Authors: Lisa Hilton
Revisiting her previous charge that the Pope is being prevented from acting by worldly concerns, Eleanor has the temerity to ask: ‘Is your power derived from God or men?’ In her fury, she dares to accuse the Pope of being a coward, of keeping ‘the sword of Peter sheathed’. Despite these taunts, the Pope continued to dither, so she set about raising the entire ransom herself.
Everyone in England, from the wealthy, who were taxed at 25 per cent, to the Cistercian monks, who had nothing to give but their sheep, was forced to contribute to the fund. Eleanor appointed a council of five to
supervise the collections and the booty was stored in the vault of St Paul’s. Collectors rode all over Anjou and Aquitaine and Eleanor personally dunned the abbot of St Martial at Limoges for 100 marks. The Pope eventually stirred from his lethargy, kindly offering to place England under interdict if Richard’s beleaguered subjects did not melt down their plate fast enough, which was not quite the assistance Eleanor had been hoping for. But by the autumn, she was able to promise over two thirds of the ransom to the imperial envoys.
Eleanor left for Germany in December 1193. Rather wonderfully, the captured Cypriot princess was one of the ladies in her train. It has been suggested that she may have taken the oportunity to visit her first child, her eldest daughter with Louis, en route, as her journey took her through the northern regions of Champagne, and she and Countess Marie may have seen one another again at Meaux or Provins. Eleanor was in Cologne in time to keep the feast of Twelfth Night, and though John and Philip had offered the Emperor a last-minute bribe to delay Richard’s release, she was reunited with her son at Mainz in February. On 12 March, the King of England landed at Sandwich. Richard was determined to put his upstart brother in his place and, after giving thanks for his deliverance at Canterbury and at a reception in London, he set off for Nottingham to besiege the castle John had garrisoned. In his swift execution of his task, he introduced Greek fire for the first time, a crusading device which combined sulphur, pitch and naptha to ‘bomb’ the walls. On 17 April, Richard was crowned again in the ancient capital of Winchester, but once more, it was Queen Eleanor, not Queen Berengaria, who witnessed his triumph.
Berengaria’s apparent lack of activity during this period has been interpreted as a sign of a breach in the marriage, but it is difficult to see how she and Richard could actually have had time to fall out. Since the moment they had embarked for the Holy Land, they had spent only a few weeks in one another’s company. Yet contemporary chroniclers such as Roger of Howden made it clear that there was something wrong with their relationship, and modern scholars have found a fruitful field of speculation in the supposed rift. The period of Richard’s Austrian adventures and captivity is exceptionally rich in Lionheart legend, and Berengaria, too, finds a place in it. However dubious their veracity, an examination of these stories and of how they have been used and interpreted brings us closer to an understanding of both twelfth-century and modern perceptions of the mystery at the heart of their marriage.
The explanation, according to many modern commentators, is that
there were two queens in the relationship. Despite being obliged to concede that there is ‘no direct evidence to prove that Richard was homosexual, and some direct evidence to prove that he was not’, a ‘majority’ of writers are determined to believe that the Lionheart was gay.
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Richard had at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, acquired a reputation for less than gentlemanly behaviour with the wives and daughters of his enemies and apparently so affronted a Fontevrault nun with his attentions that she declared she would rather put out the beautiful eyes that had seduced him than submit, but none of this is in itself proof that Richard did not also enjoy sexual relations with men. That he did has been inferred from various chronicle accounts, the first of which deals with his relationship with Philip Augustus. Roger of Howden reports that during the period of their intense friendship in 1187, before the mutual alienation of the crusade, the two men ‘ate from the same table and drank from the same cup and at night they slept in the same bed. And the King of France loved him as his own soul and their mutual affection was so strong that because of the vehemence of their mutual affection the Lord King of England was dumbfounded.’
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Ann Trindade has highlighted the choice of the word ‘vehemence’, which is used by several writers in the course of describing sexual love, but there was nothing at all unusual about medieval men sharing either plates or beds, and if Richard was ‘dumbfounded’ it may well have been by the fact that he had achieved such friendship with his traditional enemy.
The second often-cited piece of evidence concerns the visit of a hermit in 1195. The holy man warned Richard to be ‘mindful of the destruction of Sodom and abstain from unlawful things; or else God’s just retribution will overtake you’.
