Eleanor Of Aquitaine (31 page)

These issues quieted for a time, Henry hastened from the proximity of the legate. He went down to Berry to make all fast in that quarter. He had previously assigned to the vagabond young king the job of securing by force of arms the orphaned heiress of Déols;
³³
but since the profits of any such expedition would inevitably enrich the Count of Poitou, the young king was suspected of not having employed his utmost energies on that mission. He had indeed taken the chief fortress of Châteauroux, but only to find the little countess had been spirited away toward the French frontier. The elder king now speedily possessed himself of the infant heiress and took her in custody
³⁰
He then went southward into Aquitaine to survey the enterprises of his son Richard against his rebel barons. On this journey he ran, by Angevin good fortune, into a very profitable business. Finding the Count of La Marche in difficulties for money to go upon crusade, he purchased his important fief at a handsome bargain. Its situation on the borders of Berry and Poitou made it the most desirable of acquisitions for the defense of Alais's dowry.

For the Nativity in 1177, in order to signalize his successes on all fronts, Henry convened a court of unusual splendor in Angers.
³⁸
There were no local Christmas courts in other feudal centers of the Angevin empire where the
preux chevaliers
could assemble beyond the surveillance of the king. His eldest three sons and his vassals gathered about him in an imposing display of power, peace, and amity. No such concourse of knights was remembered by living men, save only for the coronation of Henry himself and for the crowning of the young king.

*

From the Capetian point of view the peace of Montlouis had been disquieting All the odds in the long rivalry seemed in the hands of the crafty Angevin Henry had recovered his losses and appeased his rebel sons; the nobles who had supported them beheld their castles in ruins for their pains. Not only Louis's chief vassal, the Countess of Poitou, but his own younger daughter were prisoners in Britain. Louis in his sixth decade, in an age when men were old at fifty, felt his grasp on life relaxing. In the latter seventies of the century he began to put his house in order for his "migration from this world." At home he could lay his burdens down gladly, for his heir, Philip Dieu Donne, had reached the age for knightly exercise. Upon him and his generation would devolve the vindication of the Capets. According to the custom of the royal house, which Henry had already imitated in England and the Countess of Poitou in Aquitaine, Louis planned the consecration of his only son as his successor. He chose for the date of the coronation the Assumption of the Virgin (August 15, 1179) and summoned the magnates of his realm and his remotest vassals to be present on that day in the royal cathedral of Reims.

Louis and the prince with their retinue set out accordingly for the episcopal city, and broke their journey for rest in Compiègne.
³⁹
Here Philip was given leave to hunt with his
mesine
in the vast forest of the province and for that purpose was given a mettlesome horse, as befitted his rising dignities. The dogs, at once starting a boar, led the huntsmen deep into the wood. For a long time Philip followed the windings of the forest, attended, as he supposed, by his escort. Near sundown he found himself alone in the midst of a vast solitude. The baying of the dogs, the call of the horns had ceased. Unable to take his bearings, the frightened prince gave rein to his horse, but the beast only earned him hither and thither into deeper fastnesses and the haunts of wild creatures. He hallooed, but only the sound of his own voice answered him in the evening stillness. He crossed himself, called upon God, the Blessed Virgin, Saint Denis. At dusk after long meandenngs he came upon a little clearing, and there, in the glare of an oast, he beheld a grimy fellow with a hatchet suspended from his neck, busy with his charcoal burning, who looked up at the sound of the youth's approach as if he saw an apparition in the parting of the trees. Philip controlled his fright and addressed him courteously. Surprised beyond measure by the prince's story, the yokel dropped his bellows and led Dieu Donné quickly by a short path back to the royal lodging. Louis, who had dispatched all the huntsmen to beat the brush with hue and cry, was found beside himself with anxiety.

As a result of fright and exposure, Philip fell into a fever and became so ill that the coronation was out of the question on the day fixed for it, and the physicians even despaired of his life. Louis labored in a panic of woe and dread. For three successive nights the king beheld a vision of Saint Thomas of Canterbury,
⁴⁰
who admonished him to go to the shrine in Britain to make supplication for his son's recovery. Louis's barons warned him against putting himself at the mercy of "another king" on foreign soil, especially since there was no time to seek safe-conduct; but nothing shook his resolution. Fortifying himself with the name and habit of a pilgrim, and subduing that dread of the sea he had acquired on his return from crusade, he set sail from Wissant by the route Thomas had taken to his martyrdom, and drew up duly under the white cliffs.

