FOURTEEN
Just north of Salisbury’s city limits, one of Salisbury Plain’s many Iron Age hill-forts dominates the landscape for miles around. The entire hill has been remodelled by pick and spade; its concentric rings of ditches and earthen ramparts are not worn soft with time, but still crisp. Pre-Roman hill-fort, it became a Romano-British oppidum, then a well-defended Saxon administrative and trading centre which was in turn refortified after the Conquest by William I, who considered it secure enough to site a mint there (plate 22).
The space within the outer ditch and rampart was the first site of Sarum or Salisbury. The houses have all disappeared but the foundations of the cathedral show up chalky white in the thin turf. Roughly in the centre of the levelled area, an inner circular rampart and ditch enclose a steep mound, on the flattened top of which stand the ruins of an eleventh-century castle built by a bishop named Roger for King Henry I. Quite a character, the bishop had in his mistress, Matilda of Ramsbury, as tough a military commander as they came. When besieged in another of her lover’s castles at Devizes, she refused to surrender until the attackers paraded in front of the drawbridge with a noose around his neck a captive who happened to be her son by Bishop Roger.
Eleanor’s heart must have sunk on arriving at Old Sarum with the knowledge that this grim fortress was to be her prison. Rescue was out of the question. An assailant had to climb up the hill, scale or breach the outer parapet, cross a deep ditch and break through a high parados surmounted by a formidable palisade. Having got that far, he had to cross 200 yards of flat killing ground devoid of cover before coming to the inner defences: another rampart, deep ditch and steep earth glacis surrounding the base of the castle walls. The sole gateway was reached by a drawbridge and protected by a portcullis.
So exposed is the position of Old Sarum that five days after the inauguration of the cathedral, which had taken fourteen years to build, the roof blew off in a gale, causing considerable damage to the whole structure. Standing on the motte or mound, the castle walls reached as high as the cathedral roof, and were subject to the same wind loading. The keep that was the key feature of Norman castles was higher still, to give sentries on the top visibility for miles in all directions. Although it was the safest part of the castle for storing gold or incarcerating hostages, the original royal apartments in it were too cold and miserable to be lived in from choice, even by Norman standards.
Accordingly, in the 1130s Bishop Roger built a small palace within the courtyard, where the high walls afforded some protection from the elements. Its ground-floor rooms were filled with earth as a defence against battering rams, should an enemy ever penetrate into the courtyard. Usually, for defensive reasons, access to a keep was on the first floor. The entrance to the palace was on the second floor, reached by an external stone staircase. On that level was a hall and a solar or smaller room with garderobe or latrine emptying into a cesspit. From here a narrow staircase inside the thickness of the walls was the only means of reaching the gloomy first-floor apartments.
In the whole of England Henry could not have chosen a more secure prison for Eleanor. Her accommodation had the advantage of being less cold and windy than the keep, but offered no view of the outside world. The horizons of the woman who had seen Rome, Constantinople and the Holy Land had shrunk to a cobbled courtyard in which she could take at most seventy paces in a straight line before being brought up short by a high stone wall, from the walkway of which sentries stared down at her. For most of her incarceration there, her prison was shared only by a small detachment of guards. Their first commander, under Henry’s justiciar Ranulf de Glanville, was Robert Maudit by name – although that may not have been his real surname, for it means ‘accursed’.
Eleanor’s world for much of the next decade and a half was to be this grey, grim stone cage, open only to the sky. In a repetition of her lost year in the Holy Land, she ceased to exist. Her retinue was reduced to one maid, Amaria. Even her wardrobe had dwindled to the minimum, the Pipe Rolls indicating her need for something fitting to wear when occasionally summoned to court. One entry is for two scarlet cloaks and two capes and two grey furs and one embroidered bed furnishing ‘for the use of the Queen and her maid’, which sounds as though Eleanor and her sole retainer had to share a bed. The size of the solar in the palace makes that likely in any case. An anonymous Poitevin poet evoked her fate:
Piegz a de mort selh que viu cossiros
e non a joy, mas dolor e temensa
pueys ve la ren que’l pogra far joyos
on non troba socors ni mantenensa.
[It’s worse than death for she who lives / yearning and suffering above ground / without the strength that hope could give / where no help or support is to be found.]
When Henry needed a lady to grace his public events, there was always the Young Queen, whose allowance was accordingly increased. Across the Channel in France, he kept Richard and Geoffrey as puppet-rulers, each dependent on his father’s purse. In Aquitaine, as a way of demonstrating his loyalty to the hand that paid him, the prince who would become England’s hero-king was enthusiastically persecuting barons who had supported the rebellion, razing their castles to the ground and having salt strewn over their lands to render them uncultivable. For the moment, Henry dared not trust the Young King out of his sight in case another coterie had it in mind to place him on the throne prematurely.
All three of the older princes were therefore summoned to the Easter court of 1176 when ‘the old king’ talked openly about divorcing Eleanor, for which purpose he had been negotiating with the papal legate Cardinal Uguccione or Huguezon for the last six months.1 Grounds for dissolution were simple to find: treason, plus consanguinity closer than had been the case with Louis. First, however, Henry insisted Eleanor renounce all her titles and retire from the world, since otherwise he would have been repeating what Louis still bemoaned as the greatest error of his rule.
It was therefore up to the good cardinal to talk the queen of England into becoming abbess of Fontevraud.2 This was a suitable job for a rejected queen of fifty-three, even if she was not yet a widow, and the abbey’s position inside the county of Anjou gave Henry confidence that she would behave herself there.3
The only problem was that Eleanor refused. Over my dead body, was the gist of her reply to king and cardinal alike. Henry might lock her up and deprive her of all her privileges and even money for clothes, but she was determined not to give up the two trumps she still held. One was the argument that as duchess of Aquitaine she was the direct vassal of the king of France, who would never consent to her renunciation. The other was her knowledge that Henry wanted to marry again. There was talk of him wedding Richard’s fiancée Princess Alais, who was his current mistress, in order to father a new brood that would enable him to disinherit her sons. Frustrating this plan seemed to her the only way of regaining their support.
Henry, however, was confident of getting his way in the end by keeping Eleanor in Old Sarum and a series of other cities and fortresses4 under conditions which would make even the prospect of abdicating and spending the rest of her life in a convent seem attractive. In his game of cat and mouse, from time to time she was moved in the custody of high officials from Salisbury to Winchester, Ludgershall and elsewhere.
Young Henry, forever chafing at the bit, finally escaped to France on pretence of making pilgrimage to Compostela.5 Landing at Barfleur with Marguerite at Easter 1176, he left her in Paris at her father’s court, where Louis provided horses and armour to enable him to fill his empty pockets in the Flemish tournaments with William the Marshal’s help. The costs of this regal indulgence, including reparations for damage to people, dwellings and crops, staggered Louis’ advisers.6
The season ending on Midsummer Day, Young Henry rode south to Aquitaine, where Richard was campaigning against his vassals the count of Angoulême and Viscount Aymar of Limoges, both sides manoeuvring large forces of mercenaries across the tortured landscape of south-west France. The jealousy and mutual mistrust of the princes preventing them spending long together, the Young King installed himself in Eleanor’s former quarters at Poitiers where, as was his wont, he charmed the barons now disenchanted with Richard.
Among his father’s spies in his entourage was Adam Chirchedune, the Young King’s vice-chancellor. An intercepted letter resulted in him being judged for treason7 and escaping summary execution only because the bishop of Poitiers argued that Adam was a cleric in the service of the archbishop of York, and should therefore be given benefit of clergy. Stripped naked and flogged through the streets of Poitiers instead, Henry’s spy was dispatched to prison in Argentan with orders that he be flogged through the streets of every town along the way8 as a way of killing him without actually sentencing him to death. However, he survived and was rescued by an embassy sent from England to procure his release.
It was now the turn of Eleanor’s twelve-year-old daughter Joanna to serve the grand design in a marriage designed to outflank the German Emperor in southern Italy. There were close trading links between Sicily and England, where Richard Palmer was bishop of Syracuse and his fellow-Englishman Walter of the Mill was bishop of Palermo. With Henry’s clerk Peter of Blois having been tutor to Sicily’s king during his minority, there was no shortage of channels of communication through which to arrange Princess Joanna’s marriage to William II, the 24-year-old king of Naples and Sicily, duke of Puglia and prince of Capua.
