Read Eleanor Of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Amy Kelly
Henry, by the grace of God, emperor of the Romans, and ever, august, to his dearly beloved friends, the archbishops, earls, barons, knights, and all the faithful subjects of Richard, illustrious King of England, his favor and every blessing. We have thought proper to intimate to all and every of you that we have appointed a ceitain day for the liberation of our dearly beloved friend, your lord Richard, the illustrious King of the English, being the second day of the week next ensuing after the expiration of three weeks from the day of the nativity of our Lord, at Speyer, or else at Worms; and we have appointed seven days after that as the day of his coronation as King of Provence, which we have promised to him; and this you are to consider certain and undoubted. For it is our purpose and our will to exalt and most highly honor your aforesaid lord, as being our special friend. Given at Thealluse, on the vigil of Saint Thomas the Apostle.
At the same time Coeur-de-Lion expressly summoned Queen Eleanor and the Archbishop of Rouen to attend him in Speyer and to bring the ransom under their own personal escort and supervision, since the English were responsible for the whole sum of it until it reached the frontiers of Germany. For the festive occasion indicated at the end of the emperor's letter, Richard bespoke his royal regalia and a fitting retinue.
*
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, According to thy word.
Luke 2:29, prescribed for reading at Complin on Candlemas day
In the dead of winter the queen, accompanied by earls and bishops, many of them destined as hostages, and the youthful heirs of great estates, together with the retinue for Richard's crowning as King of Provence, the armed guard for the coffered ransom, and the royal household of chaplains, clerks, stewards, and serving folk, took ship upon the Channel and, journeying thence by river and by road, arrived in the valley of the Rhine for the appointed day in January.
59
The queen's
mesnie
from Britain must have been impressive in any case, but especially so in view of the program of ceremonies indicated in the emperor's letter; and it must have been animated by a wide range of emotions. Eleanor and the magnates who were not upon the roster of the hostages were certainly in joyful expectation of a triumph at last over their long afflictions. But they had no sooner arrived in Germany than they became sensible of a chill more than that which blows off the Rhine in January. In the brief interval since the emperor had invited them to the festivities with which he had determined to celebrate the release of his prisoner, something had upset his resolution to go through with the affair.
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He had in the meantime discovered circumstances that altered the case, and he could not, without further deliberations, keep to the precise day he had proposed for the delivery of his captive.
What Henry of Hohenstaufen alleged in Speyer as reasons for his procrastinations is not told in the chronicles. Nor can it be known certainly that Eleanor and Coeur-de-Lion were admitted at all to the first conference. But the emperor's demur was enough to throw the friends of the captive into panic and awaken very accurate suspicions of what was afoot. The queen, after all she had endured, was for a fortnight tossed in a new abyss of dread and despair. After two fruitless days in which the bishops and barons of the German court labored with the emperor in behalf of the prisoner, the court was adjourned for more than two weeks to convene again at Mainz on Candlemas. It may be presumed that the atmosphere of Speyer had been vitiated by the developments and that the English claimed a change of venue and the privliege of being heard under ecclesiastical auspices in the friendly episcopal city with its gates open to the Rhine and somewhat nearer to the sea.
In Mainz for two days more, beginning on Candlemas (February 2), the emperor labored with his feudatories. Various issues, it seemed, were involved, and when these had been reviewed, Henry behaved toward the English with amazing candor and simplicity. The crucial fact emerged that Philip Augustus and John had recently made a new proposal with respect to the prisoner, which, as emperor and divinely ordained arbiter among Christian princes, he felt he could not ignore. In short, the King of the Franks and the heir of England offered to reward the emperor with 100,000 marks of silver if the latter would hold the captive in custody until Michaelmas next ensuing, by which season they hoped they would have secured their own justice for the accumulated mischiefs they had suffered.
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This was, of course, but a promise as contrasted with the solid English sterling already sewed up in the English sacks and deposited in Germany, but it was an arresting offer from which the emperor was apparently not bound to deduct a liberal percentage for the compensation of the Duke of Austria. It might be expected to yield more in the end than the contract with Richard in Worms, although this had been sworn to "on the soul of the emperor" and sealed in the name of the Holy Trinity. Of the sum now proposed, Philip engaged to furnish 50,000 marks and John an equal sum. There was no doubt about the bona fide character of the offer, for the emperor with disarming objectiveness displayed the documents in court with Philip Augustus' familiar biscuit seal dangling from the parchment.
