April Queen (33 page)

Historians have criticised Eleanor for showing little affection towards her offspring, but in this they have been perpetuating the bias of their sources, themselves all too eager to retail gossip and scandal and impute to a woman of whom they disapproved the ultimate opprobrium of failing to live up to that paragon of motherhood, the
Virgin Mary. The accusation that she chose to abandon her two eldest daughters in Paris on leaving Louis is unfair because she had no choice in the matter: they were assets of the French Crown, who would have been brought up by others and used in the same way, whether she had stayed with Louis or not.

There were certainly long periods when she did not see individual sons and daughters of her second marriage, but many of these separations were necessitated by her duties and Henry’s requirements for them to be where she was not. Her often-exhausting travel schedule and the fashion of putting children to live with tutors, like Prince Henry with Becket, meant that even when they were near her, little time was actually spent together. With layers of nurses, maidservants, tutors and grooms between her and the royal children, there was a lack of intimacy, but that did not mean she failed to care about them.

During much of the period 1168–73, which she spent in Aquitaine, various of the princes and princesses were with her or lodged at Fontevraud Abbey, where Henry considered them safely on his land, but where she visited and from where they could easily be brought to her. Nor were Eleanor’s daughters sent away to husbands at very tender ages, despite their father’s penchant for infant and child betrothals. Princess Matilda was twelve at the time of her postponed marriage to the 36-year-old Lion of Saxony; Eleanor the middle daughter departed to live in the household of her Castilian fiancé at the age of nine; Joanna, the youngest of the three girls, was not dispatched to her fate in Sicily until she was thirteen.

Of the princes, Young Henry was a profligate spendthrift, quickly bored when accompanying his father on the endless tours of inspection and justice, balancing the income and expenditure of the realm. Tall and endowed with the good looks of his paternal grandfather Geoffrey the Fair, the Young King dressed and lived with style. His easy charm drew a large circle of friends of his own age who enjoyed his open-handed generosity.

His greatest passion was for the tournament, that lethal mock battle said to have been invented by the Angevin knight Geoffroi de Preuilly,
⁹
who died in the year of the Conquest. This was not tilting, that bloodless test of skill and horsemanship in which a revolving board was struck with the lance at full gallop, nor the sanitised joust, with two knights separated by a stout wooden barrier attempting to unseat each other at one pass. In the mêlée, no blows were barred and being unseated could mean death from being trampled on by one’s own and all the other horses, as one of Eleanor’s sons was to find out firsthand.

So popular were tournaments that several hundred knights converged on a chosen venue in northern France and Flanders to show their prowess twice a month during the season from Pentecost to Midsummer Day. These lethal entertainments were banned in England by Henry because he feared that so many knights coming together armed and equipped for war might mask the start of a rebellion. Louis banned them in France because of the damage to property. They had been outlawed by the Church at the Council of Clermont in 1130 and were theoretically forbidden throughout Christendom
¹⁰
because they resulted in the death of so many knights and warhorses who might otherwise have gone on crusade to kill the Saracen.
¹¹

Starting with the confrontation of two armed bands before spectators in a town square, a mêlée often continued in wild pursuits across country involving damage to property and crops. Once broken on impact, lances were discarded and combat continued with swords, maces and other close-combat weapons. The custom of bearing heraldic arms on a shield arose out of the need to identify immediately as friend or foe in the confusion of the mêlée another knight whose features were concealed behind the face-piece of his all-enveloping pot helmet.

The aim of each team was to batter into submission and take captive as many as possible of the opposing knights, who were then held for ransom with their mounts and armour. It was a practice for battle that also satisfied the urge to gamble, for a poor knight could make his fortune or be ruined financially, his destrier alone being worth a year’s income.

Of acceptable prowess at arms himself, Young Henry relied on William the Marshal to keep him out of trouble in the field and also to top up his over-spent allowance by taking for ransom other knights and their horses when the princely purse was empty – with many a loser left to walk home, deprived of even his sword and armour. With a quick brain, a sure hand and eye, and the skill and strength of an Olympic athlete, William took in his first season over 100 captives, and went on to claim more than 500 in his career. Nagged on his deathbed to hand over to the Church a sum equal to all those ransoms, he politely but firmly declined.

Chivalry as a code of honour did not then exist. Whole fiefs changed hands in the space of a mêlée and so many vavassours were held as surety for their overlords’ losses and imprisoned when debts were not honoured that Henry enacted a law making the practice illegal in his territories. Another decidedly unchivalric aspect of the sport was when unscrupulous tourneyers agreed beforehand with opponents to allow
inexperienced but wealthy knights on their own side to be captured, so that they could share in the ransom.

The main attraction was surrounded by a horse fair, displays of arms and armour and performances by
jonglars
of songs celebrating great deeds against the Saracen. Smiths and armourers worked night and day repairing and improving equipment to be tested at risk of life and limb on the morrow. Huge feasts were set out in the open air and paid for by wealthy patrons like Young Henry.

It was a man’s world, where women of whatever rank came to be thrilled by death, broken limbs and lost fortunes. As might be expected, Betran de Born loved the whole tournament scene:

One of the backhanded compliments the chroniclers dreamed up for Eleanor was that she was wise but unstable.
¹²
The second adjective, but not the first, fitted Young Henry like a glove. Forever dragging his friends into wild ideas soon dropped,
¹³
he was subject to mood swings from elated defiance to abject submission, from baseless optimism to dark depression. Some said that he never recovered from being abruptly wrenched away from Becket’s household at age nine to be given the falcon treatment throughout his adolescence by the very man who had his foster-father murdered. What is certain is that he resented bitterly being kept on a leash by his father when his younger sibling Richard appeared to be enjoying real freedom with Eleanor in Aquitaine.