Towards the end of August Eleanor bade farewell at Winchester to her second daughter. Dispatched to her uncertain fate in Sicily laden with presents for her future husband, she was accompanied by Bishop John of Norwich, who had been the go-between. Henry ordered the Young King to escort her from the boat at Barfleur south to Aquitaine in sufficient force to ensure that she was not relieved of her dowry of fine horses, gems and precious metals on the way.
From Poitiers, Richard accompanied his sister to Toulouse across a landscape of misery and famine while his eldest brother returned northwards, devoting himself to tournaments and little else for the next three years. Whatever Joanna’s thoughts about her fate in Sicily, the progress to Toulouse was leisured and elegant. After saying farewell, Richard ‘pacified’ southern Gascony on the pretext that its barons were attacking and robbing pilgrims to Compostela in defiance of the Peace of God. Dismissing his Brabanter mercenaries the moment he had no more money to pay them, he unleashed another spate of misfortune when they turned to pillage and rape on their route home through the county of Limoges, which continued until the locals got together and massacred 2,000 of them on the Thursday before Easter.
The king of Sicily had been a minor of thirteen when his father died. On coming of age, he had decided to impress on his Muslim and Orthodox subjects that he was a Christian monarch by building outside Palermo at Monreale the breathtaking cathedral where Joanna, in a bejewelled dress that had cost the enormous sum of £114, was married on 13 February 1177. The cathedral’s intact décor of marble and glittering gold mosaic gives the closest impression now available of the dazzling magnificence of Santa Sophia before the Muslim conquerors of Constantinople hacked off all the Christian decoration in 1453. The floor plan of Monreale combines features of both western and Orthodox basilicas. The styles of its magnificent decoration are, like the island’s population at the time, a mixture of north European Christian, Muslim and Greek Orthodox.
Similarly, William’s seal bore a Latin inscription ‘by the grace of God’, but his coins had an Arabic inscription on the obverse, ‘desirous of being exalted by God’, and on the reverse Greek letters in an abbreviation of ‘Jesus Christ Victorious’. Likewise, William’s court was composed of Christian, Muslim and Greek advisers. As Joanna was shortly to find out, although her husband was known as ‘William the Good’ because he had been the first western monarch to send aid to the beleaguered Latin Kingdom, he also spoke, read and wrote Arabic – and took his sexual pleasures in the harem of beautiful Christian and Muslim girls in his palace.
The marriage was in vain. On 24 July 1177 Henry’s grand design, whose knell had been sounded by Becket’s defiance, was finally undone. Despairing of the king of England ever making his move, the pope signed a treaty in Venice with the German Emperor that ended all hopes of the crown of Lombardy sitting on the head of Henry of Anjou. The 2,000 marks he had paid to the count of Maurienne had had to be written off on the death of the count’s daughter. Eleanor’s two sacrificed daughters – Matilda in Saxony and Joanna in Sicily – had likewise to be written off for the moment.
No longer needing England’s support, the Pope sent a legate at the request of Louis to say that if Alais Capet was not married to Richard or returned to her father forthwith, England would be placed under interdict.9 Another round of negotiations with Louis then ensued, with both kings announcing that they would take the cross and Henry agreeing to marry Alais to Richard and Louis confirming that the Vexin castles were Marguerite’s dowry. Despite the trickery and deceit, when Henry returned to England in July 1178 he placed all his continental possessions under Louis’ protection as a way of keeping his sons in check.
Richard’s vindictiveness was alienating his vassals one by one, which pleased Henry because it rendered another rebellion less likely of support. Eleanor’s favourite was now aged twenty-two and sufficiently experienced in warfare – he did little else except hunt – to demand the plenary ducal powers. For this, his mother’s consent was necessary, but she still refused to abdicate her own title as duchess. So Henry tried a new tactic in the hope of alienating her from Richard.
