Read Eleanor Of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Amy Kelly
When the Abbots of Boxley and Pontrobert met the king, his chancellor, and his escort at Ochsenfurt, Richard was in fine fettle and by no means cast down by his hapless state. "It was," says Hoveden, "the admiration of all how boldly, how courteously, how becomingly he behaved." He had lost no inch of his regal stature, nor any gram of his aplomb. He was in excellent spirits, sanguine about his fate at the hands of the emperor, who, he believed, in spite of his imperial crown, would prove but a gosling in diplomacy. The Hohenstaufen had shown himself very angry at Ratisbon, at first refusing to look upon his victim, but Plantagenet
courtoisie
and dialectic had presently availed to temper his emotions.
21
The matter of the ransom weighed not too heavily upon the king's mind. According to his observation, sterling always renewed itself; and
preux chevaliers
expected ransoms in the give and-take of combat and must meet fortune as they found it, gallantly. From Ely he heard the lurid chronicle of John's inconstancy with vexation, but not alarm. "My brother John," said he, "is not the man to subjugate a country, if there is one person able to make the slightest resistance to his attempts." But his wrath flared hotly against his archenemy, the King of the Franks. When encountered at Ochsenfurt, the king was on his way to the emperor's Easter court in Speyer, and heartily glad to have left behind the barbaric crudity, the squalor and monotony of the Danubian fortresses for the amenities of more civilized surroundings near the Rhine.
The Easter court in Speyer, to which the whole company repaired, was an august affair, and it brought forth prodigies of diplomacy. In presence of the Holy Roman Emperor was convened an imposing array of vassals, lay and clerical. Before this tribunal Richard was brought to defend himself against the charges preferred and to receive the semblance of a judicial sentence for his accumulated mischiefs- the recognition of Tancred of Sicily to the prejudice of the rights of the Empress Constance, an act that had involved the Hohenstaufen in extensive wars to recover her inheritance; the "treason and treachery" of his conduct in the Land of Promise; his insults to Leopold of Austria; his outrages against the house of Montferrat; his violence to the Emperor of Cyprus; the jeopardies to which he had exposed the King of the Franks. Coeur-de-Lion was to be made to feel in the marrow of his bones the might and dignity of the Holy Roman Empire, which he had presumed to flout, and to learn the deference that Christian kings owed to its potentate.
A little company of Richard's vassals and familiars had been able to reach Speyer from various directions to stand with the king: Savary of Bath and Hubert of Salisbury; Ely the Chancellor; the Abbots of Boxley and Pontrobert; the Norman chaplain, William of Saint Mary l'Église. For the trial the emperor was armed with righteous indignation and a bill of particulars; Richard only with suavity. The king relied upon no spokesinan in his little entourage, but stood forth valiantly in his own behalf before the charges of the emperor and met them all with such reason and restraint, such grace and candor, and gave such a simple and guileless account of himself in Sicily and Palestine that the emperor's vassals were visibly moved and the imperial tremendousness seemed somehow ill judged and out of place.
24
The crusading king appeared as shining as his legend, the very exemplar of all
preux chevaliers
. He, the injurious one, contrived to make himself the injured, persecuted for righteousness' sake. Henry Hohenstaufen, becoming aware of the sentiment of admiration for the captive among his hostile feudatories, tempered his invective. When the eloquence subsided and Coeur-de-Lion knelt courteously before the emperor, a concordant murmur of applause went the rounds and many of the assistants, especially the bishops, wept with joy. The emperor passed by degrees from awfulness to moderation and then to leniency. At last, according to Newburgh, he seemed moved not only by pity but reverence. He burst into tears, of which he too had the gift, came down from his high seat, lifted the captive from his posture of humility, and handed him to the dais. Richard's success was, in a sense, a triumph for the school of manners in Poitiers. On Maundy Thursday, William of Saint Mary l'Éiglise left for England with the terms of the ransom in his wallet.
Throughout the week Richard was the guest of the emperor and enjoyed, with a certain relaxation of custody, the amenities of the palace city on the Rhine. But suddenly he was transferred to the strong and isolated mountain castle of Trifels on the borders of Swabia.