Henry, apprised of his imminent arrival, rode all night under a moon in eclipse to meet his overlord in Dover, whither a suitable company of bishops and barons had been hastily summoned to form an escort. Thomas' successor in the See of Canterbury and the king greeted Louis with every mark of sympathy and deference, and the cortege brought him without delay to the shrine. As soon as he arrived in the holy place, the King of the Franks laid a cup brimming with gold upon the tomb and pledged the monks of Canterbury one hundred tuns of champagne and burgundy annually, together with perpetual freedom from tolls in the Ile de France The author of the
Saga
reports that he even gave to the sanctuary a glowing carbuncle which he highly prized and which Thomas had once desired for the altar of his church.

Louis made a strictly pious business of his one journey to England. So inward was he on this expedition that he scarcely looked over the hedges of the Dover road to survey the rich lands of the Angevin king, which in the time of the rebellion he had rashly pledged to Philip of Flanders It would be interesting to know what the two kings may have talked about as they traveled together, once they had exhausted the topic of the sick prince Of Saint Thomas. Of Henry's recent scourgings at the shrine? Of the queen in Salisbury Tower? Of the late rebellion? Of the Princess Alais? There was of course the matter of a new crusade brewing in Europe in consequence of the fearful tidings that continued to arrive from Jerusalem. We do not know what their discourse could have been. Within four days Louis had recrossed to Wissant. Upon his return he found the prince had awakened refreshed from the coma of his fever.

The coronation was set again, this time for All Saints. It was an occasion not less splendid than that which had marked the consecration of the young king in London. Henry did not attend because, as Diceto declares, he wished, as a king himself, to avoid doing homage to Dieu Donné. But his sons were there to support their rank as vassals. The young king, as Seneschal of France, preceded the prince, carrying the crown. Richard and Geoffrey brought the homage of their provinces, and Philip of Flanders bore in the procession the great sword of Charlemagne.

*

Louis, most pious and Christian King of the Franks, a prince of many virtues and immortal memory, laid aside the burden of the flesh, and his spirit fled to the skies to enter upon its eternal reward with the elect princes.

William of Tyre, II,

Louis himself was unable to attend the rite that meant so much to him.
⁴⁴
The trip to Canterbury had exhausted him; and after that journey, to leave no stone unturned, he had gone to Saint Denis to petition in that holy place the patron saint of France. There in the autumn dampness he caught cold, was attacked by chills, and then suffered a stroke that hampered speech and movement. Thereafter he drifted through the next nine months, a patient valetudinarian, to his last rest. With the shadow of death upon him, he ordered all he had of gold and silver, gems, precious clothing, and royal ornaments, brought to his presence. By the advice of the Archbishop of Paris and the Abbés of Saint Germain and of Saint Genevieve, he looked them over and assigned them to the poor.
⁴⁵
In September 1180, in his city of Paris, he "paid the debt to nature."
⁴⁶
The Chronicle of Auxerre relates that he died in the abby of Notre Dame.
⁴⁷
At his own request he was taken for burial to the Cistercian Abby of Barbieux, which he had endowed, a tranquil spot upon the Seine. There Adele of Champagne provided a noble tomb for him with a place beside it for herself.

Contemporaries of the king praise his virtues. Says Map, "Because he was gentle in manner and kindhearted, unaffectedly simple toward men of any rank, he seemed to some lacking in force; yet he was the strictest judge, and even when it cost him tears, he meted justice with even hand to meek and arrogant alike."
⁴⁹
Newburgh adds, "Louis Capet was a man of warm devotion to God and of extraordinary lenity to his subordinates; a devout respecter of the holy orders. He was however a little more credulous than befits a king, and prone to listen to advice that was unworthy of him."
⁵⁰
Giraldus, eager to testify to Louis's superiority to the Angevin, lauds his piety, his frequent fasts, his restraint and moderation. The king shares the chronicler's praise for the Capetian dynasty in general, to which he imputes justice and morality, leniency and affability. He notes that the Capetians do not, like some princes he could mention, swear by the eyes, the feet, the teeth, the throat of God, and that their device is not bears, leopards, lions, but the lily.