She was released from confinement and brought to court, where Richard pleaded his case. To the courtiers it may have looked as though a family reconciliation of some kind was under way, but the queen was there on sufferance and Richard for one purpose only. In vain had a Poitevin troubadour prophesied at the end of the rebellion that Eleanor’s cries of protest at her betrayal would sound loud as the trumpet to summon to her help the valiant sons who would set her free and bring her back in triumph to her own country. Confronting his mother, all Richard cared about was his title. It was this betrayal more than all Henry’s punishment that nearly broke her will, until she saw in it a chance to better her position at little real cost to herself. As a reward for her cooperation in agreeing to pass title to Richard, Henry relaxed the conditions of her captivity.
Eleanor’s first husband was nearing the end of his life. Health failing, Louis planned to crown his son, fifteen-year-old Prince Philip Augustus. Shortly before 15 August 1179, the date set for the coronation, the prince fell into a fever no one could cure after being lost for a day and a night in the forest of Compiègne when separated from his companions on a boar hunt. Convinced that praying at Becket’s tomb would enable his anxious prayers to be heard in Heaven, Louis asked permission to make a pilgrimage to the shrine at Canterbury.
Taking ship for the first time since his nightmarish return voyage with Eleanor from the Holy Land, he was welcomed with open arms at Dover by Henry, who accompanied him to the shrine and treated him like a brother throughout the four days he was on English soil. The thought of her two husbands piously riding through the Kentish countryside on pilgrimage to the tomb of the man Henry had hated so much must have amused Eleanor, wherever she was at this time.
The prayers were heard. Six weeks later three of her sons were at the delayed coronation in Reims – Richard and Geoffrey repre-senting their fiefs held from the French Crown and Young Henry as duke of Normandy acting as seneschal of France and bearing the crown in front of Philip in the procession to the altar.10 The high point of the festivities was a grand tournament at Lagny on the Marne, east of Paris, where the Young King’s knights were victorious, as so often with William the marshal in the team.
The coronation came not a month too soon. Shortly afterwards, news reached Eleanor that a stroke had paralysed Louis down the right side and deprived him of the power of speech. After his reign of forty-two years, of which more than a third had been shared with her, the Capetian throne was now occupied by a boy of fifteen. In September of the following year, Louis died after bequeathing all his personal property to the poor.11 Eleanor was then fifty-seven and had been a prisoner for six years.
In July 1181 her son Geoffrey was married to Constance of Brittany, after which Henry elevated his bastard son of the same name by appointing him Chancellor instead of having him consecrated bishop of Lincoln. As a sign of displeasure with his legitimate sons for allying themselves with King Philip against the count of Flanders, Henry made Geoffrey the Bastard also archdeacon of Rouen and treasurer of York Minster, to provide him with a more than adequate income.
Shortly afterwards, Philip found a temporary solution to his pressing need for money by banishing all the Jews from Frankish territory, confiscating their houses and taking over their loans, the debtors being discharged on payment to the Crown of one-fifth of the outstanding amounts. Allowed to sell off their furniture, many of the dispossessed crossed the Channel and settled in England. The operation brought in 15,000 marks to the Capetian treasury, some synagogues were converted into churches and the space for the great covered market of Les Halles, latterly Paris’ vegetable market, was found by demolishing houses in the former Jewish quarter.12
In Germany, the emperor’s position of strength decided him to exile for seven years Eleanor’s troublesome and too-powerful son-in-law, the duke of Saxony. Together with his pregnant wife and their children, he sought refuge at the Norman court with an entourage so large that Henry, mean as ever about hospitality,13 induced him to send most of them home and even provided funds for the journey. After persuading the duke to go on pilgrimage to Compostela, Henry gave Matilda the palace of Argentan for her residence, intending her to give birth there, but she eluded him and departed for Paris, producing a son on the Ile de la Cité shortly afterwards.
When the news reached Eleanor that she was a grandmother yet again, Richard was campaigning with various vassals against other vassals and then retiring to Talmond or another of his favourite hunting forests. The two Henrys, father and son, were constantly falling out and making it up over the issue of whether the Young King had, or had not, a kingdom to rule. Finally he lost patience and withdrew to the court of his brother-in-law in Paris. Understandably, King Philip was out to seduce any disaffected Plantagenet with favours of all kinds until Henry enticed his son back to the fold with a daily allowance of £100 English for himself and £10 for the Young Queen, plus payment of the expenses of a hundred household knights to guarantee him a fitting retinue.
