, she held the kingdom together until her son was ready to take over.”

Matilda-Empress said, “I did as much.”

“As much, perhaps, but not as well. There was the episode of Stephen, your worthless nephew, as you have referred to him.”

“But I did raise my son to be a great king.”

“And Blanche of Castile raised hers to be a great king and a saint. My great-grandson was King Louis IX who became Saint Louis, the only French king to become a saint.”

“Well!” Matilda-Empress exclaimed. “Your sainted great-grandson is my sainted great-great-grandson. I am great-great-grandmother to a saint. And you are great-grandmother to the same one.” She paused a minute and smiled at Eleanor. “Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux would never have believed it.”