25
This was an imperial dungeon from which political prisoners rarely returned to the light of day. Here he was again guarded day and night and sequestered from intercourse with his cautioners.
It appears to have been at about this time that Henry Hohenstaufen was thrown into misgivings about his agreements with his prisoner in Speyer by an embassy from Philip Augustus,
26
whose grievances had been more or less lumped with all the others in the imperial indictment. The details of the intercourse between the emperor and the King of the Franks was of that confidential kind not usually preserved for history by the chroniclers. But it seems probable from subsequent events that Philip, whose campaigns in Normandy, after his first rebuff in Rouen, seemed more hopeful, was both alarmed and taken aback when the compact of Speyer for the release of the prisoner became known. He evidently had not dreamed that the emperor would think of arranging for the disposal of the captive without his own knowledge and consent. How otherwise could he construe the warmth of Henry's Christmas letter and his protestations more than a year before in Italy? In all the premises, Philip too had a stake in the prize. The long and short of it was that the King of the Franks bespoke a partner's consideration in the lucky fortunes of war and would go as far as he could to make justice profitable for the emperor.
The most important concern of Henry Hohenstaufen at the moment was not the affair of Coeur-de-Lion: it was to resolve his formidable conflict with his own disaffected feudatories, among them the Bishops of Mainz and Cologne and the powerful Dukes of Louvain, Lemberg, and Saxony. This group charged him with having exiled the Bishop of Liége, who was the brother of the Duke of Louvain, and having then procured his murder in France. It is probable that Philip Augustus, who was seeking a means of gratifying the emperor, offered to support him against this coalition —at a price — and to procure for him the mediation of the Archbishop of Reims. A meeting was proposed for the King of the Franks and the emperor for Saint John's day, June 24, at Vaucouleurs.
The possibility of collusion with Philip, when viewed in all its aspects, was fraught with risks for Henry Hohenstaufen, but it also offered more benefits than the latter had counted on. The contract with the English magnates for the king's release had, to be sure, been signed, sealed, and dispatched; but Henry, whose pursuit of empire had dried up his revenues, cast about for some way of taking advantage, even if somewhat tardily, of the French king's helpfulness. It occurred to him that a competition between the magnates of the Plantagenet empire on the one hand, and the King of the Franks and the heir of England on the other, might pour a refreshing flood into his treasury. Furthermore, he saw himself confirmed, by this turn in the wheel of fortune, in that imperial role he coveted as supreme arbiter and judge between Christian potentates. And thereupon he fell into a quandary about which suppliant would in the long run prove the more valuable ally.
*
No prisoner can tell his honest thought
Unless he speaks as one who suffers wrong;
But for his comfort he may make a song.
My friends are many, but their gifts are naught.
Shame will be theirs, if, for my ransom, here I lie another year
* *
They know this well who now are rich and strong
Young gentlemen of Anjou and Touraine,
That far from them, on hostile bonds I strain.
They loved me much, but have not loved me long
Their plains will see no more fair lists arrayed,
While I lie here betrayed
.
Richard Coeur de Lion,
Sirventés 28
Before setting out for England with commission to collect the hostages, the indefatigable William of Ely induced the emperor to move his captive from Trifels to Hagenau, where the imperial court passed the lovely weeks of Pentecost. Here, for greater accessibility, as it was said, Richard seems to have spent the months of April and May without suspecting the new value set upon his head by the offers of Philip Augustus. Within the limits of a strict surveillance, he appears to have enjoyed many of the privlieges of a royal guest. It was doubtless in this interval that the emperor and the king, poets both, discovered each other's talents for balladry and matched troubadours' rondels with minnesingers' songs. In his unwonted leisure, Coeur-de-Lion burnished the poetic gifts that were his Poitevin heritage.