When the Young King joined Richard and Geoffrey at the Christmas court in Caen, also present were Matilda and her family, Henry of Saxony having returned from pilgrimage. The only member of the family not invited was Eleanor,14 the Young Queen taking her place at the festivities. It was not, however, a happy Christmas: Young Henry and Richard demanded the right to hold their own plenary courts, but their father rejected such arrogance.
Something of the backbiting and bitchiness is conveyed by the ease with which gossips had convinced Young Henry that William the Marshal was paying court to Queen Marguerite. To vindicate himself, William challenged three owners of those wagging tongues to single combat, one after the other, himself to be hanged if he lost. He offered to cut a finger off his right hand first, but there were still no takers. Disgusted, he ignored a letter from Baldwin of Béthune confirming the Young King’s pardon, and departed on pilgrimage to Cologne before staying in self-imposed exile in Germany.15
Bored, Richard left the court early. Unfortunately, he had brought with him to Normandy a troubadour who sowed trouble wherever he went. It would have been quite in character for Bertran de Born to be the one who whispered in Young Henry’s ear the accusations against William, in order to cover up his own interest in Marguerite. Gifted poet and brave warrior, Bertran’s other great talent was for causing dissension, partly because his castle of Hautefort near Périgueux was expensive to upkeep and his scant resources obliged him to depend on booty. So long as Richard was on campaign, he was happy.
E platz mi quan li corredor
fan las gens e l’aver fugir.
E platz mi quan vei après lor
gran re d’armatz ensems venir.
E platz mi em mon coratge
quan vei fortz chastels assetjatz
e los barris rotz et esfondratz….
[How I love to see skirmishers / putting the common folk to flight. / An host of armed men riding them down / is a grand sight. / It warms my heart / to see great castles under siege / and ramparts gaping at the breach….]
Bertran’s other passion was women. He set his cap at Matilda, comparing her beauty with that of Helen of Troy in very explicit terms.
Et ont òm plus n’ostaria garnisons,
plus en seria envejós,
que la nuech fai parer dia la gola
e qui’n vesia plus en jos.
Tots lo monds en gençaria.
[When her last garment’s on the floor / I’ll want her all the more. / The sight of her neck changes night to day / and to see her lower down / would indeed pleasure any man.]
Matilda cannot have been disturbed by the explicit verses, for Bertran dared to reveal the identity of his adored, complaining that he would have died of boredom at the court of Argentan …
… ma’l gentils còrs amorós e la douça chara pia
e la bonha companhia e’l respons de la Sassia’m defendia.
[… but for the desirable body and sweet, kindly face / and the good company and wit of my Saxon lady.]
If he had confined himself to versifying, all would have been well. Instead, he and his jonglar Papiol took to fanning the fires of Young Henry’s envy of Richard’s comparative freedom to act as master of his own domains. To massage the Young King’s ego, when the court moved on to Le Mans and Angers Henry ordered Geoffrey and Richard to swear fealty to him for their fiefs. Geoffrey complied, but Richard refused from a distance on the grounds that his title came from Eleanor and had nothing to do with his eldest brother. Moreover, he said, they were siblings of the same bed and therefore equals.16 Encouraged by Bertran, Young Henry retorted that the barons of Aquitaine were begging him to take over the duchy Richard was ruining by his incessant campaigning.
Henry then sent Prince Geoffrey into Aquitaine to summon the barons to witness Richard’s very reluctant delayed act of homage to Young Henry on 1 January 1183. Geoffrey once remarked that the Plantagenets had from earliest times pitted brother against brother and son against father.17 As usual, he was playing two games, having been clandestinely charged by the Young King to incite Richard’s many enemies in the duchy, of whom Bertran furnished a list, to rebel against their lawful duke.
