The Wheel of Fortune Turns

At Christmas 1172, Henry summoned Eleanor, along with Richard and Geoffrey, to keep the holiday with him at Chinon, but the occasion soon turned into a family brawl. Although the Young King and Queen Marguerite were in Normandy, the king and queen, the chroniclers tell us, quarreled furiously over their absent cub. Their son, nearly eighteen years old, was now demanding his heritage. He wanted someplace in the world that he could call his own—England, he suggested, and if not England then Normandy or Anjou. Had not Richard and Geoffrey nominal authority in their duchies? Why should he remain landless, a king without a kingdom, tied on a short leash by his father and forced to subsist on a meager allowance that he received at the king’s pleasure? His coronation had been a farce, he whined, his crown only a plaything signifying nothing. How could he hold up his head before his friends when his father treated him like a babe? He wanted to become king of England while he was still young. The Young King burned with grievances, and when reproached by Henry, he had given a remarkable demonstration of Angevin black bile.

During the holiday, Eleanor must have pleaded vigorously on her son’s behalf. She was convinced that his points were generally well taken, although at the same time she could not have truthfully denied that some of Henry’s fears also seemed to be justified. It was clear that so far the boy had shown no desire for responsibility and had balked at Henry’s attempts to teach him the real business of kingship. Anything that smacked of work brought on “a dreadful ennui”; he much preferred to spend his time with the knights and squires who had flocked to his side and followed him from one jousting field to the next all over western Europe. Nor could Eleanor deny that the young man spent money at an alarming rate. Still, she defended him. If he wanted to play at life, what was wrong with that? He was young. At his age she herself had felt much the same, and yet she had matured into a responsible administrator. In time he, too, would settle down.

But Henry would accept none of these arguments. Somehow, when his back had been turned for a moment, his darling boy had been transformed into an unrecognizable monster. Since the boy could do no wrong in his eyes, someone else must be responsible for the mysterious transformation, and he did not have far to look to understand whose handiwork he was seeing. The boy had been corrupted during his visits to Eleanor’s court. His head had been stuffed full of Arthurian romances and Ovidian nonsense, unreal notions of knights-errant and women who fancied themselves goddesses. Did his son believe himself to be a hero out of the pages of a Chrétien de Troyes fantasy? He certainly behaved so. Real life was not only tournaments and courts of love; it was the sober conventions of councils and law courts. Henry did not care that the Young King had “revived chivalry, for she was dead or almost so.” The tournaments that the boy adored fell into the same category as troubadours, both a waste of time. The king himself had no taste for such diversions. He had banned tournaments in England and now regretted that he had not extended the ban to his Continental divisions. If the Young King would attend to his duties as an apprentice monarch, he would have no time for mock wars; if he must pursue renown, let it be in the course of duty as Henry’s assistant. The trouble was, the boy’s mind had been warped by Eleanor and the preux chevaliers who clustered around the queen in Poitiers, her palace a trysting place for idlers who thought only of the next amusing adventure. For too many years he had closed his eyes to Eleanor’s activities, but now he would make it his business to take more than a casual interest.

By the time that the rancorous Christmas court disbanded, there was no question that war had been declared and the battle lines drawn up, but what Henry failed to understand was that Eleanor had been arming for this conflict for some time now. God, as the Wife of Bath observed, has given women three weapons: deceit, weeping, and spinning. Since Eleanor by temperament lacked the taste for either of the latter, she had resorted to the former. While the troubadours were singing and her ladies passing judgments in the court of love, the queen had become involved in a serious development. With the aid of Ralph de Faye and other confidants among the Poitevin nobility and with the encouragement of her sons, she had somehow made contact with Louis Capet, and a conspiracy of sorts had been born. Unfortunately, the origins of the plot against Henry Plantagenet were never revealed, but it seems to have been a loose confederation of the king’s disaffected vassals, a group that at that time included his wife, sons. and their champion the king of France. Although their united goal was Henry’s removal and the elevation of the Young King, their individual motives varied widely. In Louis’s case, his machinations aimed at breaking the power of the wily Plantagenet; the traitorous Aquitainian warlords would have jumped eagerly at any opportunity for revenge on what they considered an oppressive overlord; and Henry’s sons were rebelling at an authoritarian parent who threw up barriers between them and their youthful desires. It is less easy to understand Eleanor’s motives. She who had worked so hard in harness with Henry to forge an empire must have realized that Louis’s long-range plans might destroy the very thing she had labored to build. Perhaps at that point her hatred of Henry had become so great that she was willing to see the empire fall along with its master. More likely she had convinced herself that it was time to pass along the holdings to the next generation. What she surely could not have believed was that Henry would voluntarily step down. While the chroniclers provide no insights into Eleanor’s thinking, they are unanimous in crediting her as the ringleader, and they are equally unanimous in their condemnation. Gervase of Canterbury contended that the whole uprising had been devised and executed by the queen, “a very clever woman, born of noble stock, but flighty.” The anonymous chronicler of the Gesta Henrici states emphatically that “the authors of this heinous treachery were Louis, King of France, and, as some say, Eleanor, Queen of England and Ralph de Faye.” William of Newburgh is more discreet, only remarking dryly that after the Young King had reached manhood, “certain persons indeed whispered in his ear that he ought now by rights to reign alone, for at his coronation his father’s reign had, as it were, ceased.” Richard Fitzneale, a great admirer of Henry‘s, charges Eleanor with a calculated program of alienation of affections: “For while his sons were yet young and by reason of their age easily swayed by any emotion, certain’little foxes’ corrupted them with bad advice; so that at last his own bowels turned against him and told her sons to persecute their father.”