It was Richard who was coming to most resemble, physically, not his father as he now was – limping, bandy-legged, prematurely grizzled and bent from all those long days spent in the saddle – but Henry as he had been at the May wedding in Poitiers. With the same trained warrior’s stance, the same reddish hair and burly build, Richard preferred the hunt
and real warfare to the make-believe kind on the tournament field, but when he did appear in the lists he was ruthless. The other side of his complex character included a love of music and poetry. Like his great-grandfather William IX, he could turn out a neat
sirventès
to plead a case, and loved to sing with gusto in church, exhorting his fellow choristers to give their all and admonishing by voice and a blow monks who sang too quietly or out of tune.
¹⁴

In adolescence and later life he could be impulsively generous to his friends of the moment, and was soon predictably surrounded by young nobles whose pleasures were his: campaigning and, in between, the good life and the hunt. The moments of generosity were unpredictable. Cooks were important members of a noble household because their mistakes or ill will could kill their masters. On one occasion Richard elevated his to the nobility after a particularly good meal and made the post a hereditary fief. Yet the dark side of Eleanor’s favourite son was a love of slaughter and a greed for gold that would literally be the death of him.

Prince Geoffrey was of smaller build, and darker-complexioned. While fond of the tournament scene, he fought only when he had to, but had the best brain of the four sons. Saved by having a younger brother from being put into the Church, he would in fact have made an excellent cardinal, for he had a lawyer’s gift with words and the smooth-talking ability to make black seem white that convinced even those who well knew his reputation for untrustworthiness.

The last of the brood, Prince John resembled Geoffrey in looks, shorter and darker than the two oldest princes. But he lacked Geoffrey’s intellect, Henry’s generosity and Richard’s undoubted physical courage. To his father he served primarily as a way of annoying his older brothers; to his mother, he was the runt of the litter. Left out of the arrangements announced at Montmirail because there was no remaining Plantagenet territory to which he could be entitled, he became known as John Lackland or Jehan sans Terre, and suffered the fate of so many other landless younger sons, being put into the Church – in his case as an oblate at Fontevraud. The experience inculcated in him a lifelong loathing of religion and priests. Growing up envious and scheming, he was convinced from an early age that he had been deprived of his rightful share of the double realm. Cursed with a generous measure of the Plantagenet paranoia, he was an unloved and unlovable prince.

Henry once had a wall painted depicting himself as an eagle being attacked by four eaglets; a better image would have been that of a huntsman holding four hounds on intertwined leashes, he curbing them at every turn and they forever snapping and snarling at each
other, each ready to take a bite of one of the other dogs or even the huntsman himself when the occasion offered. With John in the cloister at Fontevraud, why did the king not make some space by sending Geoffrey or even Richard to carve out his own place in the sun, in the Holy Land? Was he still hoping that the grand design would one day see the Angevin Empire so vast that it would need to be divided between four kings of his own blood?

Since feudal law proscribed marriages without the prior approval of the spouses’ suzerain, and since Eleanor was the overlord of Aquitaine, her court became a marriage mart. The princes were far from being the only young men to amuse the noble maidens and older ladies – numbering as many as sixty on occasion – in the glittering palace dominating the high ground above the confluence of the Clain and Boivre rivers. Of course, it mattered that the young bloods had proved themselves by sword or lance, knew how to set a balking lanner falcon on its prey and ride a destrier centaur-like, as though of one flesh, in the mêlée of battle or tournament. But the prizes at Eleanor’s court went to men who had manners, dressed well, showed gallantry, could pluck a lute or turn mere words into poetry.

La reina aurilhosa
, the April Queen was back where she belonged. Among the troubadours who flocked to her side was Bernat de Ventadorn, lean after his years in disfavour but later recounting how his lady read and rewarded the new compositions he wrote for her. Life at the court in which Prince Richard spent his adolescence was such fun that he continued to regard Poitiers as his home for the next twenty or so years, and was happy to be known by the traditional title of count of Poitou, rather than duke of Aquitaine, until he was crowned king of England in 1189.

The lavishness of court life in Poitiers was criticised by Bernard of Clairvaux, who commented sarcastically on the excesses of make-up and dress. Although he criticised the long trains and floor-length sleeves of the fashionable gowns, according to the chronicler Geoffroi du Vigeois, so great was the surge in demand for furs and fine cloth at this time that prices doubled in the south-west, with even bishops and viscounts taking a new interest in their appearance and blushing to be seen in clothes their fathers might have worn, slashing their outer garments to show off the precious stuff below and wearing sleeves so long they had to be knotted up out of the way most of the time.

But life was not all dress and show. There were the courts of love, with noble ladies imposing tasks on lovers and judging them worthy or not of favours, such as a handkerchief to sport on helm or lance in a tournament, in a fantasy reversal of reality. In the famous canon of
amour courtois
that love cannot exist between spouses lies the plight of the noble wife, for whom ‘being married does not prevent one falling in love (with someone else)’.
¹⁵
According to Andreas Capellanus, even Eleanor in a wistful moment expressed the thought that it would be a fine thing if a wife could find love and marriage consonant. To ladies even as highborn and beautiful as Eleanor, who were locked in marriages over which they had little or no say, an anonymous troubadour offered the beguiling dream of being able to escape into the haven of a lover’s arms: