Authors: Douglas Boyd
He insisted that his other half-sister Princess Alais, who had been shut up in Winchester Castle throughout most of her childhood and adolescence, should be released from the betrothal to Richard, who had no intention of marrying her or anyone else. To placate his insistent suzerain, Henry promised to marry her off to John instead and swore fealty for the continental possessions to Philip, which he had previously refused to do.
On the intervention of the archbishop of Canterbury and in reward for her cooperation over the issue of Gisors, Eleanor’s conditions on her return to England were eased still further. Although she remained in the custody of Glanville’s deputy Ralph fitz Stephen, dresses, riding clothes and saddlery were hers for the asking, together with items for the faithful Amaria, now benefiting from her mistress’ better fortunes. Easter 1184 was spent at Becket’s former palace in Berkhamsted, where Matilda of Saxony came to visit, largely pregnant. From there, the queen moved to Woodstock but was in Winchester for the birth in mid-June of Matilda’s son William.
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Delighted with the upturn in his fortunes, Richard meanwhile saw his court of familiars swollen daily by those who wanted to curry favour with the prince now destined to be king of England. Disturbed by this sudden popularity and Richard’s increasing arrogance, Henry had Prince John come from England, with the idea of making him duke of Aquitaine, thus placing Richard in what had been Young Henry’s invidious position of being king without a kingdom. Richard was
not
impressed, even with the promise that John would do homage to him for the duchy. To gain time, he asked for a respite of two or three days and then declared from the safety of Poitiers that he would never part with an inch of his birthright.
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At this defiance, Henry provided funds for Geoffrey and John to make war on Richard, thus launching a new round of depredations and death
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in which Richard was campaigning in Brittany to punish Geoffrey, while he and John were laying waste Poitou in return.
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In the viscounty of Limoges, Mercadier’s mercenaries were on the loose under the pretence of fighting for Richard, while other bands under
the son of the count of Toulouse were doing the same ostensibly for the other side. Finally Henry gave in to the protests of the bishops and ordered the three princes to come to London at the end of November.
The Christmas court in Windsor was thus a fraught family reunion, even by Plantagenet standards. Also present were Matilda of Saxony, her husband and children … and Eleanor. Resolved not to play Henry’s game a second time, she allied herself with Richard in refusing to even consider John being invested as duke of Aquitaine. Playing on the siblings’ rivalry, Henry then released the ever-pliable Prince Geoffrey to return to Normandy while keeping John and Richard with him. A change of mind led to Geoffrey being recalled and Richard allowed to return to Poitou after giving patently false promises of good conduct. Rightly fearing his father’s change of mind, he took ship before the week was out.
In intervals between warfare and hunting, he was often generous to the poor and particularly so to religious foundations, once declaring in a letter to the abbot of La Sauve Majeure that the abbey was dearer to him than his own eyeballs. This particular progress southwards was several times halted to issue charters granting or confirming privileges – and to establish new towns at St Rémy and elsewhere, to be peopled by offering tax-haven status for merchants and artisans.
Eleanor’s youngest son John was now eighteen. Spoiled by his father since the Young King’s death, he loved the good life, fine clothes and jewellery – also gambling, with backgammon being a favourite pastime. During Lent 1185 Henry dubbed him a knight and sent him at the head of an army into Ireland after naming him its overlord. Having a whole country to call his own revealed John’s true colours: he mocked the unfashionable clothing and long beards of the Irish lords and their halting attempts to speak Norman French. Within an eight-month stay he alienated both them and the Anglo-Norman nobility to the point that Henry replaced him by a viceroy, John de Courcy.
Thanks to the intercession of Matilda and her husband, Eleanor had been living with them at Windsor under conditions that were very comfortable, compared with her years in Old Sarum. Summoned with them in mid-Lent to Rouen by Henry, she had another pleasant surprise on learning that he had solved the problem of Richard’s overweening arrogance by sending him an ultimatum to surrender Poitou and Aquitaine immediately to his mother. Should he not comply, Henry threatened to march at the head of an army and reinstall her as duchess by force!