The new offer was not in actual amount in excess of the ransom gathered by the English, but the offer itself provided the emperor with an instrument for pressing Coeur-de-Lion to new concessions. Henry Hohenstaufen had no idea of emerging from his lucky situation without having secured either of his suppliants as his ally. If he flouted the French, their alliance was lost in his conflict with his feudatories; and the English would certainly not have been ingratiated by his humiliation of their king and the exaction of the ransom and the hostages. He could therefore not let the English go without some substantial guarantees of future friendship. What he contemplated was that Richard Plantagenet should acknowledge his vassalage to the Hohenstaufen, a homage in any case meet from a mere king duke count to the Holy Roman Emperor. This proposal left the English aghast. In the face of it, the ransom was a mere item in a perennial tribute.
The disclosures provoked a violent remonstrance among the emperor's feudatories, who threatened to revoke the peace they had agreed to in Worms under the good offices of the captive and to resume their former hostility. No nuncio came from Rome at Eleanor's solicitation, but protests against the king's captivity were produced from the Abbé of Cluny and other prelates of wide authority. Though surrounded by his ablest magnates, Coeur-de-Lion stood forth in the hall of Mainz as his own advocate. The Angevin choler that now and then possessed Henry Fitz-Empress flashed from his countenance. He employed in his own defense the rich and sinewy martial eloquence that was the gift of his house. "He had," says the
Itinerarium
, "the eloquence of Nestor, the prudence of Ulysses."
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He called upon the ecclesiastical feudatories of the Empire to vindicate the sanctity of oath, to recognize the inviolability of the Christian warrior vowed to crusade. It is related that he brought forth a letter from the Old Man of the Mountain himself vindicating him from all charge of having procured the death of Conrad of Montferrat,
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and he cleared himself once more from the other indictments brought against him by his adversaries. His words excited universal admiration, and as at Worms, there were exclamations of applause from the assistants.
But in the horrible dilemma that still faced the English it was the queen who resolved the conflict. She had nothing but a choice between evil alternatives. She chose the one that was remediable. On her advice Richard, having brought his oratory to a finish, doffed his royal bonnet and laid it courteously in the hands of the emperor, signifying thereby that he renounced his allegiance to the perfidious Capets and transferred it to the Hohenstaufen.
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The effect of this gesture on the English is not related. But a warmth of feeling sprang up in the hall of Mainz. The bishop of the city, in whose palace or chapter house the conclave perhaps occurred, gave words to the public sentiment. The Bishop of Cologne supported him. All wept.
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Henry of Hohenstaufen condescended grandly; the captive's fetters were unloosed; the ransom was conveyed; the hostages were given over, among them the Archbishop of Rouen, who had been the queen's stay in so many crises, her protector on so many journeyings; and the queen herself, worn with labor and anguish, fell weeping into the arms of Coeur-de-Lion. She was, as she had written to Pope Celestine, "worn to a skeleton, a mere thing of skin and bones, the sap consumed in her veins, tears all but dried in the fountains of her eyes." All the bystanders let their tears flow at the spectacle of this aged woman, the most astute and venerable sovereign in Europe, still at seventy-two a figure of significance in the counsels of men, raining her tears on the bosom of her glorious son. There may have been in that concourse some patriarchal bishops who remembered her as the young Queen of France getting herself and her baggage wains over the Rhine in this very city of Mainz a half century before on her way to the Holy Land, for she too had been signed with the cross; and for the younger generation the mere sight of her would evoke the airs of troubadours' and minnesingers' songs that had kept her name alive in all the intervening time with malice or with praise.
Nothing more is heard of the crowning of Richard as King of Provence. Candlemas, the day of the
nunc dimittis
, had been desecrated. The Plantagenets, with the emperor's safe-conduct in their wallets, felt no eagerness to turn back to Speyer for any further ceremonies. The queen and her son accepted the invitation of the Bishop of Cologne to spend the end of the week in the capital of his diocese on their way down the Rhine to the sea. In Cologne the prelate did his best with sumptuous banquets and valley wines and every distraction offered by the splendors of his city to divert the minds of the English from their hardships and misfortunes. When the royal guests visited his cathedral of Saint Peter to hear mass, the bishop himself, entering the choir like a mere precentor, chanted, instead of the introit for the day, the other that begins, "Now I know that the Lord hath sent his angel and snatched me from the hand of Herod."
