April Queen (54 page)

Having quietened internal dissent with these tactics, she turned her attention to the strategy for safeguarding the integrity of the duchy, which was once again threatening to fragment into two separate entities, north and south of the Garonne. Philip having accepted Arthur’s homage for the three Angevin counties, she had no wish to give John any rights over Aquitaine in case he lost Normandy or died without issue, in which case Arthur would succeed by default. She therefore made a convoluted but feudally sound arrangement.

Maintaining that Richard’s dukedom had been for his lifetime only and was not therefore part of his inheritable estate, she reasserted plenary powers for herself on the grounds that she had never actually renounced her titles as countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine even during the fifteen agonising years when Henry used every trick to force her to do so. She then ceded the county and duchy to John on condition that he swear fealty to her and renounce all his rights for the duration of her lifetime or until such earlier time as might suit her. Her price was that he confirm all her prerogatives as queen of England, which kept her still the richest woman in the world.

She was at Rouen with John towards the end of June when Joanna caught up with her again, pleading poverty because she received no allowance from her husband.
¹⁵
Arguing that her own wealth was already committed, Eleanor persuaded John to grant his sister an annual pension of 100 marks.
¹⁶
At the time he was being dunned for repayment of the money Richard had borrowed from the Lombard bankers to buy Otto’s election as emperor, but had so little reserves that he solved the problem by granting total exemption from customs duties to a merchant of Moissac, who then discharged the debt to the Lombards. John also gave Joanna a lump sum of 3,000 marks.

In September, the sick and pregnant ex-queen of Sicily was still in Rouen, her condition preventing a return to Fontevraud. Feeling near death, she dictated a testament leaving the major part of the 3,000 marks to be disposed of by Eleanor in charitable works for the religious and the poor, with explicit mention of a legacy towards the costs of a new kitchen for the convent at Fontevraud, in consideration for which she wanted to be buried there as a nun.

Advanced pregnancy being normally an insuperable barrier to becoming a bride of Christ, Eleanor sent for Abbess Matilda to solve
the problem. At the same time, fearing the worst, she summoned Hubert Walter who diplomatically regretted that, although archbishop of Canterbury, he had no powers to admit the dying ex-queen to the Order, as this was the prerogative of the Abbess. To calm Joanna’s desperate pleas, Eleanor pressured him to call a council of clerics including some nuns from Fontevraud, who agreed that the wishes of the ex-queen of Sicily were so extraordinary that they must be divinely inspired. With this alibi, he admitted her to the Order shortly before she died
¹⁷
and was delivered by Caesarean section of a son, who survived just long enough to be baptised Richard after his dead uncle.

In the space of five months in her seventy-eighth summer Eleanor had lost a son and a daughter before her very eyes. With Marie de Champagne having also died during the siege of Châlus, out of the ten children borne to Louis and Henry only Eleanor of Castile and John survived. Escorted by John, the grieving dowager queen accompanied the funeral cortège towards Fontevraud, after prising out of him a modest pension for Joanna’s two maids-in-waiting, left penniless by the demise of their mistress.
¹⁸

It was somewhere near the pillaged city of Le Mans that they met Guillaume des Roches, whom John enticed into changing sides again
¹⁹
by confirming him as seneschal, to the detriment of Count Amaury of Thouars, who then declared for Philip and helped Richard’s old enemy Guillaume des Barres to spirit Constance and Arthur away to the safety of Paris.
²⁰

The new king of England had intended spending Christmas 1199 north of the Channel, not having been back there in the six months since the coronation, but decided to hold his Christmas court at Bures instead. Early in January between Les Andelys and Gaillon he met Philip, who had been rendered somewhat more amenable to relinquishing Arthur’s claim to Maine and Anjou because of the setbacks suffered by Constance’s forces there after their initial successes. He now offered to allow John to swear fealty for Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Brittany, with Arthur in turn to do homage to John for Brittany. The price for this recognition of John’s succession was his confirmation of Richard’s cession of the Norman Vexin plus the county of Evreux plus a relief for his lands or
rechatum
payment of 20,000 English marks.
²¹
The money having to be raised by a special
carucage
tax in England earned the new king a second unfortunate nickname: Softsword.

The other item on the agenda was the marriage of Philip’s son Prince Louis to Eleanor’s granddaughter Princess Urraca of Castile,
whose dowry was to be provided out of Capetian territory taken by Richard. This was Eleanor’s way of reuniting her blood with that of the Capetians after two generations’ interval, for the match had been first mooted when she travelled to Tours and swore fealty to Philip in mid-June.

With John in England trying to collect 20,000 marks from a land stripped bare by Richard’s voracity, Eleanor took the long road south from Poitiers to Castile with a retinue that included the archbishop of Bordeaux. Even in a heated motor vehicle this can be a tough journey in winter. That she felt it necessary to go in person despite her approaching seventy-eighth birthday indicates how crucial she felt the choice of bride to be. Before the end of the first day’s ride, not far from the site of the ambush in which Patrick of Salisbury had died and William the Marshal nearly lost his life, she fell into another ambush. The Lusignans were intent on revenge for her engineering the repudiation of their relative Bourguigne by Raymond of Toulouse and demanded in return for Eleanor’s liberty the county of La Perche, sold by them to Henry years before.
²²
Pragmatic as ever, Eleanor yielded what Hugues de Lusignan demanded and hurried on her way, following the old pilgrim roads to Spain and defying the winter conditions in the Pyrenean passes.