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His vassals refusing to support him against Henry, Richard rode sullenly to Normandy and declared in front of witnesses that Eleanor was the true mistress of Poitou and Aquitaine. To make the point that he really had become the second young-king-sans-kingdom, Henry had a treaty drawn up confirming Eleanor’s plenary powers, on parchment at least.
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A grandmother of sixty-three, it was natural that she should celebrate this amazing upturn of fortune after eleven years of deprivation by making generous gifts from the proceeds of her own estates to the abbey of Fontevraud and other foundations.
To emphasise that she was acting of her own volition at long last, she announced the gifts to the archbishop of Bordeaux, the bishops and barons and just about everyone else of importance in Aquitaine. Henry seemed to have softened a little since the collapse of the great design, and his health was gradually declining. In November 1185, after acting the peacemaker and brokering a settlement between Philip and the count of Flanders who had been so generous to Young Henry, he was too ill to attend the treaty signing.
Back in England, although Eleanor was now living a fairly normal life, she still had keepers. Henry of Berneval replaced Ralph fitz Stephen as Glanville’s eyes and ears, watching her at every turn as she stayed mainly at Winchester, where Princess Alais was still captive. At his next meeting with Philip in Lent of 1186, Henry again promised to marry Alais to Richard or hand back Gisors. If the latter was a conditional promise he had no intention of keeping, the first alternative was out of the question, since Richard had no desire for a wife and it was common knowledge that Alais had been Henry’s mistress for years.
Before returning to England on 27 April 1186 Henry neutralised Richard, who continued to style himself duke of Aquitaine
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in the absence of its duchess, by equipping him with an army of Brabanter mercenaries and sending them to invade the county of Toulouse in alliance with the count of Montpellier and the king of Aragon. The declared aim was to punish Raymond of Toulouse for his support of Young Henry.
Geoffrey was meanwhile playing a different game on the Ile de la Cité. During one of a series of tournaments given by Philip to entertain him, the honoured guest fell in a mêlée. This was not a
joûte à outrance
or fight to the death, but in the confusion he was trampled to death by the horses,
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despite his armour. Like thousands of unrecorded victims of the sport, he died on 19 August 1186 and was buried with great pomp in the basilica of Notre Dame, Philip having to be restrained from throwing himself into the grave with the coffin.
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Eleanor learned of this in Winchester. First the Young King, now Geoffrey. Three of the five sons she had borne to rule an empire were dead. Given Richard’s violent way of life, did she already have a premonition about him dying prematurely too?
Philip afterwards demanded as suzerain of the dead prince that Henry send Geoffrey’s daughter Eleanor of Brittany to be raised at the French court until she was of an age to be married, so that she would be under his control. When Henry prevaricated, Philip insisted to the point of war. For the first time since falling out with Becket, Henry delegated real authority, dividing his forces into four corps: one commanded by Richard; the second by John; the third by the Count of Aumale; and the fourth by Geoffrey the Bastard.
On 29 March Geoffrey’s widow Constance gave birth to her ill-starred son Arthur, whose only good fortune was in her choice of name, which made many superstitious Bretons believe him a reincarnation of the eponymous mythical king. The boy inheriting his dead father’s title at birth, Philip as suzerain now sought to bring both him and his sister to Paris with the widowed Constance.
While Henry refused to allow this, he also had no intention of allowing Geoffrey’s widow to become one of those powerful mothers who brought their sons up with a view to a great destiny – as the Empress Matilda had brought him up. He therefore exercised his right to dispose of widowed vassals in forcing Constance to marry the young count of Chester, Ranulf de Blundeville, after which Philip’s forces marched into Berry, where a new war was only averted by the truce of Châteauroux.
In Paris, seeking the welcome Philip always extended to a disaffected son of Henry, Richard was told – if he did not already know – that his father’s talk of marrying Alais to John after making him duke of Aquitaine was a smokescreen. The truth was even worse, Philip said: after twenty-two years of keeping Alais his prisoner and latterly his helpless mistress, Henry intended to marry her himself and make their young bastard son his heir to the throne and all that went with it, to the detriment of the two surviving sons by the marriage to Eleanor.