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Scholars disagree on the interpretation of the sins of Sodom. Some note that the term could be used to cover a range of sexually aberrant activities and is therefore applicable to Richard’s adulterous heterosexual behaviour at this juncture; others insist on texts which refer ‘consistently and unambiguously to male homosexual intercourse’.
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Later Lionheart legends certainly pick up on the theme of Richard’s sexuality. In the English romance
Richard Coeur de Lyon
, the imprisoned King falls in love with the King of Almain’s daughter, and when her furious father releases a ferocious lion into his cell, he reaches down its throat and rips out its heart. This seems a straightforward bit of heroic fantasy but it has also been interpreted as a ‘defensive’ anecdote, designed to counter the story of the hermit by casting Richard as aggressively heterosexual. The most famous of the legends concerning Richard’s captivity is perhaps that of the minstrel Blondel, who sang piteously before a number of German
castles before hearing the voice of his beloved master. The story appears in the thirteenth century, and in some versions Blondel is portrayed as a rival to Queen Berengaria for Richard’s love. That it is entirely fictitious does not entirely dismiss the possibility that contemporaries thought Richard had love affairs with men and that the Blondel story could be a reformulation of collective rumours.
Academic obsession with dragging the Lionheart out of the closet may indicate no more than that to twenty-first-century eyes Richard was too convincingly straight for his own good, but what is interesting about the hermit story, the most compelling piece of evidence for some sort of extramarital antics, is the way it centres upon Richard’s reconciliation with his Queen. That such a reconciliation was called for has led some scholars to believe that the marriage was never consummated, but there is no reason to believe this was so. According to Howden, the King initially disregarded the hermit’s warnings, but during Holy Week he fell ill. He called for priests and confessed, then ‘received his wife, whom he had not known for a
long time
[this author’s italics], and renouncing unlawful intercourse, was united with his wife and the two became one flesh; then God gave him health of both body and soul’. This suggests that Richard had ‘known’ Berengaria at some point; that he had not done so for a long time is explained by the simple fact that he had not seen her. The King heard Mass, gave alms and ordered new church ornaments to replace those which had been impounded to raise his ransom. This pattern of reformation and reunion follows an earlier sequence in which Richard performed a similarly motivated penance in Sicily before departing on crusade, a penance capped by the arrival of Berengaria at Messina. Sin, sexual or otherwise, is followed by disease (a pious objective correlative), then repentance, symbolised by union with Berengaria, and a return to God. The point here is not the precise nature of the sins Richard committed, but the primacy given to the queen as a symbol of redemption and healing. Abuse of the sacrament of marriage leads to God’s displeasure and disease; the proper use of the queen’s body sets things right. In this light, the hermit story might be read as much as a celebration of the sanctity of sex within marriage as a hint of Richard’s love for men without it.
A likely date for Richard and Berengaria’s reunion is June 1194, at Loches. His English homecoming had been short-lived. In May, Richard and Eleanor sailed for Normandy, where Eleanor presided over a reconciliation between her sons at Lisieux. John prostrated himself before his brother and was forgiven — was Richard displaying the same kind of ill-
judged leniency that had caused so many problems for his father Henry? — and after that it was back to business as usual, which for Richard meant war. Philip’s incursions into Normandy had to be stopped, and it was this mission that occupied the last five years of Richard’s life.
Berengaria was accompanied to Loches by her brother Sancho. Their father, Sancho El Sabio, died the following month and Berengaria’s brother, who had proved himself staunchly committed to the English alliance, returned to Navarre. In Poitou, Berengaria had been keeping a small household, moving between the castles of Chinon, Saumur and Beaufort-en-Vallée, but the next Christmas she and Richard may have been together at Eleanor’s palace in Poitiers. She was certainly present with him when Joanna was married to Raymond VI, the new Count of Toulouse, in Rouen in October 1196, in an ill-fated attempt to resolve the difficulties between the houses of Aquitaine and Toulouse. In 1195, the year given by Howden for the hermit’s visit, she and Richard purchased land together at Thorée and built a house there. This single attempt at constructing a marital home certainly suggests that Richard was at this stage committed to Berengaria, though there is no evidence that they ever lived there together, and nothing of this modest property, with its mill and fish pond, stands today. In 1216 Berengaria made a gift of it to the brothers of the hospital of Jerusalem.
