Henry Plantagenet was in love. This time it was no comely damsel found in a Norman village where he had spent one night nor a sporting prostitute from the dockside taverns along the Thames nor a baron’s daughter whose father sought to make his fortune by pimping for his overlord. Nor was it a queen whose lands and fame had aroused in him a greedy lust. This time it was a real love, perhaps the only one that Henry would ever feel for a woman.
Her crisped locks like threads of golde
Appeared to each man’s sight;
Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearles,
Did cast a heavenlye light.
The blood within her crystal cheekes
Did such a colour drive;
As though the lillye and the rose
For mastership did strive.
Rosamond Clifford is believed to have been the daughter of Walter de Clifford, a Norman knight living at Bredelais on the Welsh border. During Henry’s campaign in Wales during the summer of 1165, de Clifford had been among those to join the king’s forces. Afterward, Henry must have visited his castle, perhaps by invitation, but more likely on one of those unscheduled stops along the road that never ceased to irritate his traveling companions. In later centuries, it would be claimed that Rosamond was the mother of Henry’s illegitimate sons, Geoffrey and William, an impossibility, since both of them were born in the 1150s and she was still a girl in 1166, when Henry first encountered her. There was something about Fair Rosamond and her idyll with the king that provided irresistible raw material for the weavers of fables and fairy-tales. That she was radiantly beautiful there is no doubt, and one can further guess that she must have had a pretty, compliant type of femininity that appealed to the king: “A sweeter creature in this world/ Could never prince embrace.” Unlike Henry’s other affairs, this was both serious and relatively stable, because it endured until Rosamond’s death in 1176 or 1177. In the densely forested park at Woodstock, Henry built, or so the balladeers claim, “a bower the like was never seene,” a secret love nest so cunningly concealed that it could only be approached through a maze. To shelter nature’s work of art, his Rose of the World, from the rude eyes of men—and from his jealous queen—Henry contrived a labyrinth so intricate that “none but with a clue of thread could enter in or out.” While he was away from England, however, the queen threaded the maze by following a silken string fallen from a marvelous needlework chest that the king had given Rosamond for her embroidery. Once inside the house, “the furious queene” offered her rival the choice between drinking a bowl of poison or death by dagger. In most versions of the fable, Rosamond, as brave as she was fair, chooses the poison.
In contemporary accounts, however, there is no hint of foul play in the death of Rosamond Clifford and certainly no evidence to support the story of Eleanor balancing a dagger and a cup of poison. The first association of Eleanor with Rosamond’s death occurs in an anonymous fourteenth-century chronicle, The French Chronicle of London, but the jealous queen is not Eleanor of Aquitaine but Eleanor of Provence, the wife of Henry III. In this Grand Guignol account, the queen first strips Rosamond of her gown and roasts her naked between two fires, then finishes her off by placing two horrible toads on the fair lady’s breasts while at the same time bleeding her to death in a bath. As the blood oozes and the toads suck, Eleanor cackles with pleasure. Except for this particular chronicle, no writer before the sixteenth century assigns Eleanor the role of murderess. Which is not to imply that her contemporaries ignored Henry and his new mistress. Gerald of Wales does not hesitate to state that the king, “who had long been a secret adulterer, now flaunted his paramour for all to see, not that Rose of the World as some vain and foolish people called her, but that Rose of Unchastity.” For all her subsequent fame, Rosamond must be one of the most neglected concubines in history, because during the dozen years of their liaison Henry spent only a total of three and a half years in England. During those twelve years, she lived at Woodstock and then in retirement at the nearby nunnery of Godstow, where she died of natural causes and was buried by sympathetic nuns who had, apparently, found her a romantic figure.
A chronicler tells how Bishop Hugh of Lincoln was making his rounds in the Oxford countryside in 1191 and, entering the church at Godstow to pray, saw before the altar a tomb covered with silken clothes and surrounded by a considerable number of expensive candles. Making inquiries about this obviously well-tended shrine, “he was told that this was the tomb of Rosamond, who had formerly been the mistress of Henry, King of England, and that for love of her, he had shown many favors to that church.” To this the horrified bishop made a predictably indignant reply. “Take her away from here, for she was a harlot; and bury her outside of the church with the rest, that the Christian religion may not grow into contempt and that other women, warned by her example, may abstain from illicit and adulterous intercourse.” Rosamond was then interred in the nuns’ chapter house, where, according to Ralph of Higden, her tomb was inscribed with a coarse punning couplet:
Hic jacet in tumba rosa mundi, non rosa munda; Non redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet.
Here lies the rose of the world, not a clean rose; She no longer smells rosy, so hold your nose.
Long before Henry met Rosamond, the ancient manor of Woodstock had been a favorite royal palace. At the time of the Norman Conquest, a Saxon manor stood on the site, and later Henry’s grandfather had built a hunting lodge in the middle of the great forest and surrounded it with a deer park that he then encircled with a stone wall seven miles long. Henry I had had a passion for rare animals, and behind his great wall he collected a menagerie of lions, leopards, lynxes, and even camels. His grandson used Woodstock as a meeting place for sessions of the Great Council, but mainly it was a hunting lodge. One can imagine that such an extraordinary place delighted the Plantagenet children, and perhaps Eleanor too had a special affection for Woodstock with its exotic animals and its treetops arching in vast shadowy caverns.
During those months in 1166 and 1167 when Eleanor struggled with the Breton and Poitevin insurgents at Angers, insistent tales must have drifted across the Channel to be repeated by the courtiers as the choice gossip of the moment. Judging from Gerald of Wales’s remarks, “vain and foolish people” may already have dubbed the new mistress Rose of the World and described her as a fairy princess who had enchanted a king. Eleanor’s extreme reaction to Rosamond Clifford is a continuing mystery to which there are few clues; nothing in her background easily accounts for it. From the outset, Henry’s whoring had been an established part of her marriage, and by that time she would have taken it for granted that none of her household maids were safe with him and that his vassals locked up their wives and daughters when the king entered their neighborhoods. Neither should it be forgotten that Eleanor was a sophisticated woman who came from a region where adultery was not only tolerated but distilled into the wine of troubadour poetry and quaffed regularly to the tune of lute and drum. Her own grandmother, the viscountess of Châtellerault, had been one of the most notorious adulteresses of her generation, whose extramarital escapades had provided young Eleanor with romantic bedtime stories. At any event, no highborn lady of the twelfth century complained very strenuously about her lord’s philandering, no matter how much she may have fumed in private. Lust, a man’s nature, was accepted and ignored. For fifteen years Eleanor had looked the other way, indeed in the case of Henry’s natural son, Geoffrey, she had done more than that, accepting him as a member of the family.
There is no proof at all that she suffered inordinate pangs of sexual jealousy. Granted, it could be true that she suddenly turned into a possessive termagant as she grew older and less desirable to Henry, but on the other hand, long practice had taught her to hide her inward feelings. And, if she had weathered his all-consuming passion for Thomas Becket, she certainly might have overlooked a provincial girl from the Welsh marches. There had been many, many women, too many to count, and luckily the affairs had always blown over quickly. Perhaps that was the trouble: Henry’s feelings for Rosamond were special, like none he had felt before for any woman, Eleanor included, and somehow she became aware of this.
But that was less than half the story. What must have turned her against Henry so irrevocably was his public flaunting of Rosamond. Sometime during his stay in England after the Welsh campaign, he brought Rosamond to Woodstock and installed her with regal honors in Eleanor’s apartments. Apprised of these developments by friends or informers, Eleanor lost no time in making her way toward the vicinity of Oxford once she reached England in 1166. There must have been a compelling reason why a woman whose pregnancy was nearly at term and who might have retired to her comfortable palaces at Westminster or Winchester would prefer to seek instead the spartan atmosphere of Beaumont. One can only guess that Eleanor, determined to investigate firsthand Henry’s latest amour, found Rosamond living like a queen at Woodstock. Evidently reluctant to eject Henry’s sweetheart from the palace, unwilling to remain under the same roof for her lying-in, exhausted and outraged, she must have withdrawn a few miles to the nearest royal sanctuary, which happened to be Beaumont Palace in Oxford.