The plan, if such it was, failed when Alais’ child died, but Philip’s talk fanned Richard’s ever-smouldering animosity towards his father, as his host had intended. In Paris, he was shown every kindness, king and prince spending their days together, sharing their favourite foods at table and drinking from the same goblet, at night sharing a bed. The intensity of their relationship was such that all Henry’s bribes failed to persuade Richard to leave Paris.
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When he eventually did, in his own good time,
it was to head straight for Chinon and help himself to considerable funds from the treasury there, which he used to fortify several castles in direct defiance of his father’s orders.
Eleanor seems to have spent most of 1187 at Winchester, following from a distance all these manoeuvrings in conditions that were comfortable. With Henry’s worsening health, it must have been about then that she realised for the first time that there was a very good chance of her outliving him. Should Richard too die before his father, John was capable of having her locked up for the rest of her life. Therefore it was in her interest to forgive Richard and use what influence she had in his favour.
A new crusade was being preached by Archbishop Joscius of Tyre to recover Jerusalem from the great Saracen general Salah-ed-Din, called Saladin in the West, who had captured the holy city on 2 October 1187. All that remained in Frankish hands was the coastal strip including three vital ports, without which the Latin Kingdom could not survive. A couple of years earlier, Henry had been offered the throne of Jerusalem,
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but preferred instead to fund the Templars to defend the holy places in his name. In a fit of adolescent enthusiasm, the atheist Prince John took the cross. Although his relative and friend Count Philip of Flanders had gone all the way to Jerusalem to check out the possibilities and returned disillusioned, Richard could not do less. Having taken crusader’s vows did not stop him treating rank-and-file captives taken in his campaigns against Toulouse with his usual brutality – until his chaplain Milo came up with the humane solution of pardoning them on condition they swore to accompany him on the coming ‘pilgrimage to Jerusalem’.
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Dunned to support the new crusade, Henry promised Joscius that he too would take the cross – a bluff which compelled Philip to do the same. Making both monarchs swear to respect each other’s status as pilgrims and live in peace until their return from the Holy Land, on 22 January 1188 the archbishop of Tyre pinned a white cloth cross to the cloaks of Henry’s retinue, with red ones for Philip and his barons and green ones for the count of Flanders and his men.
All three thereupon declared a new tax to finance the crusade, known as the Saladin tithe: a tenth of all revenues and movable property, with the exception of a knight’s horse, armour and weapons, the clergy’s books and vestments, and Church treasures. In both Normandy and England protests were raised at this precursor of income tax
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proclaimed by the bishops, who threatened defaulters with excommunication. Unable to impose it in his domains, Philip was at
a financial disadvantage
vis-à-vis
Richard when they did eventually depart on crusade.
In addition, a prolonged Lenten fast was decreed – with no meat to be eaten on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
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Many other details were thrashed out: there were to be no beggars or pardoned criminals on this crusade, but only disciplined fighting men. Fine clothes were banned, as were dice and swearing. Eleanor must have smiled when she learned that there were to be no Amazons this time – nor any other women except ‘decent’ washerwomen.
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While many knights and barons departed early for the Orient, both Henry and Philip could claim a thousand reasons to delay their departure for the Holy Land. From Périgord, Bertran de Born was heard deploring from a distance ‘the journey that the kings had forgotten to make’.
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Few considered it a sin to kill Saracens, but there were some pacifists with the courage to express profound belief in the sanctity of life: a future canon of Lincoln Cathedral, Radulfus Niger held that the terrestrial Jerusalem was a mirage distracting men’s minds from the true priority of a spiritual Jerusalem. With extraordinary courage, he raised his lone voice in the wilderness of crusade fever, calling out that it was wrong to kill Saracens because they were human beings, albeit infidels.
After visiting Eleanor briefly in Old Sarum, where she was suffering for her support of Richard, Henry took ship for Barfleur at the head of an army of English and Welsh mercenaries to meet Richard with his Brabanters and Basques converging on Berry to teach the French a lesson. Whatever one side won was soon lost again. At a meeting on 16 August under the ancient elm below Gisors Castle, Richard was sent away by his father when his temper got the better of him. This was not gullible Louis with whom they had to deal: Philip played all the tricks Henry had served on Louis in earlier times, even having the elm cut down at the end of their negotiations to demonstrate that the time for talking was over.
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