Louis lay in the chapel of his y of Notre Dame, shriven, anointed, redolent of spices, garbed not in the splendor of a feudal king, but in the seemly wrappings of a cenobite.
⁵²
He had put away his bauble scepter for all eternity and clasped on his breast the abbatial cross of Notre Dame. The eyes, so long in quest of inwardness, were now shuttered finally on the false shows of this world, on temporal thrones and powers and principalities. A great sigh had escaped his lips and left him eased forever. Fifty-nine strokes the bells of Paris tolled for his years in the century.

Eleanor was fifty-seven, and she had been in durance for six years.

AFTER THE JUST CAPETIAN fell asleep at the end of his long reign of forty-two years, the Angevin enjoyed a brief peace unchallenged by the malice of the Franks. Perhaps at no time in Henry's reign had he such untrammeled opportunity as now to give substance to his spacious vision of the kingly office. To review the activities in which he engaged at this time is to ask what he might have achieved in a lifetime, if, free from the Capetian enmity and the disorders of his own household, he had been able to devote his whole insight and energy to replacing the crumbling pillars of the feudal world with a more enduring structure.

His was the task (though it was not given to him to finish it) of converting an uncentralized society with diverse local law, custom, tradition, dialect, into a well-functioning organisin. He had the vision, the experience, the energy for comprehensive plan and effective execution. To regularize, to build, and to infuse the functions of government with life and movement was the work of his predilection.

Tirelessly he journeyed from end to end of his far-spread provinces, carrying government with him to the remotest quarters, inspecting every detail of feudal life, learning from contact with every type of person. He himself overlooked his garrisoned castles, the operations of his stewards and his seneschals. Traveling with his justiciars from place to place, he established more equitable justice which reached subjects of every estate. He systemized taxes and instituted new forms of military levies designed to create an army answerable directly to the king and less convenient for employment in local insurrections.

In seeking counsel the king went beyond the circle of those privileged nobles whose interests since his advent had been inimical to his own. He surrounded himself with sober men in any guise, lay or clerical, valuing ability, learning, trustworthiness, above prestige of rank.
¹
The demand and the rewards for men of talent led every burgher, as Diceto tells, to strive for the education of his son, to whom public life offered unprecedented opportunity. There thus grew up a confident and prosperous
bourgeoisie
, men skilled in professions and competent in trade.

The heirs of privliege in his time accuse Henry of parsimony. It is true that sycophants found little to gratify them in the king's generosity. His gifts were not the usual prizes of chivalry bestowed for personal valor or to win attachment. He did not give, as nobles of his day were wont to do, for display or to beget a following; yet he was careful to reward the humblest service and to requite his servants for unexpected losses in executing his behests.
²
His gifts to religious foundations, it was said, did not fulfill the traditions of his house; yet his contributions to "religion" were large in the aggregate, especially those to support Templars and Hospitallers on crusade and to equip individuals for their pilgrimage. His endowments of houses of religion and seats of learning, such as Grammont, Bee, and Fontevrault, make a long list, but one unmarked with ostentation. In time of famine in Anjou, he opened his provincial treasury of grain and wine for the support of a whole population until a new harvest and vintage.

His largest expenditures were secular and of practical benefit to the general economy: the reconstruction of ancient capital cities on ampler sites, with better access and more salubrious disposal of huddled industries; the building of roads, bridges, and levees for flood control; the improvement of markets and fairs; the repair of strongholds overlooking uneasy frontiers. His revenues, though uneven from year to year, were more stable and abundant than those of earlier times; but the expenses of his roving government with frequent crossings of the Channel, his diplomatic missions moving ceaselessly over the face of Europe, the conflicts for which he hired mercenaries, the numerous and extravagant households that he maintained, were a heavy drain on his treasury. On his perpetual journeyings, he must have been gratified by evidences of an expanding economy, a growing population and rising prosperity; and in these signs he must have found wherewith to assuage the disquietude that haunted him.