She was received at Alfonso VIII’s court in Palencia with all the courtesies appropriate to the doyenne of European royalty. In the civilised luxury of a Christian palace enhanced by all the comforts and knowledge of its Muslim neighbours, she had time to regain her strength and get to know her grandchildren because there was no point in hurrying back for a wedding that could not take place before the end of Lent. Why then had she been in such a hurry to get there? Three of Eleanor of Castile’s daughters were of ‘marriageable’ age. Berengaria, the eldest, was already betrothed to the heir of the neighbouring kingdom of Leon, and thus not available. Meeting their intimidating grandmother for the first time in the presence of Philip’s emissaries,
²³
the other two adolescent princesses may not have known that they were
both
being assessed.

Comparing the girls with her instinct for people honed by the events of an extraordinary life, Eleanor decided that fourteen-year-old Urraca was a less good choice than her younger sister Blanca. Had she perhaps a
frisson
on first seeing this girl of twelve who so closely resembled herself at that age, with her broad features and fearless gaze, her long brown hair and her cool classical beauty – and who had also grown up and been educated in a court where troubadours were welcomed and
honoured as they had been at Poitiers so long before? Something of the sort occurred, for there was no doubt in Eleanor’s mind. On the pretext that Urraca’s name would sound outlandish to Frankish ears, whereas Blanca translated easily as Blanche, the choice was formalised and the rejected elder princess engaged instead to the heir to the throne of Portugal.
²⁴

The return journey across the Pyrenees by the pass of Roncevaux, where the Augustinian abbey alone offered sparse accommodation for the night, lasted well into Lent against the stream of pilgrims taking advantage of the warmer weather to set out for Santiago de Compostela. Stopping to celebrate Easter in Bordeaux, Eleanor was greeted by Mercadier, who had not accompanied her all the way to Spain because he was acting as constable of Aquitaine, but was going to escort her and Blanca north. On 9 April, taken unawares in what may have been a drunken street-fight, he was fatally stabbed by a mercenary from another band led by one Brandin,
²⁵
whom some believed to be in the pay of John. Whether his killing was premeditated or spontaneous, it came as a severe blow to Eleanor, who now had no one on whom she could rely or keep order in her name.

She summoned up the strength to accompany Blanca to Fontevraud, where she stayed to recover from the journey from Castile, Blanca under her Gallicised name of Blanche being escorted by the archbishop of Bordeaux and the bishops of Saintes and Poitiers to Richard’s ‘impregnable’ Château Gaillard in Normandy. There she was the guest of her uncle John until the marriage could be celebrated by the archbishop at the small church of Port-Mort in Norman territory on the right bank of the Seine a few miles south of Château Gaillard. The ceremony had to be performed on Norman soil because Philip’s territory still lay under interdict and he was unable to attend, being excommunicate. John too was absent, having constituted himself a hostage on Frankish soil so long as Arthur was in Normandy.

Constance of Brittany was another notable absentee, having been diagnosed as suffering from leprosy. Her son was now fourteen, the same age as the groom. After witnessing his Castilian cousin’s marriage Arthur did homage to John for Brittany with Philip’s consent,
²⁶
after which he accompanied the young couple to the palace on the Ile de la Cité where Eleanor had first arrived with Louis, aged fifteen. There, no church bells rang out to welcome them, for under interdict every bell was lowered to the ground.

Blanche was to justify Eleanor’s choice by becoming one of France’s greatest queens, who in 1230 checked the attempt by her cousin,
England’s Henry III, to regain the French territories lost by their uncle John so early in his reign. She even came within an ace of commanding her own invasion fleet from Boulogne, and remained the lifelong counsellor of her son Louis IX, canonised as Saint Louis – making Eleanor the only woman ever to number two royal saints among her great-grandsons, the other being San Fernando of Spain.

W
hen escorting Blanche to Rouen for the wedding, the archbishop of Bordeaux had been charged by Eleanor with another duty: the undoing of John’s consanguineous marriage of convenience to Isabelle of Gloucester, which was never going to provide an heir for the throne of England. Shortly afterwards, the pliable bishops of Avranches, Bayeux and Lisieux cut the knot between the king and his estranged wife
¹
which left him free to seek another spouse while at the same time keeping his hands on her dowry. Visiting Eleanor at Fontevraud, where another spell of illness had immobilised her, he found that she had her eye on another Iberian princess as a suitable bride for him. As a result, in July 1200 an embassy was dispatched to the court of Portugal.
²

Making a cautious progress through Poitou, a county where he was not universally welcome, John was busy settling the usual feudal trivia: confirming Richard’s gift of the manor of Vieux-Sauloy to Eleanor’s cook Adam for an annual rent of one pound of pepper and other arrangements for her butler and maid-in-waiting, which imply that this time she really was retiring from the world.

Even he must have been surprised when two of his Saxon nephews tracked him down and informed him that his nephew Otto had not renounced the dukedom of Aquitaine or the estates bestowed on him by Richard and expected to receive the benefits therefrom. They also demanded on Otto’s behalf one-half of his late uncle’s treasury and his jewels, claiming that this had been Richard’s dying wish at Châlus. Was this what the abbot of Turpenay had been silent about? Or had Milo the Chaplain, who certainly knew Otto personally, taken it upon himself to inform the real beneficiaries of an oral testament subsequently concealed by Eleanor? Whatever the truth of that, John’s reply was to send the two young Saxons away empty-handed after citing his agreement with Philip not to give any assistance to Otto, who was at war with Philip of Schwabia, then an ally of Paris.