There is no doubt that Rosamond Clifford touched a nerve in Eleanor, but it was a nerve already raw. Of late her relations with the king had grown steadily worse for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual jealousy. In large part her discontentment stemmed from the gradual waning of her influence. Whatever else Eleanor may have loved, she loved to rule best. To her, queenship meant sharing the regal power; queenship to Henry meant, when all was said and done, a woman who bore children and then had the sense to retire and take up pious work, a woman like his mother. Male and female had their assigned places, after all, and the throne of England was only big enough for one. Slowly, irrefutably, Henry had edged Eleanor further and further from the high place where he sat, and now, to add a gratuitous insult, he publicly honored a concubine, installing her in a palace where the queen had been undisputed mistress. Other queens might sit by helplessly and watch themselves relegated to a secondary role, but Eleanor had the resources to spare herself that humiliation. Before she had ever become queen of France or queen of England, she had been duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitou. Her vassals had never been happy under the rule of foreigners, and now a plan began coiling in her mind, a vision that suggested solutions to both her vassals’ problems as well as her own. How she might put these visions into effect was quite another matter, however.
During the entire year of 1167, Eleanor chose to remain in England, ostensibly to prepare for her daughter’s forthcoming wedding. Although the ceremony would take place in Germany, there was much to be done before Matilda’s departure. Since the princess must arrive in her new land in a style that would reflect the power of England, she must be magnificently accoutered. To that end, Eleanor purchased sixty-three pounds worth of clothing, as well as “2 large silken cloths and 2 tapestries and 1 cloth of samite and 12 sable-skins.” Other purchases recorded in the pipe rolls included twenty pairs of saddlebags and twenty chests, seven saddles gilded and covered with scarlet and thirty-four packhorses. To cover these expenses, Henry took advantage of his royal privileges. He had the right to exact a special aid from his barons on certain occasions: for ransom, in case he was captured in war; for the knighting of his eldest son; and for the marriage of his eldest daughter. Now his tenants were assessed accordingly, but he went further than previous kings by extracting a tax from cities, towns, even the tiniest villages. Altogether, the assessment for Matilda’s trousseau brought in a sum of £4,500, almost one-quarter of the kingdom’s total revenue that year. Obviously, the princess’s bridal outfit did not cost anywhere near that figure, which meant that Henry was left with a handsome profit. In July, envoys arrived to escort Matilda to Germany, and in late September, Eleanor accompanied her daughter to Dover, where the enormous collection of chests, bags, and boxes was loaded onto German ships. One account claims that Eleanor embarked with Matilda, but this appears doubtful; if she did cross to Normandy, she must have returned immediately. At Winchester that fall, she behaved suspiciously like a woman who is about to leave her husband; she collected and packed every movable object that she could call her own in England, and when she finally set sail in December, it required seven ships to transport her accumulated belongings.
During Christmas court, celebrated that year at Argentan in Normandy, she informed Henry that she wished to return to her own estates. We do not know how she broke this news to him, only that she left for Poitiers immediately after Christmas. There was little likelihood that she displayed any open hostility, although Henry would not have been blind to her coolness, and she certainly did not mention divorce. What she seems to have had in mind was an unofficial separation in which she would go her way and the king go his. Whenever it came to disengaging herself from unwanted husbands, a situation into which she had now fallen a second time, she rejected personal or domestic arguments, always concentrating on practical reasons sure to carry political weight. Now, carefully avoiding any exhibition of defiance that might be interpreted as disloyalty and bring the sort of repercussions she had seen falling on Becket’s head, she probably engineered her departure by suggesting that her presence in Aquitaine might help to ease the discord between her vassals and the crown. In setting up an administration of her own, she would attempt to restore the goodwill of her people and bring about a peace that had continued to elude Henry.
There is no doubt that Aquitaine stood on the brink of total rebellion by the time Eleanor returned to the Continent, and in fact, the south had occupied much of the king’s time during the previous year. Forced to spend the first six months of 1167 in Eleanor’s estates, Henry had taken an army of mercenaries into the Auvergne, where the local nobility had ideas of offering their allegiance to Louis Capet, a hope that Louis all too eagerly encouraged. Henry found himself in the position of a person trying to extinguish a roaring conflagration with buckets of water; each time he turned his back, a new blaze ignited. In the end, he agreed to Eleanor’s plan simply because he had little choice. Perhaps those proverbially faithless southerners would respond best to their own duchess.
After Christmas court, Henry and his army personally escorted Eleanor to Poitiers so that on the face of it her return appeared to be part of Plantagenet policy for Aquitaine rather than any personal break between king and queen. By the time Eleanor arrived in her ancestral city, nearly all the land south of the Loire had broken into open rebellion under the leadership of the counts of Angoulême and La Marche, the Lusignan family, and Hugh and Robert of Silly. Girding himself for action, Henry wasted no time in mounting an attack on the fortress of Lusignan, and after capturing and garrisoning the castle, he razed its walls and ravaged the neighboring lands. Most of the ringleaders escaped, although Robert of Silly, who made the mistake of surrendering, was imprisoned and starved to death, Henry probably intending to make an example of him. By March 1168, some of the most noble families of Aquitaine were wandering the roads, homeless, hungry, and reduced to brigandage. Some found their way to the Île-de-France, where Louis’s new foreign policy extended asylum to all Plantagenet enemies.
Aquitaine secure for the present, Henry left Poitiers before Easter and headed for the Norman frontier to attend a peace conference with the king of France. Ever since the birth of Philip Augustus, Louis had been sticking his fingers into Henry’s affairs whenever the opportunity arose, an obvious means of keeping the Plantagenet uneasy. Now war between France and England appeared imminent, although at this point Henry was so beset by enemies that he barely knew in which direction to turn.
Although Eleanor had been left behind in the captured castle at Lusignan, she had not been abandoned to her own devices. Even though Aquitaine seemed quiet, sedition was the southerners’ daily bread, and Henry, aware of Eleanor’s trust in Ralph de Faye, took precautions lest she turn to the wrong person for advice. Rather than appoint her regent, he placed her under the protective custody of Earl Patrick, his military commander for the region, and in view of the unsettled conditions Eleanor may have been content with the arrangement. She soon discovered that Henry’s security had been a mirage.
On March 27, just a few days after Henry’s departure, Eleanor and Earl Patrick were riding near the castle with a small bodyguard. Since the men wore no armor, perhaps the party was hawking. Suddenly, there burst from an ambush a strong force led by two surly Lusignans, who, with the recklessness of those who have nothing more to lose, had decided to capture Eleanor and Earl Patrick and hold them for ransom. Accustomed to dealing with ruffians, Eleanor was off and riding toward the castle once she realized what Geoffrey and Guy de Lusignan had in mind. Earl Patrick called for his war-horse but before he could don his hauberk, he was slain from behind, the Lusignans not being sufficiently chivalrous to wait until their foes armed. As a result of this grievous incident, Eleanor’s attention had been drawn to Earl Patrick’s nephew, a young knight who fought “like a wild boar besieged by hounds” but who had, nevertheless, been captured. Twenty-two-year-old William Marshal was one of those landless younger sons, in fact the son of that same John Marshal whose complaints had brought Becket to Northampton. Knighted only a few months earlier, he had already distinguished himself in several tournaments, and Eleanor was not the first to remark upon his skill with sword and lance. Not only did she arrange for his ransom and release, she “bestowed upon him horses, gold and rich garments, and more than all opened her palace gates and fostered his ambition.” Seeing something special in the young man, those virtues of courtesy, generosity, and perfect loyalty that always touched her, she brought him into her family as tutor, guardian, friend, and companion for Prince Henry, thus paving the way for Marshal’s rise from knight-errant to, five decades later, regent of England.
With the death of Earl Patrick, Henry was too embroiled with other problems during the remainder of 1168 to pay much attention to Aquitaine. For the time being at least, Eleanor was on her own.
In Paris, in Rouen, and in London, there were whispers about the domestic affairs of the Plantagenets. It was noted that the king of England had kept Christmas court at Argentan in 1168, but the queen was nowhere to be seen. She had presided over her own Christmas court in Poitiers with her favorite son, Richard, and several of her younger children. Just as if she had no lord, she administered her duchy with a steady hand, no doubt putting to good use the lessons she had learned while serving her apprenticeship in the English law courts. She was, of course, closely supervised, for no one believed that Henry would cut adrift either his queen or her domains, no matter how troublesome Aquitaine had grown in recent years. There was more to this than met the eye, but exactly what lay behind these unusual arrangements within the English royal family no one could say for certain. Since no enlightenment was forthcoming from either of the principals, the nature of the breach between them—if there was one—remained a mystery to those who made it their business to keep abreast of international happenings.
Louis Capet, normally the last to traffic in domestic gossip, was not, nevertheless, so myopic that he could allow these odd rumors and reports to slide by without further investigation, especially since he counted the queen in her capacity as duchess of Aquitaine as one of his vassals and more especially since he had been engaged in a desultory war with Henry for the past year. Throughout 1168 Louis had sent raiding parties into the Vexin, and Henry had burnt villages along the French border; the skirmishes had been interspersed with cease-fires and feeble attempts on Louis’s part to patch up their differences by diplomacy. If neither force nor diplomacy had proved effective in breaking up Henry’s empire, perhaps yet another way remained. Louis was a slow man, and his ideas were never flashy nor executed with the electricity that marked some of Henry’s programs. Louis chewed over imponderables until, sometimes, he was able to devise an inspired course of action. All things were possible if one had the patience to wait, and although Louis at forty-nine could obviously not wait forever, his strivings might not necessarily be in vain if Dieu-Donné could reap the harvest.
To break the diplomatic deadlock and secure peace in France and in Henry’s mainland possessions. Louis proposed that Henry partition his empire among his three oldest sons; he should cede the counties of Anjou and Maine to Prince Henry, not quite fourteen, and then the boy might do homage to Louis for his lands. Likewise Richard should receive the duchy of Aquitaine and Geoffrey the duchy of Brittany on the same basis. To sweeten the pot, Louis offered to give Richard the hand of Alais, his daughter by Constance of Castile and the sister of Princess Marguerite. Although one might imagine that Henry would have seen through this thinly veiled attempt to divide and conquer, he did not. As we have seen, he was prey to intense anxiety that his sons might have to fight for their inheritances as he had. The surest way to provide for an orderly succession would be for them to do homage to the king of France while Henry was still alive. In fact, the more he thought about the idea, the more it appealed to him, and undeniably it fit perfectly into his cherished plan to have Prince Henry annointed king of England during his lifetime. Altogether, the arrangements suggested by Louis would provide him with some desperately needed peace of mind. If it occurred to him that Louis might be attempting to weaken his empire by driving a wedge between father and sons, he surely discounted the notion. He was not in the habit of crediting Louis with guile or even ordinary astuteness, and in any case, he had no intention of hacking up these grants to his sons with any real authority. They were, after all, mere babes.
On the feast of Epiphany, January 6, 1169, Henry and Louis conferred at Montmirail, on the border of Maine near Chartres. Both potentates arrived with imposing retinues, especially Henry, who was accompanied by his three sons, each of them decked out in his finest clothes and surrounded with a household of knights and barons. Obviously glorying in this opportunity to show off his handsome offspring, Henry was in unusually high spirits that day. He opened the parley with a flowery speech of the variety that he rarely bothered to make. “My lord King,” he said to Louis, “on this feast of Epiphany, commemorating the day on which the three kings offered gifts to the King of Kings, I commend my three sons and my lands to your safekeeping.”
Louis swept his gaze over Eleanor’s three sons and made the kind of holier-than-thou rejoinder that always succeeded in annoying Henry. “Since the King who received those gifts from the Magi seems to have inspired your words, may your sons, when they take possession of their lands, do so as in the presence of our Lord.”
Allowing this lesson on the duties of a vassal to pass without comment, Henry proceeded to renew his homage to Louis for his Continental possessions and promised to return castles and lands he had taken from the Aquitainian rebels, many of whom were now refugees in France. Once these formalities had been taken care of, the conference shifted emphasis from the older generation to the younger. The next day, Henry brought forth his namesake, his pride and joy, Prince Henry, and watched proudly as the boy placed his hands in the palm of his father-in-law to render homage for his provinces of Anjou, Brittany, and Maine. (He had already done homage for Normandy in 1160.) To show his regard for the lad, Louis bestowed on him the post of seneschal of France. Then eleven-year-old Richard stepped forward to be confirmed in his inheritance of his mother’s lands, that magnificent dower that had slipped through Louis’s fingers seventeen years earlier, and to Richard he presented his future bride. Nine-year-old Alais Capet, orphaned at birth, was handed over to the Plantagenets to be reared in their court. And finally, Geoffrey, now ten, made his appearance to receive Louis’s consent to his marriage with the heiress of Brittany. It was arranged that later in the year he would do homage to his brother Henry for his patrimony.
For the witnesses and spectators at Montmirail, it had been a confusing two days, and even afterward, they would have difficulty making sense out of these happenings. Most perplexing was why the acquisitive Henry had agreed to this division of his hard-earned lands to boys who had yet to be knighted. One theory held that he secretly planned to take the cross and depart for the Holy Land, others contended that he had been offered the Holy Roman Empire and therefore could well afford to dispose of his mainland holdings. And why did Eleanor remain sequestered in Poitiers? And why had Henry agreed to Richard’s betrothal to Alais, making it possible for Aquitaine to one day be pulled back into Frankish domains? But there seemed to be no answers to these questions.
Among the spectators at Montmirail sat one man who watched the investitures with ill-concealed impatience. Thomas Becket had not seen Henry since their furious combat at Northampton four years earlier. For the archbishop, those had been years of prayer, study, and harsh, self-administered penances, a life of solitude far from the dazzling arena of kings and courts. As for Henry, time had accomplished what reason could not. Finally, he had succeeded in pushing Becket from the forefront of his concerns; or perhaps more accurately, he had faced more pressing problems in quelling various insurrections in his estates. By now, Becket had become a nuisance and a distraction—in fact, Becket had become an irritant for many people—because if Henry was willing to drop the quarrel, the aggrieved archbishop was not. Victory was his raison d’être, and he pursued Henry with all the indefatigable ardor of a rejected mistress. From the Abbey of Pontigny and later Saint Columba’s Abbey near Sens, he pestered Henry with scolding letters urging penance and reflection upon wrongdoings and reminding him that he was the king’s spiritual father. He collected works on canon law and spent his days working up an airtight case against the arrogant Plantagenet. He swamped Europe with a river of self-pitying correspondence in which he pressed for redress of his grievances. No suffering equaled his: There was, he wrote, no grief “like unto my grief.” While Henry ignored the letters, other incidents moved him to fits of blind rage, which Thomas could inspire so successfully. On Whitsunday 1166, Thomas had celebrated Mass at Vézelay. At the conclusion of the service, he had excommunicated all of Henry’s officers who had committed crimes, either against his person or against the see of Canterbury. Exempting Henry, who, he had heard, was ill, he had limited himself to a stiff denunciation and a warning that if the king continued to persecute the Church, he too would soon be bound by the chains of anathema. When reports of these holy thunderbolts had reached Henry at Chinon, he had turned his wrath upon his court, accusing everyone in sight of being a traitor who lacked the courage and enterprise to rid him of the pestilential archbishop. Thomas, he had cried, would not be happy until he had deprived him of body and soul.
Nevertheless, by 1169, the controversy had dragged on too long for the comfort of all parties, especially the papacy, and even Henry grew anxious for Thomas’s return to England, if for no other reason than that he wished the archbishop to crown Prince Henry. Becket was the last item on the agenda at Montmirail. It was late in the afternoon of the second and final day when his tall, gaunt figure crossed the thronged field to where the two kings waited. Approaching Henry, he slumped to his knees and began to weep, but Henry quickly caught him by the hand and raised him to his feet. With burning eyes and a humility that he had not displayed in recent years, he began his capitulation by pleading for Henry’s mercy, both for himself and the Church of England. Finally, he came to the words for which everyone was waiting. “On the whole matter which is in dispute between us, my lord king, in the presence of our lord the King of France and the archbishops, princes, and others who stand around us, I throw myself on your mercy and your pleasure.” But then, to the consternation of all present, he added “saving the honor of God!” At these words, which nullified his capitulation, Henry unleashed a stream of abuse, most of it somewhat irrationally centered on the luxurious life that Becket had lived at his expense while chancellor. Finally, he turned to Louis and said:
My lord, this man foolishly and vainly deserted his church, secretly fleeing by night, although neither I nor anyone else drove him out of the kingdom.... I have always been willing and am now to allow him to rule over his church with as much freedom as any of the saints who preceded him. But take note of this, my lord, that whenever he disapproves of something, he will say it is contrary to God’s honor and so always get the better of me. Let me offer this, so that no one shall think me a despiser of God’s honor.... Let him behave toward me as the most saintly of his predecessors behaved toward the least saintly of mine, and I will be satisfied.
The field rang with an approving chorus of “Hear! Hear! Fair offer! The king has humbled himself!” Even Louis seemed impressed. Turning to the archbishop, who had remained silent, he said: “My lord archbishop, the peace you desire has been offered. Why do you hesitate? Do you wish to be more than a saint?”
It was a question that only time would answer.
One hundred and twenty-five miles to the south, in her high tower above the rivers encircling Poitiers, the duchess of Aquitaine observed the feudal world of kings and archbishops with a skeptical eye, especially the pledges that her husband had made in the presence of that august assembly at Montmirail. Never having known Henry to willingly relinquish power, at least no more of it than was absolutely necessary, she, too, may have pondered the implications of his actions. He was thirty-five; obviously he did not mean to give up his titles or lands in favor of his sons until his death, an eventuality that still lay some distance in the future. And, yet, the acts of homage rendered by their sons were not merely prospective but immediate. They made Prince Henry and Richard the legal count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, respectively, not under the suzerainty of their father but under the direct overlordship of Louis Capet. In the case of Aquitaine, the practical result of Montmirail was that the duchy now had two dukes. At best, it was a complicated state of affairs, in which Henry’s anxieties had triumphed over common sense and in which the only advantages could accrue to their sons—and to the French crown. If Henry did not see through Louis’s scheming, Eleanor did, and for once she may have felt a grudging respect for her ex-husband. At that point, however, she was much too busy to allow herself to be drawn into any controversy with Henry over these matters.
When Eleanor had returned to Poitiers in 1168, she came with the intention of restoring peace to her domains. That she was not immediately permitted a free hand we know from the presence of Earl Patrick and the fact that Henry himself spent the spring and summer of 1169 in Poitou and Gascony, presumably for the purpose of restoring order. But after his departure in August 1169, he seems to have maintained a hands-off policy. Some historians give the impression that Eleanor kept continuous court at Poitiers for the next five-year period, never stirring from behind the city walls. The fact is, she traveled extensively in her own lands and from time to time in Henry’s mainland provinces. During those years, her name crops up in the chronicles as being present at Falaise, Chinon, and other Plantagenet castles, nearly always on some occasion involving the children.
Just as her contemporaries were mystified by the private arrangements she had made with Henry, neither is it easy from the distance of eight hundred years to understand either her personal or her political relationship with the king of England. On the face of it there seems to have been, as we would say today, an amicable separation in which each observed a live-and-let-live policy. But this certainly fails to paint a complete picture. From everything we know of Henry, he was too much the autocrat to allow Eleanor total freedom in ruling a duchy he considered nominally his. On the other hand, curiously enough, he appears to have done precisely that. As long as Eleanor did nothing to jeopardize his interests, as long as she cooperated in matters concerning the children and pretended to be his loyal wife, then he did not interfere. Actually, in the short run, there were undeniable advantages; not only was he able to save face and avoid an open acknowledgment that he could not rule Aquitaine, but furthermore—and no doubt this was a consideration—he neatly rid himself of a wife he no longer desired.
By 1169, Eleanor could not have dodged an incontrovertible reality: She was no longer young. In fact, at forty-seven, she was at an age that the twelfth century considered rather past middle age and somewhat into the realm of the elderly. Life expectancy varied. If a man survived childhood, he could expect to live to his thirties; if he survived his thirties, then he had a good chance of living until the fifties. A woman’s life was far more hazardous. If she survived her child-bearing years—and many women did not—she might live perhaps a few years longer than her husband. In the opinion of one chronicler, life beyond the age of fifty was undesirable, the afflictions of the elderly arousing more horror than pity. While still a stunning woman, Eleanor was no longer the young belle who had dazzled the world from Bordeaux to Antioch, not even the mature beauty whose perfect ripeness had lured young Henry Plantagenet and inspired sweet rhymes from Bernard of Ventadour. Called the flower of the world so often that she had come to believe it, she was now forced to acknowledge the deadly passage of time and the fact that a fresher blossom, the girl that people called Rosa Mundi, had taken her place. What remained to her at forty-seven were her children, especially her heir, Richard, and her heritage, and to these she gave herself wholesale. Their cause became hers.
For more than thirty years her subjects had patiently suffered occupation under her foreign consorts, but now, with the return of their duchess, a new regime had become possible. From 1169 on, Eleanor’s twofold resolution stands out clearly: to cut off Aquitaine from the Plantagenet empire insofar as this seemed feasible, and to create for herself a realm that would reflect the splendors of the past and prefigure innovations of the future. To lance the fear and unease that roamed the duchy’s cities and villages, Eleanor took to the highroads on royal progresses that carried her to the four corners of her land. Hers were no disorderly chevauchées such as those Henry had conducted through her dominions. She brought with her no army of mercenaries who forced vassals to huddle bitterly behind their barricaded keeps or sent them scurrying for the safety of the Île-de-France. With the pomp and majesty of which only she was capable, she came to her towns in peace, eager to make up for past abuses, asking for renewed oaths of homage, offering proudly for their approval and admiration her son and heir, Richard. With the soldiers and military governors gone, with Capetian and Plantagenet overlords occupied elsewhere, she began to undo the effects of oppression, using her considerable charm and influence to bring together feuding vassals and defuse their explosive jealousies.
Once more the ducal palace at Poitiers, darkened these many years, became the center of all that was civilized and refined. As in the time of her father and grandfather, troubadours, musicians, scholars, and literary types of all varieties were welcomed at court; traditional fairs and tournaments were revived; beguiling customs that had fallen into abeyance with the last of the male dukes were hauled from dusty recesses of memory and reinstated with full honors. Those who had sought refuge from the sword of Henry Plantagenet began to come home. Where Henry had razed walls and taken hostages, Eleanor salved raw emotions and attempted to exorcise bitter memories; where Henry had sneered at crowns and royal gewgaws, Eleanor gloried in peacock processions and pageants, deliberately seeking out occasions for ceremony. Wherever she went, she pushed Richard into the spotlight as the rightful heir of the Troubadour, providing the southerners with constant reminders that Henry had been replaced. In Poitiers, she arranged for the boy to be invested with the honorary title of abbot of Saint-Hilaire and called upon the venerable archbishop of Bordeaux to present him with the lance and standard that signified that distinguished office.
In Limoges, a city that had suffered Henry’s wrath, she managed her son’s investiture as duke of Aquitaine with a dexterity that suggested a shrewd eye for public relations. The monks at the Abbey of Saint Martial had recently discovered among their archives an ancient account of the life of Saint Valerie, the city’s patron saint, a noble virgin who, according to legend, had been martyred for her faith at the dawn of the Christian era. In the days of Eleanor’s forebears, the legend of Saint Valerie had played an important part in the coronation of the dukes of Aquitaine, and now Eleanor rekindled local chauvinism by reviving this ancient ritual. On the day of the coronation, a great procession escorted Richard to the Church of Saint-Étienne, where he contracted a symbolic marriage with Saint Valerie, her ring upon his finger signifying his indissoluble bond with the land of his forebears. Robed in a silk tunic and wearing a crown of gold. Richard led a procession of clergy to the altar, where he received his sword and spurs. Afterward, there was feasting and jousting the likes of which had not been seen in Limoges for many decades, and later, the delighted southerners declared that Richard’s coronation outclassed any they had seen in Paris or Reims.
It should not be supposed that pageants and coronations suddenly transformed Aquitaine into a twelfth-century Camelot. Eleanor was swimming in a swift stream against the current, and the problems she faced in governing a traditionally ungovernable region had been found virtually insuperable by every man preceding her. While anarchy did not disappear, it did abate, and for a time, the land knew a precarious kind of peace or at least what passed for peace among the southerners. If it was not the government Henry had hoped to install, it was one that reflected Eleanor and her conceptions of the ideal state: music and poetry, love and laughter, freedom, justice, and a modicum of order. In the late sixties and early seventies, all roads in Aquitaine led to Poitiers and to the ducal palace, where events were taking place that intrigued the Aquitainians and amazed the rest of Europe. During these years, Eleanor’s household sheltered much of the future royalty of Europe. The Plantagenet children, once dragged from castle to castle, country to country, often without one or both parents, had never known a proper home. Now she drew them together in the halls and gardens where she herself had grown up: Prince Henry and Richard, Eleanor and Joanna, Geoffrey and his future wife, Constance of Brittany. The only missing child seems to have been John, whose father, in a moment of levity, had nicknamed him Lackland because he had run out of lands to bequeath the boy. It is believed that John spent his childhood in the care of nuns at the Abbey of Fontevrault, possibly with his parents’ intention that he devote his life to the Church, but more likely due to Eleanor’s unmistakable aversion to the boy. In addition to Eleanor’s own brood and their Poitevin cousins, circumstances had made her stepmother to the Capetian younger generation. Despite Louis’s earlier objections to Eleanor as a mother, events had decreed otherwise, because now under her supervision were both daughters of his second marriage, Marguerite and Alais, and soon there would come to Poitiers, like a wraith from the past, Eleanor’s firstborn daughter, the disappointing female she had borne to Louis before the Crusade.