From Cologne the leisurely progress of Richard and the queen among the emperor's feudatories had almost the nature of a triumph, and the good fruits of Coeur-de-Lion's graciousness among them was later seen. Everywhere with his affability and his impulsive liberality, the king won the friendship of doubtful barons whose fiefs abutted the domains of the Franks, the Flemings, and the emperor. It is related that after Richard had passed out of Swabia, Henry Hohenstaufen, stimulated anew by pressures from Philip Augustus, repented him of having so lightly delivered his captive and sent followers to pursue and overtake him; and that Philip cooperated in this plan by placing ships in the Channel to intercept the royal party.
However this may have been, the king and queen avoided all these traps and came at last to Antwerp to the castle of the Duke of Louvain, where they were honorably entertained. Here Richard's admiral, Stephen of Turnham, received the travelers on the famous ship
Trenchemer
. On March fourth the royal smack, making out from the estuary of the Scheldt, brought them to the port of Sweyne.
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Hoveden relates that they made their way among the islands by day with the skillful pilot of
Trenchemer
, and by night, for greater comfort and security, they lay upon a great galley that came out from Rye. On March twelfth,
71
at about the ninth hour of the day,
72
the ships bore into the harbor of Sandwich. Richard had been freed in Mainz seven weeks before upon an Egyptian day;
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but as the vessels rode into Sandwich, the sun stood a man's height above the horizon and shone with such ruddy effulgence that Kentish men driving their oxen in the furrow, and the coast guard looking toward Flanders, and the wherry men on the Thames, and the watch on the city walls, took it for a good omen and, speaking one to another, said that it betokened the coming of the Lion Heart and was a good augury for spring.
The news of the coming of the king, so long and desperately awaited, flew faster than the north wind.
William of Newburgh
IT WAS SIX YEARS SINCE the potentates of Europe had taken the cross for the rescue of Zion; four years since the tumultuous departure of the armies from Vézelay. The great emprise for which they had gone forth was nevertheless far from attainment. Saladin still held Jerusalem; the true cross and the holy places remained in his custody; and the fabulous treasure of the West had vanished into the East as if swallowed by the sea. There was a notable contrast between the glorious stir and elation of Richard's departure from Dover in 1190 and his unceremonious return to Sandwich in 1194. No procession greeted Coeur-de-Lion and the queen on their landing. No army with music and banners followed them along the Dover road. The veteran foot soldiers who had survived the crusade had already returned and scattered to their homelands. The bishops and barons who should have come to meet the Plantagenets were also dispersed, some of them as hostages in Germany, some in the siege of English fortresses. The land was smoldering in various regions with a sullen civil strife maintained by the partisans of John in the castles he held by gift of the king. The youngest Plantagenet was not on hand to greet his brother. Upon the certainty of Richard's release from captivity, he had betaken himself to the shelter of the French court.
Coeur-de-Lion on crusade had not made himself famous for tact. It was notorious that his brashness and candor had frequently proved expensive to Plantagenet interests. Queen Eleanor, though spent with recent anxieties and feeling the burden of her declining years, remained at his elbow in Britain to explain, admonish, interpret, to curb that Angevin abruptness and impatience that, when Richard was left to unguided impulse, raised up fatal enemies in his wake. More familiar than the king with the tissue of intrigue and contrivance that had made the history of the regency, and also more aware of the temper of the islanders, she was still at the heart of policy. Hers was the mission on the one hand of composing the disorders of the public mind, of regilding the hero of the holy war in the sight of those who had equipped his luckless armies and paid his ransom; and on the other, of opening the somewhat disregardful eyes of her son to the inestimable worth of Britain as a bulwark of his threatened continental provinces. She led Coeur de Lion first to the great shrines.
Together from the landing in Sandwich they went to Canterbury to pay reverence to Saint Thomas and to honor the establishment that had contributed so greatly to the king's deliverance. The news of the arrival flew from that sanctuary like the wind, confuting the dismal rumors lately spread abroad by John. The pause in Canterbury gave London time to deck itself with spring garlands for the advent. In the capital Richard was heralded as the champion of the holy war, "the anointed of the Lord," the hero betrayed by his Christian allies in the midst of his pious enterprise and ransomed by the sacrifice of his people. He was, says Diceto, "hailed with joy upon the Strand." Processions of citizens led him to Saint Paul's, and the bells rang out tumultuously in the valley of the Thames. Certain German magnates in London at the time to overlook details of the balance still due upon the ransom remarked with surprise the popular joy and especially the thronging, prosperous city, which they had been led to believe reduced to misery by the exactions of the emperor;
3
they declared the Hohenstaufen would have held out for a much larger sum if they had not been overborne by the representations of the English.