By late February Young Henry was in Limoges, the heartland of the conspiracy which was about to be joined by the duke of Burgundy and 500 knights sent by the count of Champagne. Dispatched to Paris for her own safety and to beg Philip for his support, Marguerite was unable to get a personal commitment from her half-brother, who nevertheless announced that he would not prevent any vassal taking sides against Richard.18
There can have been few conspiracies betrayed by a poem: secrecy was blown to the four winds when Bertran deliberately included the names of the main conspirators in a sirventès and then made sure it reached Henry’s ears as a way of ensuring they could not retract. Travelling light, he took the road for Limoges with a small force of trusted mercenaries,19 determined to break the Young King’s conspiracy before it gathered more support. Outside the city he was attacked by a mob of armed citizens and only saved from death by an Englishman who recognised the king’s banner. His cotte of chain-mail pierced by a sword thrust that came within an inch of drawing blood – some said by an arrow fired at extreme range from the city wall that lodged in the cloak after being stopped by the mail – Henry retired to the castle of Aixe.20
Young Henry arrived fully armed that evening to plead that the townspeople had not known whom they were attacking. It was a feeble excuse for an act of the highest treason, but Henry invited him to dine in the hope of talking him out of this latest foolishness. Determined on a final trial of strength,21 the Young King refused. Henry tried to parley again next day but was almost wounded a second time, after which he remained in the castle of Aixe until Richard arrived with reinforcements, having ridden two days and two nights without rest. On the way, he missed capturing a key rebel, his vassal Count Aymar of Limoges, only because his horses were too exhausted to give pursuit.
Besieging the castle of Gorre with Aymar was a band of mercenaries who were less lucky. Many of those taken prisoner were thrown with their arms bound into the River Vienne; others were executed by the sword; about eighty were blinded and released in a countryside where everyone was their enemy22 – all this on Richard’s personal orders.
Arriving at Aixe, Richard found himself in a bizarre triangle of power with his father and his half-brother, Geoffrey the Bastard. Together they besieged Limoges where Young Henry was in financial difficulties, his allowance having ceased at the outbreak of hostilities. He borrowed from the citizens to pay his mercenaries and those sent by Philip before plundering churches of their treasures, covering this infringement of the Peace of God by giving receipts for the loot. Other bands under Prince Geoffrey pillaged St Martin in Brive and held some of the monks to ransom. In Henry’s favourite monastery at Grandmont, the rebels hacked to pieces the altar vessels and distributed them as bullion. Only at Uzerche did the wily abbot outwit the rapacious prince by receiving him with such pomp and ceremony and protestations of respect that Young Henry was too embarrassed to steal the treasure.
After several months of this murderous free-for-all, in which the contingents from Champagne and Burgundy only added to the confusion and even the count of Toulouse changed sides to join the rebels, the end was in sight when Young Henry fell ill after looting the shrine of Rocamadour.23 A few days later, after confessing his sins, receiving absolution and taking communion, he lay dying in the house of one Etienne Fabri in the town of Martel in Périgord.
When the news reached Henry, he was dissuaded from riding to Martel by Richard’s reminder that the Young King had already received the last rites six years before and recovered. Should the king be killed en route by Young Henry’s mercenaries under their leaders Sancho and Curburan,24 the crown would pass straightaway to their master. Instead, Count Rotrou of La Perche and the bishop of Agen were sent, bearing the king’s ring as a token of goodwill.25
In Martel the dying prince dictated a letter for his father, begging his mercy on Eleanor after her ten-year imprisonment, asking him to provide an acceptable pension for the widow Marguerite and to pardon Count Aymar of Limoges and the other rebels.26 He also asked that the many thefts of Church property be made good and ended with instructions for the disposal of his mortal remains. Eyes, brain and entrails were to be buried beside the plot reserved for Henry’s grave at Grandmont, but the rest of his body was to be interred beside the tombs of the dukes of Normandy in Rouen Cathedral. After receiving the viaticum from the bishop of Agen, he expired two years short of his thirtieth birthday with a cross on his chest, begging his friend William the Marshal to take it on crusade to the Holy Sepulchre.27 This, William swore to do.
The funeral cortège was a sorry sight. Young Henry having died in debt on all sides, a valuable destrier had to be sold to buy food en route and at least one of the prince’s household had to pawn his shoes to buy breakfast.28 At Uzerche, where the abbot provided bed and spartan board, himself paying for the candles at a service for the salvation of the departed soul, the collection among the dead prince’s entourage amounted to twelve pence, instantly pocketed by his chaplain for food.