The countess of Champagne, nee Marie Capet, had never really known her mother. For part of her childhood, Eleanor had been absent in the Holy Land, and afterward had come the divorce. She had been reared in the strictly religious French court by two consecutive step-mothers, who provided her with the most conservative of upbringings and in an atmosphere where the name of Eleanor of Aquitaine must have been a byword for female irresponsibility, not to mention perfidy. The likelihood of her having any contact with Eleanor during those intervening years is extremely remote, and yet the young woman who journeyed down to Poitiers from Troyes about the year 1170 could not have been more attuned to her mother’s thinking than if there had been no separation. More than any of Eleanor’s children, including Richard, Marie was her mother’s child. The manner in which this strange reconciliation came about is a detail that no chronicler saw fit to record; it is tempting to surmise that Louis, disturbed by the fact that two of his young daughters had fallen into undesirable hands, deliberately sent Marie to subtly keep an eye on the situation. At any event, she suddenly appeared as a leading figure at Eleanor’s court, a woman in her late twenties who bore ideas that curiously paralleled her mother’s.
Marie was already a person of some consequence in her own right. Even though she had been betrothed as a child, Louis had not seen fit to permit her marriage to Henry the Liberal of Champagne until she had reached the advanced age of nineteen. Unlike the Capetian court, her new home at Troyes was a center of culture and taste in northern France, and its sophisticated court a gathering place for poets such as Chrétien de Troyes. Marie gives the impression of being an aggressive woman who carved spheres of influence for herself, but, less politically minded than Eleanor, she took for her province of expertise the literary.
Something of the talent of William the Troubadour must have surfaced in the countess, a gift for inventing tales and creating worlds with words, but circumstances prevented a direct use of her talents. In her time, the idea of a female poet was not unknown—of the 450 troubadours known by name, 4 are women—but a daughter of Louis Capet did not take up the calling. Instead, she accepted outlets more appropriate to a woman and became a patroness of the arts, one of her protégés being Chrétien de Troyes, who composed, at her suggestion, the romance of the gallant Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.
In the harsh authoritarian world of masculine kingship, the world from which Eleanor had so lately fled, the court at Poitiers stood as an oasis where a woman of independence and imagination might find the freedom to invent a milieu suitable to her own taste. It had, like all oases, a fantasy quality about it, although to Marie and Eleanor; to the countess of Flanders and the countess of Narbonne; to Henry Plantagenet’s half sister, Emma of Anjou; to the dozens of highborn ladies in residence at one time or another, the court was reality, the rest of the world a distortion. They saw themselves as innovators of a rational new world, a prototype for the future perhaps, in which women might reign as goddesses or at the least mistresses of their own destinies. Eleanor and Marie and their friends may be forgiven their excessive optimism, because in some respects the twelfth century seemed the dawn of a new age for women. There is no question that the rigid feudal view of women had already begun to splinter. The Church’s traditional misogynistic view of the female as an instrument of the devil, a thing at once evil and inferior, had given way to the cult of the Virgin, and all over western Christendom the gospel of Mary was slowly dispelling the image of Eve the temptress; Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven, was worshiped in the magnificent new Gothic cathedrals, in pilgrimages to various shrines throughout Europe, in festivals such as the Annunciation and Candlemas, which celebrated the main events of the Virgin’s life. Along with the cult of the Virgin, there had appeared in more recent years the cult of chivalry, with the medieval lady as Mary’s secular counterpart. While Mariolatry had swollen mysteriously among the general populace, the chivalrous cult of the lady was a deliberate invention of the aristocracy, encouraged if not specifically devised by women themselves. Even though God had seemed to change sex by the twelfth century, the position of women still oscillated between the depths and the unreal elevation of the pedestal. In this time of great confusion about the roles of male and female, some women—the nobly born, the educated—felt the need for a redefinition of the relationship between the sexes. The inferiority of the female they acknowledged to be a myth, and in the Middle Ages, as Henry Adams wrote, “the superiority of the woman was not a fancy, but a fact.” It was not a fact that the average medieval man could readily accept, however, and women’s ongoing struggle with men continued.
At Poitiers, the “man problem” was a matter of more than merely personal concern to Eleanor; it was, on the contrary, a political dilemma of disturbing proportions. Despite the professed ideals of chivalry and courtly love then current, the knights of Aquitaine were still, in her estimation, rude and barbarous beneath their veneer of courtesy. The young men who swarmed to her court, especially during the June “season” between Whitsunday and Saint John’s Day, when there occurred the annual armistice in interbaronial fighting, were a restless, bellicose lot, many of them landless, penniless younger sons with no occupation except troublemaking. They came to joust and dice and find a woman, either on a permanent or on a temporary basis, and they brought to her court a disorder that she found potentially dangerous. In the past, this footloose segment of society had been siphoned off to Crusades or funneled into the Church, but Eleanor, wrestling with the perennial problem of anarchy in her estates, sought more long-range cures for this social ill. To her daughter she assigned the task of educating these high-spirited male subjects of hers so that the younger generation might be molded into civilized beings who, not so incidentally, would know how to respect women. Eleanor’s ideas went far beyond what we today would call feminism, in the sense that equality of the sexes was not precisely her goal. Rather, she believed in the superiority of women. What was needed, in her opinion, was a code of civility to embody and publicize these ideas. Not for nothing had she labored in the service of the legal-minded Henry Plantagenet; if the king of England could write down laws for Church and State, as he had at Clarendon, then the duchess of Aquitaine could informally codify and commit to parchment a system of manners to regulate the social conduct of her male subjects.
From her court at Troyes, Marie had brought along a chaplain, Andreas Capellanus, who was called upon to assist in the work of writing a manual for the medieval male. Even though the chaplain set down in scholarly paragraphs the heretical doctrines dictated by the countess, the ideas were Marie’s and, of course, Eleanor’s; the cornerstone of their curriculum was love, their goal the guidance and education of the male to a higher level of consciousness. It is amusing that Marie should have been compelled to commission a male cleric as her ghostwriter in this attempt to dethrone masculine dominance, but even more amusing is Andreas’s reaction. Obviously, he addressed himself to the task at hand with considerable reservations, because at some later date, he added a furious epilogue disavowing the work and calling down heaven’s wrath on the female sex. Although Tractus de Amore et de Amoris Remedia (Treatise on Love and the Remedies of Love) bore Andreas’s name, it was Marie’s book, and the thirty-one articles of its Code of Love reflect the passions peculiar to women who have come into their own and feel confident enough to use their authority in unorthodox ways.
Modeled on Ovid’s Art of Loving, the content owes little to the original, because in Ovid’s textbook, man, the master, employs the art of love to seduce women for his own pleasure; in Andreas’s treatise, the situation is reversed—the woman is the dominant figure, the man a pupil who must be carefully instructed until he becomes a fit partner for his lady. There is little that is poetic or ethereal about the principles set down in the code; rather it sets forth in practical terms the rules a man must remember when he deals with a woman: “Being obedient in all things to the commands of ladies, you must always try to ally yourself to the service of love”; “Thou shalt be in all things polite and courteous”; “Thou shalt keep thyself chaste for the sake of her whom thou lovest”; “Thou shalt not exceed the desires of thy lover.” The themes of courtly love sung by the troubadour poets, those ungerminated seeds suggested by Eleanor’s grandfather, now emerged full-blown, the raw materials reworked by the feminine sensibility until they almost seem a manifesto for some Amazon culture. The ladies of troubadour poetry were very often silent, passive goddesses who were adored whether they liked it or not. Since troubadour love was not always mutual, there was no reason to dwell on qualities that might make a lover acceptable. In contrast, the type of love defined in De Amore is certainly a great deal freer, in that the woman is no longer passive or silent. In finding her voice, however, she has made her views known: She is supreme, a goddess to be approached with reverence, and the man is her property. No chattel to be bought and sold and traded at man’s whim, no sex object to be seduced or raped against her will, she holds the power to accept or reject a man and, however difficult the trials she sets for him, he must treat her with respect and humility.