It is difficult to unravel cause and effect. Did Eleanor, as the chroniclers claim, foster her sons’ hatred of their father and incite them to rebellion, or did she merely support them in their own feelings about Henry? John, whom she did not raise and rarely saw, would later hold similar attitudes about his father. If Eleanor, as the custodial parent of Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey, did in truth turn them against Henry, she did a more thorough job than most separated wives, in that such attempts more often than not backfire. Her contemporaries, adamant in believing the worst about her, proceeded on the premise that a woman who had ostentatiously abandoned her husband and set up a court where women reigned supreme had to be wicked or, at the least, “flighty.” Remembering her intrigue with Henry while she had still been queen of France, they viewed her as an unnatural woman, one who did not know her place and, as such, would be capable of anything, especially a strenuous campaign to poison her children against their father.

All efforts at changing Henry’s attitude having failed, Eleanor took Richard and Geoffrey back to Poitiers, where plans for the uprising moved forward in a somewhat cautious manner. Mainly it was a period of waiting and watching for precisely the right moment to strike. Henry, however, took active steps to regain control of his heir so that he might undo the work of the “little foxes.” Not only would he separate that young man from his mother and her obnoxious court, but he would also banish other undesirables who might be exerting a bad influence. Despite the Young King’s howls of rage, Henry dismissed his favorite jousting companions and informed him that in future he would accompany his father and learn the profession of kingship. In early February, he more or less dragged young Henry to Montferrand in the Auvergne, where an important meeting had been scheduled with Count Humbert III of Maurienne, the lord of a spacious province extending southward and eastward from Lake Geneva to the frontiers of Italy and Provence. Two years earlier Henry and Humbert, who had no son, had tentatively agreed to a match between the count’s daughter, Alice, and John Lackland, and now a formal betrothal was to take place. The contract drawn up, Henry promised to pay Count Humbert five thousand marks, while Humbert agreed to make John his heir to Maurienne. So far, young Henry had observed the negotiations without enthusiasm but with, perhaps, some jealousy. After Count Humbert had handed over the baby Alice to Henry, the entire party moved north to Limoges, where the king had summoned Eleanor and his two middle sons to confirm the settlement. During the week of February 21-28, he held court in Limoges, the first time he had stepped foot in Eleanor’s provinces for several years, and he dominated the proceedings as though his wife did not exist. Calling together the barons of Aquitaine, he proudly announced his new alliance with Maurienne and then proceeded to take care of other business. With great ado, he acted as arbitrator between the feuding king of Aragon-Barcelona and Count Raymond of Toulouse, after which he received the homage of the count, who had recently severed his connections with the Capets.

Sometime during that week, Count Humbert, having disposed of both his daughter and the future of his fief, began to have annoying second thoughts. Perhaps he had made a poor bargain. Admittedly, his prospective son-in-law was the son of the king of England, but what did that mean exactly, since Henry had already divided his lands among his three eldest sons? What dower, he suddenly demanded of Henry, did he mean to set aside for young John? Placed on the spot, Henry replied that he would give the six-year-old boy the castles of Chinon, Loudon, and Mirebeau, a spur-of-the-moment decision that conveniently ignored the fact that those castles lay in Anjou, a county already assigned to his eldest son.