As the news spread, the fighting stopped. Knights, men-at-arms and mercenaries made their ways home, as did the duke of Burgundy and the count of Toulouse. The cortège progressed slowly westwards towards Limoges, Young Henry’s fine friends melting away one by one, none wanting to be present when the king set eyes on the corpse of his favourite son. Finally only a few servants remained, led by the ever-faithful William the Marshal.
In the hot midsummer weather putrefaction had already set in. On arrival at Grandmont, the viscera were immediately removed and buried on the spot. Papal legates were present, bearing letters ordering a truce on pain of excommunication and interdict that were now superfluous. Before the funeral service could begin, the bishop of Limoges objected that Young Henry’s excommunication for pillaging the monastery was still in force. He agreed to lift it only after the prior of Grandmont had undertaken to obtain restitution in full from the king.
Embalmed in salt and aromatic herbs, the corpse was wrapped in a white winding sheet, itself enveloped in a leather tube covered by a green cloth. The eulogies evoked the deceased’s qualities of generosity and statesmanship, yet the chroniclers could not fail to observe that to die so soon after looting shrines, churches and monasteries was clearly divine retribution. Eleanor’s second-born son left behind only the reputation of a playboy spendthrift who had squandered enormous sums on the tournament.
The degree of his destitution became apparent when Henry ordered William to escort the body to Rouen for burial and the Marshal explained that he was unable to obey, having himself been mortgaged by the Young King to Sancho, together with his horse, weapons and armour for 100 marks – a practice Henry had made illegal five years earlier. Redeeming the debt, Henry also gave William horses and funds for the pilgrimage to Jerusalem he had sworn to make for the good of Young Henry’s soul.29 But the body never reached Rouen, being kidnapped by the citizens of Le Mans on the way, so that it could be buried in their cathedral.
It was now the turn of Bertran de Born to pay for his role in the conspiracy. Surrendering the castle of Hautefort to Richard, he saw it given to his brother Constantin, from whom he had obtained it in the first place by trickery, endorsed by Richard before he went over to the Young King’s cause. Sent under heavy escort to Henry for justice, he pleaded the slender extenuation that it would have been disloyal of him to surrender before his own overlord Viscount Aymar had laid down his arms.
What saved his life was not that argument but a planh or lament for the Young King that Bertran had hastily composed as an insurance policy during the siege of his castle. The grieving father was moved to tears by it:
Si tuit li dolh e’lh plor e’l marrimen
e las dolors e’lh danh e’lh chaitivier
qu’òm anc auzis en est segle dolen
fossen emsems, semblaran tuit leugier
contra la mòrt del jove rei engles….
[If the sadness of all the grief and tears / and the pain, the suffering and misery / that can afflict a man in a hundred years / were put together, they would seem to be / less than the death of the Young King… .]
Pardoned, Bertran offered to take up arms against his recent confederates, and swore to do homage for Hautefort to Richard despite having previously maintained that it was in allodium, free of feudal obligation.30 Restored as co-seigneur with his brother, Bertran eventually sought to atone for all the mischief and misery he had caused by taking vows and dying a monk in the Cistercian abbey of Dalon. A hundred years later he was in the eighth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno, carrying his severed head before him like a lantern and confessing what sin had earned this fate. ‘Like the biblical Achitophel who set Absolom against David,’ he says, ‘I set a son against his father.’31
The news from Martel reached Eleanor officially through Henry’s messenger Thomas Agnell, archdeacon of Wells. He found her under renewed strict guard at Old Sarum – a precaution ordered at the outbreak of the recent rebellion. Rumours of the Young King’s death had crossed the Channel before the worthy archdeacon, but it suited her to claim that she had been told of it in a vision. Of her sixty-one years she had spent eleven as prisoner of her two husbands. Her eldest son was dead, but he had always been Henry’s favourite and not hers, so what grief she felt was tempered by the knowledge that Richard was now heir to the throne of England. With Henry’s increasingly poor health, the gamble she had taken at the end of the great rebellion of 1173–4 was within a heartbeat of being won.