To put it at its mildest, these precepts were so radical, so subversive to the whole divinely ordained plan, as to boggle the mind of the average man—and at the same time so novel that they quickly spread through the courts of Europe, where they were eagerly taken up as the latest fashion by both men and women of the aristocracy. These rather incredible notions emanating from Poitiers must have caused certain sovereigns to blink. Certainly, Henry Plantagenet did not subscribe to a single article of Andreas’s Code of Love, nor did Louis Capet nor any self-respecting baron. No doubt Henry, who made it his business to keep abreast of developments in Poitiers, followed the new fads with amusement. Not only was his wife promulgating her sex as goddesses, but she sponsored courts of love in which confused men having problems with this new arrangement for the sexes might bring their questions before a tribunal of ladies for judgment. The women, sometimes sixty strong, sat on a raised dais in the Great Hall, while below them gathered the men, prepared to hear lengthy disputations on the nature of love, expositions on a man’s duty toward his lady. One “case” that piqued more than ordinary interest was this one: Can real love exist between a husband and wife? In Countess Marie’s opinion, it was doubtful whether love in the ideal sense could ever take place between spouses, but before giving a final judgment, she wished to refer the question to her mother. After due consideration, the queen allowed that it would be difficult to contradict her daughter, although she personally would find it admirable if a woman could find love in her marriage. One cannot help but sense the disillusionment behind her words. In fifty years she had not found romantic love with either of her husbands, and despite the tales of her adulteries, it is highly improbable that she found it outside of marriage either.
Andreas’s description of formal tribunals of charming ladies, solemnly ruling on affairs of the heart and rendering verdicts to hapless males, is now generally dismissed as a twelfth-century conceit. While there is no historical evidence to prove the courts real in the sense that verdicts were taken seriously, nevertheless, that they did take place is well within the realm of probability. In an age when a woman was never her own mistress but always a minor in the tutelage of some male, when at the same time women like Eleanor were asserting their independence, the courts of love afforded a means of attacking male supremacy. Granted, the courts of love may have been an amusing game, but they still offered a direct challenge to the male establishment. And the fact is, the challenge was not totally unsuccessful either. Far from it. During the latter half of the twelfth century, the ideas made fashionable at Eleanor’s palace were to insinuate themselves through the upper social circles of Europe and persistently reverberate down the corridors of history to the twentieth century. Our code of etiquette with its rules that women take precedence, our image of the courteous, housebroken male, must be considered the dying gasps of a bold new innovation that the noblewomen of Poitiers may have initially imagined would be a lever to raise the status of women. Unfortunately, their attempts to elevate women to a position of emotional and spiritual supremacy simply presented men with a convenient loophole by which they could pay lip service to the idea while at the same time continuing to withhold from women the smallest shred of real power. This irony would not have escaped a hardheaded politician such as Eleanor.
On Friday, December 25, 1170, the hunting lodge at Bures near Bayeux was decorated for Christmas. Logs burned on the hearth, jugglers and minstrels cavorted among the guests, and the hall shook with noise and boisterous laughter as it usually did when the Plantagenets came together. The remnants of the royal family, scattered these several years, had reassembled to celebrate their considerable blessings; Eleanor, stately grande dame who had forsaken a decorous Nativity at Poitiers for this murky castle where one stumbled over the hounds; Henry, his paunch more noticeable, his reddish hair flecked with salt; Richard, Geoffrey, Joanna, and, one chronicler claimed, even four-year-old John, making one of his rare public appearances. For a few days Eleanor and Henry had put aside past estrangement and gazed with the proud eyes of mother and father upon the dynasty they had created in happier days. It had been a consequential year for the family, one of those euphoric years when Eleanor and Henry could look back with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. The Plantagenet realm was at peace; thanks to Eleanor, Aquitaine was quiet for once, and Henry’s reforms in England promised increased revenue. At last Prince Henry, now known as the Young King, had been crowned at Westminster, and this year he kept his own Christmas court in England. Princess Eleanor, nine, had been betrothed to the twelve-year-old king of Castile, Alphonse VIII, and crossed the Pyrenees to confront her destiny. In early August, Henry had fallen gravely ill of a tertian fever, and so close to death had he come that his departure from the world had been prematurely reported in France. Chastened, he had made a will confirming his division of lands at Montmirail and vowing that if God permitted him to recover, he would make a pilgrimage to the monastery of Rocamadour in Quercy.
And in that year, too, the king had made peace with “God’s doughty champion,” the archbishop of Canterbury. In July, Henry had held Thomas’s stirrup at Fréteval and then had thrown his arms around him. “My lord archbishop,” he had said, “let us go back to our old love for each other and let each of us do all the good he can to the other and forget utterly the hatred that has gone before.” Admittedly, he had not given Thomas the customary kiss of peace but had sworn that “in my own land I will kiss his mouth and his hands and his feet a hundred times.” In the end, he had not accompanied Thomas back to England as he had half promised, but he did write to the Young King in October to notify him of their reconciliation: “Henry, king of England, to his son, Henry the king, greeting: Know that Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, has made peace with me according to my will. I therefore command that he and all his men shall have peace. You are to ensure that the archbishop and all his men who left England for his sake shall have all their possessions as they had them three months before the archbishop withdrew from England.... Written from Chinon.” He had grown weary of the tradesman’s son; he had done everything a king could possibly do to make amends, and now he preferred to forget the man. He would even ignore Thomas’s parting words when they last met at Chaumont in mid-October.
“Go in peace,” Henry had said. “I will follow you and I will see you in Rouen or in England as soon as I can.” It was nothing more than conventional politeness, for he was in no hurry to see Thomas again.
“My lord,” Thomas had replied, “my mind tells me that I will never see you again in this life.”
His theatricality annoyed Henry, who said sharply, “Do you think I’m a traitor?”
“Absit a te, domine,” Thomas had answered. “God forbid, my lord.”
While still on the Continent, Thomas had taken precautions to arm himself with a weapon in case Henry failed to keep his agreement. He had requested and received from Pope Alexander letters suspending the prelates who had participated in the illegal coronation of the Young King, letters to be used at his discretion in an emergency. However, on the day before he crossed the Channel, already doubtful of Henry’s good intentions, he angrily sent ahead a messenger to deliver the letters excommunicating Archbishop Roger of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury.
On Tuesday, December 1, Thomas and his party of faithful followers landed at Sandwich, six miles from Canterbury, after an absence of six years. At the port, some of the king’s men, surly and armed, attempted to seize the archbishop, but after being shown the king’s letter of safe conduct, they permitted him to pass unmolested. “As he set out for the city he was welcomed by the poor of the land as a victim sent from heaven, yea, even as an angel of God, with joy and thanksgiving.... And though the road was short, yet amidst the thronging and pressing crowds he could scarce reach Canterbury that day, where he was welcomed with the sound of trumpets and organs, with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”
A week later he set out for Winchester to visit his foster son, the Young King. “He had brought with him three costly chargers, of wondrous speed, beautiful in form, high-stepping, their delicate flanks rippling as they walked, their housing worked with flowers in various colours, which he intended to give as a gift to his new lord.” When he had ridden only as far as London, however, he was halted by a messenger from the Young King, forbidding him to continue or for that matter to visit any town or city in England; he was ordered to return immediately to Canterbury and remain there. On the trip back to Canterbury, Thomas’s knights, thoroughly frightened by the harsh tone of the message, rode with shield and lance to protect him.
Meanwhile, the excommunicated archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury had crossed the Channel and hurried to Henry with their complaints. “Their evil accusations were doubled by falsehood. It was reported to the king that the archbishop was careering about the kingdom at the head of an army. The king asked for their advice. ‘Seek advice from your barons and your knights,’ said the archbishop of York. ‘It is not for us to say what should be done.’ At length another of them said, ‘My lord, while Thomas lives, you will not have peace or quiet, or see good days.’ ”
Exasperated, the king “waxed furious and indignant beyond measure, and keeping too little restraint upon his fiery and ungovernable temper, poured forth wild words from the abundance of a distracted mind.”
In the crowded hall at Bures on Christmas Day his voice carried over the din. He raged impotently at Thomas and then began to scream at his barons and clerks in the hall. “I have nourished and promoted in my realm idle and wretched knaves, disloyal to their lord, whom they suffer to be mocked thus shamefully by a low-born priest.” Since the king had expressed similar sentiments in almost identical words on previous occasions, undue attention was not paid to this outburst. Nor was it noticed when four of his barons, “men of noble birth and renowned in arms,” disappeared from the noisy hall.