Richard was also preoccupied with a far grander building project: the castle of Chateau Gaillard at Les Andelys, a magnificent declaration of defiance to the French (the name means ‘Saucy Castle’). Whomever else Richard loved, he loved his castle, even referring to it, rather sadly, as his ‘child’. Though he spent much time at the château, again, there is no indication that Berengaria ever visited him here; indeed, it has been claimed that, despite the reconciliation reported in the chronicles, Richard was during this period considering repudiating Berengaria, primarily on the grounds of her childlessness but also because her brother, now Sancho VII ‘El Fuerte’, was ‘insouciant about Richard’s diplomatic concerns’.
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In 1198, Richard had enlisted papal support to push Sancho over the matter of Berengaria’s dowry castles, Rocabruna and St Jean Pied-de-Port, and the newly consecrated Innocent III had duly written to Sancho, who appeared to do little about the matter. This request has been construed as evidence that the Navarrese alliance was under strain, since Sancho was now more concerned with politics to the south of the Pyrenees, and at the same time gathering vassals in Gascony whose first allegiance ought to have been to Richard. Though there is truth in both of these points, Sancho’s long-term policy towards the English suggests a continued relationship
of mutual interest and support, indeed a certain dependence, which was later to become particularly relevant in the matter of Berengaria’s disputed dowry If Berengaria had ‘outlived her usefulness’,
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it was biologically, rather than diplomatically Whether or not Richard did experience sexual difficulties with women, he was fertile and had married in the hope of producing an heir. Berengaria did not provide one. The term ‘barren’ may be distasteful to modern ears, but as far as her contemporaries were concerned, Berengaria had failed in her primary duty as a queen, and when she was widowed in 1199, it became clear that the Angevin rulers, now represented by Eleanor of Aquitaine and John, had no further use for her.
Richard’s struggle with Philip of France over the territories of the Vexin and Gisors, which occupied the last years of his life, amounted to little more than two bald men fighting over a comb. Perhaps this explains why the Lionheart legends attempted to invest Richard’s pointless and premature death with one last bit of glamour by claiming that he went to besiege Chalus-Chabrol in search of buried treasure. In fact, the attack on Chalus, near Limoges, in March 1199 was a necessary part of the King’s strategy in his ongoing struggle to maintain control of his vassals in Aquitaine. But the great warrior had grown a little careless. Strolling outside his camp on the evening of 26 March, protected only by his helmet and shield, Richard was hit in the arm by an arrow fired from the ramparts. His health had been sporadically poor as a result of the illnesses he had suffered on crusade, and even though the arrow head was wrenched from his flesh, it became clear that the wound was infected and that he was not going to recover. A messenger was dispatched to his mother Eleanor at Fontevrault, and she arrived at his bedside in time to be with him as he died, on 6 April. The castle fell the same day.
Berengaria, who was at Beaufort-en-Vallée, was not summoned to Richard’s deathbed, supposedly because this would alert the French and allow them to take advantage of the situation. It is a measure of her political marginalisation that a visit from Eleanor should not have been considered suspicious, whereas Berengaria’s arrival would have signalled an emergency Instead Berengaria heard the news from Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, who had been en route to meet Richard when he was informed of the King’s death. According to Adam of Eynsham, Berengaria was ‘sorrowing and almost heart broken’ and Hugh said Mass for her and was able ‘to calm her grief in a wonderful way’. Hugh then departed for Fontevrault, where Richard was buried on Palm Sunday in the presence of Queen Eleanor. Although later chroniclers assumed that Berengaria
was among the chief mourners, it appears that she did not attend the funeral, as she kept Easter at Beaufort with Bishop Hugh and her brother-in-law John. In response to an urgent message from Eleanor, John had rushed from Brittany to Chinon as Richard was dying to secure the royal treasure, then ridden on to Fontevrault, where he visited not only Richard’s tomb but that of his father and Henry the Young King, before going on to Beaufort. Three days later Berengaria did visit the abbey, where she witnessed a charter issued by Queen Eleanor. Why did Berengaria not take up her rightful position at Richard’s funeral? Was she too ill with grief to contemplate the journey? Or did she consider Fontevrault too much Eleanor’s territory? In later life Berengaria maintained some correspondence with the abbey, purchasing land for her own foundation from the abbess in 1230, but she eschewed any connection with the royal mausoleum, unlike the next Queen of England, Isabelle of Angoulême. Berengaria had had little joy from her marriage, and John and Eleanor made it quite clear in the year after her widowhood that her concerns were of little importance to them. Her resistance to the Angevin way of death has something assertive about it, a little gesture of defiance towards the mother-in-law who was the most powerful woman of her age.