Before addressing themselves to the reduction of John's castles, Richard and Eleanor took their thank offerings to the shrine of the protomartyr of Britain in Saint Albans. Thence they, went straight to the center of sedition in Nottingham.
4
The mere rumor of the king's coming was as potent as Joshua's horn before the walls of Jericho. So thoroughly had John convinced his followers that Richard counted no more among the living, that the first reports of his approach were suspected as a ruse.
5
But when agents came at Richard's invitation to take testimony with their own eyes, they were as amazed as if confronted with a ghost. Panic spread among the garrison and the castle fell with only a gesture of resistance. Tickhill, besieged simultaneously by the Bishop of Durham, followed suit. In Cornwall the keeper of Saint Michael's Mount fell dead of fright when he learned that the king himself was leading his soldiers.
6
The other strongholds surrendered one after another, and the magnates charged with the various besieging operations converged on Nottingham. A fortnight had sufficed to recover the castles in the king's control. The end of Lent was near, and, while waiting for the magnates to assemble from their triumphs for an Easter court, the Plantagenets took advantage of the respite for a spring holiday.
*
King Richard hearing of the pranks
Of Robin Hood and his men,
He much admired, and more desired,
To see both him and them.
Ballad of Robin Hood
Richard's itinerary shows that the king's party spent the week end of April second in Clipston Palace on the edge of Sherwood Forest in that region where place names still memorialize the exploits of Robin and his merry men.
8
This fact and Richard's known relish for histrionics and disguise give warrant for surmising that some figment of reality underlies the famous old English ballad that relates the encounter of the stouthearted robber outlaw and the prince of chivalry, who was his overlord. Furthermore, the relaxation of the forest laws and the royal leniency to trespassers with which Eleanor had marked the opening of her son's regime would have given happy auspices for the ballad's episodes.
Coeur-de-Lion, who knew little enough of his native England, had never visited Sherwood Forest, the vast hunting preserve of Henry Beauclerc and Henry Fitz Empress, with its miles of dark cover, rich with game, its routes marked by lodges and hamlets in tiny clearings, the umbrageous domain as well of Robin and his outlaw band. No hunting forest of Angevin predilection on the Continent, not Chinon nor the Talmont nor the reserves near Rouen, outrivaled this spacious haunt of stag and wild boar.
The ballad relates, as every school child knows, that Richard, eager to form his own ideas of the famous outlaw who pillaged sumptuous prelates to succor the poor, disguised himself as an abbot and rode into Sherwood, with a "clerical" retinue, and was promptly halted by Robin and his men.
He took the King's horse by the head
"Abbot," says he, "abide,
I am bound to rue such knaves as you,
That live in pomp and pride."
In a dialogue that follows, Richard discovers that Robin, while summary with prelates, is a loyal liege man to his king; and Robin, for his part, agrees to exempt the "abbot," who represents himself as a messenger on royal business.
Then Robin set his horn to his mouth,
And a loud blast he did blow,
Till a hunderd and ten of Robin's men,
Came marching all of a row.
So then they all to dinner went,
Upon a carpet green,
Black, yellow, red, finely mingled,
Most curious to be seen.
Venison and jowls were plenty there,
With fish out of the rivet,
King Richard swore, on sea or shore,
He neer was feasted better.
In good brown ale the "abbot" toasts the king, and then all ride to hunt in Sherwood. When at length the disguise is thrown off, Richard leads the outlaw to London to be made a peer. The ballad may indeed bring down the wind some echo of a dramatic interlude with which the Plantagenets entertained their household on holiday and celebrated the approach of Easter by acts of royal condescension.
*
The Easter court, which William of Scotland joined on the confines of the forest, progressed from Nottingham to Northampton. It was a plenary session to consider the state of the world and to take stock of the Plantagenet's mission in it. Papal letters testified to the continued perils in Palestine and admonished all Christians to give heed to first things first. But events in the foreground obscured the distant horizon overseas. Nothing could conceal the fact that the mounting conflict of the Capets and the Plantagenets eclipsed the vision of recapturing Zion. England, which had long resisted the proposal to supply men as well as tithes for continental wars, now faced the certainty of new burdens merely to defend the transmarine provinces of her Angevin king.