He employed his favorite lyric form, the
sirventés
, that vehicle of irony which he had learned from no less a master than Bertran de Born. With it, lately in Palestine, he had exchanged taunts with that fire eating Capetian versifier, the Bishop of Beauvais
29
He used it now in the interests of speeding up the ransom, and he addressed himself, among others, to his dear sister, the Countess of Champagne, in whose school he had been taught. It is difficult in English, with its relatively meager stock of rhymes and its weight of consonants, to render completely the disarming grace of this reproach to fair-weather friends, the suave cadence, the delicate strophic scheme that embodies his appeal to the countess and, through her, to his familiars in hall, in tournament and war. In this sally the king shows himself no paltry descendant of Guillaume, the troubadour Count of Poitou.
From Hagenau, Coeur-de-Lion dispatched a flood of letters in his own behalf to abbots, earls, barons, clerks, and freeholders, bespeaking their efforts for his release and promising them his "grateful thanks." Of course he wrote to the queen.
31
Without so much as mentioning Berengana, he addresses her as "Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England," his "much beloved mother." He writes cheerfully of the consideration he meets in the court of Hagenau and of the delightful amenities of the company and the entertainment. He expects soon to be home. The ransom is of course a difficulty, but one he seems to feel sure his loyal subjects will be prepared to meet, as one of those occasional setbacks inevitably encountered in the operations of the brave. He mentions the sum required, and admonishes the queen and the justiciars themselves to set a high example of liberality and to see to it that the clergy bear their share in rounding out the sum, even to the weighing of their altar vessels if necessary. He lays upon the queen the special care of keeping the whole collection under her own seal against the day of reckoning. He then hints obscurely at some advantages likely to arise from his present predicament and declares that he would not, for any consideration, have missed the ultimate benefits to accrue from his intercourse with the emperor. He explains about the hostages and advises the regency that William of Ely, his chancellor, will presently arrive in Britain to assemble them for transportation to the Empire. As a precaution against a possible day of reckoning in the tribunals of France, he addressed the chief of the Assassins in the fastnesses of Syria, bespeaking a deposition from the Old Man of the Mountain that should clear him of the charges of having procured the murder of Conrad of Montferrat.
32
By his admiral, Stephen of Turnham, the king sent to England the armor he had worn upon crusade, that the exhibition of this poor empty scaffolding in which he had defied the enemies of Christ might stir the liberality of his faithful subjects.
33
It is said that in all these weeks not a shadow sullied the brow of Coeur-de-Lion, even when he looked out from the narrow slits of his fortress chamber in Trifels. He amused himself by wrestling with the stalwarts set to guard him and made them comically tipsy with the Rhenish vintages supplied for his own table. The heavy role of count, crusader, king, rolled off in these secret hours and left him to the spontaneous delights provided for the baser portion of mankind.
*
That which the palmer worm hath left hath the locust eaten, and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten, and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.
Joel 1.4
Richard's messages from Hagenau, though they assuaged the queen's long anguish of dread, could not wholly restore her peace of mind. The weight of the ransom must appall the subjects of the king, following as it did the requisitions of Henry Fitz Empress and Coeur de Lion for the grand crusade. And where, after the exodus of
preux chevaliers
to Palestine, were the hostages to be found? However, the queen put her shoulder to the wheel of her ungrateful task without delay.
30
With her, for the collection of the ransom, she associated the Archbishop of Rouen and the Bishop of Salisbury, the latter recently nominated by the king for the vacant See of Canterbury, the Earls of Arundel and Warenne, and, as a nerve to reach all the substantial burghers of London, the mayor of that newly ratified commune.
The levy was pressed in every quarter with no distinction between layman and clerk, burgher and rustic. Every privileged subject held his peace in the hope of being passed by. No one could say, declares Newburgh, "Behold I am only So and-So or Such-and-Such. Pray let me be excused."
37
The barons were taxed a fourth of a year's income, and lesser persons by a descending scale. The churches and ys measured up by weight their treasure "accumulated since olden time," gold and silver vessels, candelabra, the very crosses on their altars. Reliquaries were shorn of their cabochons, basins scraped of their jewels. The Cistercians, those humble brethren of Saint Bernard, possessing no corruptible treasure of this world, sheared their flocks and gave a year's crop of wool.