On Tuesday, December 29, Henry’s four barons, accompanied by an attendant, pushed their way into the main hall at Canterbury. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, the winter light beginning to fail, and the household was just finishing its meal, although the archbishop had already retired to his room with his clerks to discuss business. Invited to dine, the visitors refused, saying only that they had urgent business with the archbishop. Once admitted to his room, they examined him silently for a few moments and then at last one said, lying, “We have brought you a message from the King oversea.” Shouting now, the knights accused Thomas of plotting to take away the Young King’s crown, abusing him for excommunication of the bishops, and threatening him with dire punishments if he did not leave England. The voices grew louder; shouts and curses punctuated the air; fists clenched and unclenched. Becket’s face was severe and decisive. “Stop your threats and still your brawling,” he ordered. “I have not come back to flee again.” At this, the knights “retired amidst tumult and insults,” rushing into the courtyard, where they gathered under a mulberry tree to strap on their hauberks, helmets, and mailed gauntlets.
The archbishop calmly returned to his room. Soon afterward, the armored knights began to hack at the hall’s barricaded door “with swords, axes and hatchets.” Terrified, the monks urged Thomas to take refuge in the cathedral, but “he who had long since longed for martyrdom, now saw that the occasion to embrace it had seemingly arrived, and dreaded lest it should be deferred and even altogether lost if he took refuge in the church.” He sat motionless on his bed, visions of eternal grandeur jostling in his mind, and “when he would not be persuaded by argument or entreaties ... the monks seized hold of him, in spite of his resistance, and pulled, dragged and pushed him” into sanctuary. The monks who had been saying vespers in the cathedral broke off their chanting and ran to meet him; hearing heavy steps drawing closer and seeing unsheathed blades, they hurried to bolt the door, but Thomas wrenched them away. “God forbid that we should make His house into a fortress. Let everyone who wants to enter God’s church come in. May God’s will be done!”
It was nearly five o’clock now. The cathedral trembled in darkness, with only a few flickering candles splashing rings of light on the stone. Suddenly shrill voices tore through the shadows. “Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the king and the realm? Where is the archbishop?”
The monks ran to hide, but Thomas did not move. “Lo, here I am,” he answered fearlessly, “no traitor to the king, but a priest. What do you seek from me?”
“Absolve and restore to communion those whom you have excommunicated.”
“I will not absolve them.”
“Then you shall die this instant and receive your desert.”
“I am ready to die for my Lord, that in my blood the Church may obtain peace and liberty. But in the name of Almighty God I forbid you to harm any of my men, whether clerk or lay.”
The knights, “those satellites of Satan,” rushed forward and tried to pull and drag him outside the church, but the archbishop clung to a pillar. Bowing his head as in prayer, he murmured the names of God and Saint Mary and the blessed martyr Saint Denis. A steel blade flashed through the air and sheared off the archbishop’s cap and part of the crown of his head. “Next he received a second blow on the head, but still he stood firm and immovable. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows.” The awful blade fell again and “by this stroke the sword was dashed against the pavement, and the crown of his head, which was large, was separated from the head in such a way that the blood white with the brain and the brain no less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the cathedral with the white of the lily and the red of the rose.” The fifth murderer—no knight but a clerk—“placed his foot on the neck of the holy priest and martyr and, horrible to relate, scattered the brains and blood about the pavement, crying out to the others, ‘Let us away, knights. This fellow will rise no more!’ ”
While the body still lay warm on the pavement, some of the townsfolk of Canterbury smeared their eyes with blood. “Others brought bottles and carried off secretly as much of it as they could. Others cut off shreds of clothing and dipped them in the blood. Later, no one would be satisfied if they had not carried off something from the precious treasure of the martyr’s body. And indeed, with everything in such a state of confusion and tumult, each man could do as he pleased.... Thus the night passed in lamentation and mourning, groans and sighs.”
By New Year’s Day 1171, Henry had dismissed his Christmas court and moved on to Argentan, where he prepared to hold a meeting with his advisers. There he received news of the murder in the cathedral.
At the messenger’s first words, the king burst into loud cries of grief and changed his royal robes for sackcloth and ashes. Indeed he behaved as though he were the friend rather than the king of the dead man. At times he fell into a stupor but then he would begin groaning again and calling out more loudly and bitterly than before. For three whole days he remained shut up in his room and would take neither food nor admit any who wished to comfort him. It began to seem that his grief was so extreme that he had made up his mind to die himself. We began to despair of the king’s life.
For forty days, Henry abstained from all business, exercise, and amusements, remaining alone within the walls of his palace, sighing and groaning and repeating, “What a disaster that this terrible thing should have happened.”
At Winchester, the Young King lamented briefly for the man he had once called father. “What a pity!” he said, raising his eyes to heaven, “but thank God it was kept a secret from me and that no liege-man of mine was involved in it.” One cannot help but read the insensitivity in his words.
To the queen, withdrawn behind her own borders, the assassination and its aftermath must have seemed a nightmare from which she too wished to disassociate herself. The murder of Thomas Becket profoundly shocked Europe. Many people said that it was the most terrible thing to have happened since the Crucifixion, and Archbishop William of Sens, a friend of Becket’s, did not exaggerate public sentiment when he described the deed as surpassing the cruelty of Herod, the perfidy of Julian, and the treachery of Judas. “Almost everyone,” wrote William of Newburgh, “laid the death of the blessed martyr at the king’s door.” Everyone included Eleanor and the children, for who knew better than they the anguish caused by Henry’s insane, self-indulgent rages? The death of Thomas soon proved not an ending but a beginning: unceasing processions of pilgrims coming to Canterbury, the miracles people swore took place at the tomb, the prompt movement for the martyr’s canonization. As if to prove that saints and martyrs rule from the tomb, Becket reached out to taunt Henry more effectively than he had ever done in life. The king became the most hated man in Europe, and even though he had written to the monks of Canterbury and to Pope Alexander declaring that he had never desired Thomas’s death, he had, nevertheless, not seen fit to punish the murderers, and thus few believed in his innocence. His prestige at a record low, the storm of censure blowing without letup, he decided to undertake his long-postponed conquest of Ireland, a remote outpost of the world beyond the reach of papal legates who were threatening to excommunicate him.
At Poitiers, life slumbered along much as it had before. The carved saints adorning the Maubergeonne Tower caught the evening sun, the valley below undulated in waves of violet mist, and later the evenings throbbed with the strains of viol and lute and the aching beauty of the poets’ songs. The night breezes swept into the Great Hall, where the ladies amused themselves with petitions to their court of love, and in the gardens and foyers the gilded youth talked of love and tournaments. They laughed and danced as if tomorrow would never dawn, and in fact, there seemed to be no good reason why their days would not drift on forever in this same joyous way. With so much evil afoot in the world, when an archbishop could be hacked to death before the altar of his own cathedral, how fortunate the children of Henry Plantagenet felt to be sheltered in their mother’s domains, a silken cocoon of civility and sanity.
Life at the ducal palace moved slowly, and why not? There was no hurry. A high value was placed on amenities, especially on the art of conversation—intellectual, philosophical, and, of course, political. They spoke of Becket as a great man, a saint, and they discussed in clinical detail the aberrations of Henry Plantagenet. And they also talked of Louis Capet, whose defects now seemed delightful idiosyncrasies compared to the glaring irregularities in the character of the king of England. Time had done much to heal Eleanor’s rancor toward her first husband; that desolate year in Jerusalem, the death of Raymond of Antioch, that dreadful, helpful smile of Pope Eugenius’s at Tusculum-all these anguished memories had become mere silt in some far corner of her mind where they no longer had the power to hurt and humiliate. Louis, she was told, had grown mellow and wonderfully childlike. He played chess, dined frugally with the monks, and fell asleep in unlikely places. Once Marie’s husband had found him dozing under a tree on a summer’s day with only two servants nearby, and when the count had reproved him, Louis had only smiled serenely and replied, “Although I’m alone, I sleep free from danger for no one wishes to harm me.” To those at Poitiers, the remark seemed pregnant with significance, especially when they tried to imagine Henry making such a statement. In fact, Louis had been known to compare himself with the English king. To Gerald of Wales he had remarked, “Thy master, the king of England, lacks nothing. To him belong men, horses, gold, silk, gems, fruits, wild beasts and all things else. As for us in France, all we have is bread, wine and joy.” Bread, wine, joy and, for the moment at least, the psychological upper hand over Henry.