*

The young Plantagenets, though for a time less exposed to the machinations of the Franks, had not been reclaimed from the "demon of Anjou" by the solemn oaths exchanged at Montlouis. Richard, given license to suppress the anarchy surviving the rebellion in Aquitaine, pursued his course with such success that he, rather than his brother, seemed to all the world the virtual heir of Angevin supremacy.

In the meantime the elder prince, that young man with the highest pretensions in Europe, filled his days of ennui with counterfeit exploits and spurious renown. Rootless, without the spur of necessary strivings, he led his dazzling puppet show of knights errant over the jousting fields of Normandy and the Ile de France. Under his patronage the noble pastime of chivalry became a profession that gathered to itself the foot loose and restless younger generation: heirs waiting for their patrimonies, the cadets of noble houses, obscure young men of bravery and brawn eager to gamble on luck in a joust to escape their destined misery For a time the stir and the flying fame of the tournaments absorbed the young king, gave vent to his turbulence. But the ironic contrast between the mimic king of England and the conquering hero of Aquitaine deceived no one. It ended by provoking a desperate rancor in the younger Henry that no pageant could divert, nor any palliation of the elder king disguise or assuage.

By the spring of 1182 the strife in Aquitaine had reached such a pitch of ferocity that Henry could no longer leave the situation to the Count of Poitou's unaided operations The barons of the south, perennially in local confederation against each other, were finally brought to a common ground by their enmity toward Richard. But they found among themselves no acceptable leader and they lacked the means to finance an army of resistance against the effective mercenaries in the pay of the Angevins. In the young king they saw a man cut to their very pattern: the prince of cavaliers, rich, prodigal, with a following of elect knights, and with a grievance they knew how to inflame.

The demagogue of the conspiracy against the Count of Poitou was Bertran de Born,
⁴
seigneur of the castle of Hautefort near Periguéux and its thousand souls. He was in every way extravagant, an epitome of the violent contrasts that made the peculiar genius of the south country. Poet and warrior, cynic and romantic, hot-headed and cold-blooded, he gloried above all things in the spectacle and excitement of warfare, where prizes went to the reckless and the bold. He had a rich stake in the barons' conflict, for Hautefort was on the program of Richard's operations. Bertran's instrument for rousing and fusing the movement for revolt was the troubadour's topical song, the
sirventés
. He spilled out his fiery and provocative rhymes as from an inexhaustible horn, and his jongleur, Papiol, sounded them far and wide in the river valleys of the Lot and the Dordogne, and in the high places of the Limousin.

I
care not for Monday nor Tuesday
    Nor for weeks nor months nor years,
   Nor do I cease in April and March
   Seeing to it that harm may come
To those who do me wrong
.

Peace does not comfort me,
I am in accord with war,
Nor do I hold or believe
Any other religion'

The bucklers of cavaliers with their glints of blue and white, their banners unfurled to the breeze, their polished helmets, tents and pavilions spread upon the plain, the thunder of horses charging, splintered lances, shields hacked and broken, the debris of the battle field — these were the troubadour's delight.

Papiol easily found the ear of the young king and into it poured martial music, the purport of which was unmistakable. Why should he, the eldest of the Plantagenets, alone lack a particular domain?
⁸
Without much subtilty, the firebrand troubadour offered the castles of the Limousin, the barons of Aquitaine to his banners, the lordship of Poitou to the quasi lord of Normandy. Bertran threw out impudent lampoons designed to sting the young king's pride and fix his resolution. The Duke of Normandy, the heir of England, "is lord of little land." The prince may have a fine title, but he has neither wealth, nor power, nor security, and his living is but a Norman carter's tax. "As for me, I prefer a little land with honor to an empire with dishonor." "I should not care to be Lord of Toledo, if I could not stay there with confidence."