Resources were the nub of discourse in Northampton.
10
The levies for the ransom were still incomplete, and Henry's Saladin tithe and Richard's procurements for crusade had preceded the ransom. These vast sums had vanished like dew without bringing the hoped-for consummations to the islanders. Royal and episcopal treasuries had been drained, and the orders had paid their tribute in kind. The prospect of reaping a new harvest seemed grim. But, as if with a divining rod, the Plantagenets discovered new sources of wealth. They came forward with a perfectly simple scheme for refreshing the treasury. Richard retracted the offices he had sold upon his accession and sold them again to the highest bidders. Ely, restored to favor by his exertions for the king's deliverance, bought his chancellorship a second time. Sheriffdoms brought good prices, and other holdings in proportion to their emoluments. The captives taken in John's castles were sorted out according to their worth and yielded a valuable sum in ransoms. Presently, on the grounds of affording martial training to the youth of Britain, Coeur-de-Lion licensed tournaments,
11
which the English had previously denounced as foolish and extravagant, and took a fee from every knight who entered the lists. These income and amusement taxes and indemnities made it possible for the Plantagenets to consider strategy again in a spacious way.
Among the barons and clergy there lingered misgivings about the nature and extent of the concessions the Plantagenets had made to the Holy Roman Emperor, and especially about that desperate measure advanced by the queen at the last moment to secure her son's deliverance — Coeur-de-Lion's proffer of fealty to the Hohenstaufen. To wipe out misunderstandings that might arise anywhere in the feudal world in consequence of that display of submission, the bishops and nobles in Northampton resolved upon a rededication of the king, a reaffirmation of his untrammeled sovereign state, and a new definition of their own vassalage.
The magnates gathered in the old capital of Winchester on the octave of Easter and reenacted features of the original coronation.
12
The king, refreshed with baths and spiritual purgations at Saint Swithin's, the next day issued from his chambers in royal regalia and, covered by a silken canopy and escorted by nobles and clergy bearing the symbols of earthly power and heavenly grace, made his progress to the altar, where his crown was placed on his head by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Again he made his royal offering and sat enthroned during the mass.
Eleanor, "by the grace of God, Queen of England," surveyed the triumphant spectacle from a dais reared for her service in the north transept of the minster. Hoveden relates that she was encompassed, as in the sumptuous days of the courts of love, by a host of noble beauties, the valuable marriage prizes of the Plantagenets.
13
But Alais had been set aside, and Berengaria, crowned and dowered as Queen of England in Limassol, bore no share in that illustrious pageant. Among the royal ladies Eleanor reigned supreme.
Now, as at the time of assuming the crown of Britain, the king was impatient to cross the Channel. From Portsmouth, early in May, Richard set sail
14
in the face of tempests and was driven back; but on the ninth, followed by one hundred ships and accompanied by the queen, he made off for the port of Barfleur.
15
The motley sails of the fleet bent to the wind, their prows breasted the swells, and the coast of England shrank quickly away in a shroud of mist. The eyes of the Plantagenets strained for the shores of Normandy. The queen was going home at last from the kingdom that had been her prison. In the tumult of taking off, the king did not guess that he too weighed anchor for the last time in an English harbor.
*
The Plantagenets, revolving elements of strategy betimes, landed in Barfleur in the second week of May. Thence they went to examine the exchequer in Caen and the news in Bayeux.
18
Their progress was everywhere a triumph. Processions of burghers and clerks and country folk and a rabble of suppliants led them from stage to stage with dance and song. The crowds that lined the wayside to hail their duke, who had survived the rumors of his vanquishment and death, were so great, declares the biographer of Guillaume le Maréchal, that no one could have tossed an apple in the air without hitting someone's head. Thus escorted, the king and queen arrived at the house of John of Alencon in Lisieux to pass the night.
Here they received a visit perhaps not very surprising to them and one for which they were prepared.
17
In the merciful half light of evening, Lackland arrived at the archdeacon's gate on foot, in a state, says the chronicler, "of abject penitence." He begged to see the queen his mother that he might beseech her good graces to bring him to a reconciliation with the king.
18
He had been having a tough time as liege man of Philip Augustus. The loss of his castles and his revenues had brought him to utter misery, and for his needs he had found no suitable relief in the courts of Paris. Richard had guessed that the impoverished culprit could not long delay his appearance.