Slowly, Eleanor was edging out of the Plantagenet orbit and moving back toward the Capets. There was nothing definite about this, no meetings or letters that informers might report to Henry, perhaps nothing that even Eleanor herself could have recognized as a specific turning. If there was a conspiracy at that point, it was more a meeting of minds, at one in their contempt for Henry, a feeling shared by most of Europe. Not surprisingly, Eleanor’s three older boys had been deeply affected by the events at Canterbury, but not in the way one might imagine. Only to young Henry had Becket meant anything personal; to Richard and Geoffrey, their father’s great friendship was only a story people told. They themselves had been too young to remember. It was, rather, the universal condemnation heaped upon their father that helped to shatter their image of him. If he had once been a hero for them, this had not been true for several years, and by 1171, being the son of the king of England did not hold the prestige of former days. The chronicles give the impression that Henry’s sons turned against him overnight and suddenly began to hate the father they had once adored. It is doubtful, in the first place, whether they had ever adored him. Feared and respected, undoubtedly, but loved, no. He was a remote figure, a larger-than-life apparition who would roar into their lives at Christmas or Easter after an absence of months or sometimes years to suddenly announce some honor he had arranged on their behalf; he would pluck them from their nurseries and tiltyards to receive the homage of a king or prince and then seemingly forget them again. But they could not forget him, his terrifying rages, his incomprehensible quarrels with the queen, his love for the woman at Woodstock.
As Eleanor moved about her court, hearing Richard recite a poem he had written or watching the pleasure on young Henry’s face as he prepared for a tournament, she must have known that they spoke of their father with fierce disrespect, that soon after Montmirail they were quarreling among themselves over their prospective inheritances, bragging and sniping like little boys trying to divide a too-small sweet. Possibly she accepted their quarrels philosophically and laughed about them, as Geoffrey would do later when he said, “Don’t you know that it is our nature to quarrel, our heritage that none of us should love the other?” Richard, too, was fond of joking about their demon Angevin ancestors, and he often repeated Abbot Bernard’s famous words when he first met their father, “From the devil they came, to the devil they will go.”
By 1172, the three oldest Plantagenet boys were no longer children who could be trotted out to perform on ceremonial occasions. Now seventeen, fifteen, and fourteen, they were young men of distinct but diverse personalities. The Young King was every twelfth-century woman’s idea of a fairy-tale prince: “The most handsome prince in all the world, whether Saracen or Christian.” Apparently, he had inherited the good looks of his grandfather, Geoffrey Anjou, and the chroniclers take great pains to describe his superficial attractions. “He was beautiful above all others in both form and face,” declared Walter Map, “most blessed in breathing courtesy, most happy in the love of men and in their grace and favour ... he was a man of unprecedented skill in arms.” There is no doubt that his affability and his reputation for being a “fountain of largesse” helped him to attract a large following among his own generation. Like his mother, he had a taste for splendor, and he also prided himself on being the epitome of generosity and hospitality. Stories of his munificence flew about Europe, eventually finding their way into the contemporary histories. Once, he and his friends came to a spring after a tiring day of hunting. When he found that his servants had brought only one skin of wine, he emptied the skin into the water so that his companions might share what little he had. On another occasion, Christmas Day 1172, he invited all the knights in Normandy who bore the name William to share his dinner. One hundred and ten knights, we are told, sat down to a banquet of unprecedented extravagance. This was the public side of young Henry, and if that had been all of him, Eleanor might have had cause to rejoice. But there was more, and the rest of him she must have deplored. He may have been “noble, lovable, eloquent, beautiful, valiant, in every way charming, a little lower than the angels,” but he was also weak, vain, shallow, empty-headed, and irresponsible—traits that his beauty made it easy to overlook, even by those who knew him well and especially by his father, who did not know him at all. He had a talent for saying the wrong thing, the exquisite manners he had learned in the households of Eleanor and Thomas Becket alternating with the most outrageous insensitivity and cruelty.
At the lavish banquet following his coronation in 1170, his father had insisted on serving the Young King himself, as a token of respect for his new exalted rank. Appearing before the boy with a mighty boar’s head, he had smiled and joked, “It is surely unusual to see a king wait upon table.”
“Ah,” retorted the Young King, “but it is not unusual to find the son of a count waiting on the son of a king.”
Henry’s reply to his favorite son, if there was one, has not been recorded.
“Baseness of temper” is how Walter Map describes Eleanor’s eldest son. “Foolishly liberal and spendthrift,” adds Robert of Torigni. “He was a restless youth born for many men’s undoing,” sums up William of Newburgh.
Richard was Eleanor’s favorite, which may have been one reason Henry disliked him. “He was tall in stature, graceful in figure; his hair between red and auburn, his limbs were straight and flexible; his arms rather long, and not to be matched for wielding the sword or for striking with it, and his long legs suited the rest of his frame.” Physically, except for his height, Richard owed his looks to Henry: the reddish hair, ruddy complexion, his athletic prowess, and bold expression. In all other ways, he was Eleanor’s son. Indeed, he was everything she had always sought in a man: a born warrior, a handsome chivalrous knight, a poet and musician, an intellectual. From his mother and his half sister Marie, he had learned to please a woman, and already he could compose delicate, sensuous verse and pay compliments in song to a lady. Blooming in the soil of Aquitaine as though he had been born there, he spoke the langue d’oc whenever possible, and despite his early years in England, cared nothing for the kingdom. He thought it no great honor that his brother would someday wear a king’s crown; all Richard wanted was Aquitaine.
Neither Eleanor nor Henry seemed overly fond of Geoffrey. Considerably shorter than his two brothers, he also lacked their good looks and grace. Even though he possessed intelligence and accomplishments in knightly skills, probably more natural ability in tournaments than young Henry, he was a young man who inspired neither love nor confidence. Gerald of Wales described him as “overflowing with words, soft as oil, possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the seeming indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler.” Roger of Hovedon disposes of Geoffrey in a few words: “Geoffrey, that son of perdition.”
By twelfth-century standards, Eleanor and Henry’s sons were adults. Looking at a world full of exciting opportunities, they grew restless and ambitious, eager to be their own men and take their rightful places in society, but instead, Henry forced them to remain helpless dependents. He had seen fit to honor them with titles, but he still viewed them as children; the authority and revenues accompanying those titles he clutched tightly. One reason, of course, was his inability to relinquish anything that belonged to him, but at the same time, he could never quite accept the fact that his sons had grown up. This is difficult to understand, because at his eldest son’s present age Henry himself was leading armies and planning invasions, and moreover, his own father had already turned over to him the duchy of Normandy. In his youth he had worked hard and played little; life was serious, and crowns had to be won. The younger generation baffled him because he could see no resemblance between himself as a youth and his frivolous sons, especially young Henry, whom he had raised to a station so lofty that no child would have cause to complain. Had he not turned his chancellor into an archbishop so that the boy might be anointed and had he not suffered from that decision as no king had ever suffered? He had given his beloved boy a title, and surely no son had a right to expect more. But now, to his astonishment, the boy actually expected Henry to step down from the throne of England, and others supported his incredible demand:
Afterwards between you and your son a deadly hatred sprung up
Whence many a gentle knight has since lost his life,
Many a man has been unhorsed, many a saddle emptied,
Many a good bucklet pierced, many a hauberk broken.
After his coronation and after his investiture
You filched from your son something of his lordship,
You took away from him his will; he could not get possession.
Another reason that Henry had difficulty transferring authority to his sons was that he himself, carefully groomed for kingship since birth, was long accustomed to being the center of attention. As an adult, he continued to expect this kind of special consideration from everyone, his children included. Not having realized emotional maturity himself, he could not comprehend his sons’ attitudes. Eleanor, on the other hand, recognized their immaturity, but she was also capable of understanding their impatience, and she must have strongly identified with them. There was no doubt that their ambitions outran their abilities at that point, but at the same time, deep resentments were building rapidly. She believed there would be no peace in the empire until Henry invested them with power and responsibility in some gradual recognition of their rightful claims. That he would agree to any such system she could never have seriously believed. She knew him too well. When had he ever allowed any member of his family to possess even a morsel of real authority? His voice must always reign supreme.
For those who kept track of prophecies and omens, the conflict between Henry Plantagenet and his sons had already been predicted by Merlin. “The cubs shall awake and shall roar aloud and, leaving the woods, shall seek their prey within the walls of the cities; among those who shall be in their way they shall make great carnage and shall tear out the tongues of bulls. The necks of them as they roar aloud they shall load with chains and shall thus renew the times of their forefathers.” As dire prophecies go, this one would turn out to be fairly accurate, save in one detail: The awakened Plantagenet cubs would be led by their mother.