In the summer of 1182, the succession of tournaments for a time suspended, the young king moved about in Poitou and Aquitaine. Ostensibly he was lending a hand, at the instance of the elder king, in restoring peace in the provinces, where towns, castles, and granges were aflame with the sullen fires of war. But he could be employed only languidly to support the Count of Poitou. His ardors for the moment seemed not military but pious. In making pilgrimages to the shrines of the Limousin, he beheld the ruin of the countryside and was moved by the miseries of the people, who found no sanctuary, even in the churches, for the goods they tried to save from fire and pillage. On the pilgrim routes, the stinging music of Papiol everywhere reached his ears. He was in Limoges for the feast of Saint Martial, and on the saint's day, in the city where Richard had been consecrated Duke of Aquitaine, he presented to the famous y a mantle of green brocade embroidered with the legend
Henncus Rex
, perhaps the one he had worn at his own coronation.
⁸
In these weeks he was honeycombed with indecision, and in the labyrinthine maze of mind and will, pride met honor; temptation, compunction; jealousy of his brother, fealty to the king.

The Count of Poitou was in the meantime by no means unaware of the disaffection of the young king and of his connivance with the barons of the south. Bertran's
sirventés
reached his ears, too He acted with Angevin bravado. Without taking counsel of anyone but himself, he took measures to fortify his borders against treachery. In that critical wedge of land where the inheritances of the Plantagenet princes converged on the marches of Maine, Poitou, and Brittany, Henry held in his own hands the three
formidable castles of Chinon, Loudun, and Mirebeau (those with which he had sought to endow John in 1177). Encroaching upon this neutral ground, Richard hastily built a new strong castle at Clairvaux. Again Papiol's song was heard:

Between Poitiers and Ile Bouchard, between Mirebeau, Loudun, and Chinon, at Clairvaux, someone has built a beautiful fortress in the very center of the plain. I should not like to have the young king know of it or get sight of it, for it would scarcely please him But I fear nevertheless that he will see it from Mateflon, for from there it shows white on the horizon.

Henry himself was in the queen's provinces through the summer, trying to moderate the strife, to beat out the fires that struggled up from the ash and rubble of desolated towns; observing meanwhile with deepening uneasiness the bitterness between his sons. But in the midst of his pacific operations a new crisis diverted him to Normandy. He went there hastily in August to offer asylum to his daughter Matilda and her lord, Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, with their children, expelled from Germany by the malice of the Emperor Barbarossa, who had decreed their exile for a period of seven years and had distributed their four duchies to his partisans.
¹¹
The downfall of the duke, through a series of unfortunate events, was a heavy blow to Angevin prestige, for Henry of Saxony had been a striking figure in the destinies of the Empire, the kind of man the king could appreciate, a pillar of enlightenment, rich, powerful, a builder of cities, a patron of the church, a crusader whose exploits beyond the seas had spread his fame through Christendom. The duke and duchess were accompanied in their exile by some two hundred German magnates of their following. Henry barely anticipated the arrival of this army of noble guests in Rouen, where he threw open his castles and his bailiwicks for their reception. The size of the retinue however was sufficient to outreach even a royal hospitality. Henry lodged Matilda and her children in the castle of Argentan. The Duke of Saxony, already an illustrious pilgrim, was counseled to employ the leisure of his exile in visiting the shrine of Saint James of Compostella. As for the magnates, Henry rewarded them liberally for their fidelity to the Saxon cause and bade them Godspeed upon their homeward way.

The young king, who might be involved in heaven knew what occupation in Poitou, was summoned to Rouen to greet the exiles. But when he arrived, he was discovered to be full of his own affairs. He was miserably unhappy, sick with pique and suspicion, desperate with discontent. He responded to none of the indulgences that usually beguiled him from his spleen. He had reached a decision, it seemed, from which nothing could dislodge him. Let the king give him his inheritance, or at least Normandy, or at the very least Anjou. He required a capital seat where he and his young queen could hold their own court without let or hindrance; and soldiers of his own; and revenues sufficient for the maintenance of a royal household. He no longer offered himself to the world as a butt for vagabond jongleurs.

When Henry tried to postpone him to a later time, he flew in a Poitevin rage to Paris and poured out his wrongs before the sympathetic Capets. Shortly he came back with a new string to his harp He was now sad rather than angry. He would accept banishment. Dispnzed and dispossessed of his inheritance, he would take the cross. Never again would he submit to his puppet role as King of England. In Palestine, where valor made a man, he could find exercise. He had a calling at last. What matter where it led? And — he went on — if the king should contravene his vows, he would end his miserable life with his own hand. The beautiful prince raged like Absalom.