With no prompting from Eleanor, the Young King burst into loud protests, flatly refusing to give his castles to John, either then or at any time in the future. Indignant, he began to recite the whole chronicle of injuries his father had visited upon him, particularly the scorching insult of not being permitted to select his own friends. Although Eleanor, Richard, and Geoffrey supported him in refusing to ratify the marriage settlement, their refusals did not prevent Henry from assuring the count of Maurienne that his word remained law in the family. In the midst of this exceedingly public quarrel, the count of Toulouse saw an opportunity to settle an old score. Speaking privately to Henry, he suggested that the king might do well to open his ears and eyes a bit wider. Surely he could see that the queen had brainwashed their sons. Behind the floss and frill of her court of love, plots to depose him were being hatched, and for that matter, Raymond doubted if Henry had a loyal vassal left in the whole of Aquitaine. The king listened to this tale of sedition without revealing his emotions. Whatever else he might think of Eleanor, he could not readily believe that she would betray him, and he knew that Raymond, a past-master at treachery, certainly held enough of a grudge against the queen to concoct such a story. Henry, too, had his informers, and no reports of foul play had come to his ears. At the same time, he did not dismiss Raymond’s warning; rather, he filed it as a subject worthy of further investigation.

When the conclave broke up at the end of February, Henry announced that he would continue to take charge of the Young King; to Eleanor’s dismay, she was forced to return to Poitiers with only Richard and Geoffrey. As the king’s entourage moved north, breaking their journey occasionally to hunt and hawk, there was no doubt that young Henry was being held under house arrest. His father did not allow him out of his sight, even insisting that they sleep in the same room. On the evening of March 5, after a hard day’s ride, they reached Chinon, and that night Henry slept perhaps more soundly than usual, because the next morning he awoke to find his son gone. The drawbridge, he learned, had been lowered before dawn. Frantic, he dispatched messengers in every direction, and when he learned that the boy had forded the Loire and had been seen heading north, he sped after him. For the next two days Henry raced to overtake the renegade in a hopeless chase that took him from Le Mans to Alençon to Argentan. But on March 8, after an all-night ride, the Young King crossed the French border to rest safely in the domains of his father-in-law. Obviously, the escape had been carefully planned; fresh horses had been posted at intervals so that the Young King would have no trouble in maintaining a good lead over pursuers. Exactly who arranged these details is uncertain, although it would be reasonable to assume that Eleanor was responsible.

At the French frontier, shaking with frustration, Henry sent several eminent bishops to Louis asking for the return of his son and promising that if the boy had complaints, they would be rectified. In this matter he would, he vowed, even take Louis’s advice.

Louis replied with a feyness that greatly amused his court.

“Who is it that sends this message to me?” he asked.

“The king of England,” replied Henry’s bishops.

“That is untrue,” said Louis archly. “Look, the king of England is here with me and he sends me no message through you. But if you still call king his father who was formerly king of England, know that he is no longer king. Although he may still act as king, everyone knows that he resigned his kingdom to his son.”

It was obvious to Henry that the time had come to put his house in order. If his heir mocked him, there still remained time to gather in the rest of the brood. Shortly, however, he discovered his mistake. “Soon after, the younger Henry, devising evil against his father from every side by the advice of the French king, went secretly into Aquitaine where his two youthful brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, were living with their mother, and with her connivance, so it is said, he incited them to join him and brought them back to France.” With three sons now beyond his jurisdiction, Henry still did not take the runaways terribly seriously. Childish petulance was all that troubled them. Apparently undisturbed, he had his hawks and hounds shipped over from England and passed the time hunting. More or less impotent for the moment, he was reduced to threatening Eleanor. Through Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen he appealed to her to end the game, adding assurances that if she and the boys returned home, all would be forgiven.

“Pious queen, most illustrious queen,” wrote the archbishop, “before matters come to a worse end, return with your sons to your husband, whom you are bound to obey and with whom you are forced to live; return lest he mistrust you or your sons. Most surely we know that he will in every way possible show you his love and grant you the assurance of perfect safety. Bid your sons, we beg you, to be obedient and devoted to their father, who for their sakes has undergone so many difficulties, run so many dangers, and undertaken so many labors.”

The archbishop then lifted before the queen’s eyes the specter of serious punishment. “Either go back to your husband, or by canon law we shall be compelled and forced to lay the censure of the Church on you. Although we say it unwillingly, unless you return to your senses we shall do this with grief and tears.”

Eleanor did not deign to reply, indeed there was no reason at all to pay the slightest morsel of attention to either Henry’s importunities or the archbishop’s threats of excommunication. As for her husband’s secondhand promises of “love” and “perfect safety,” she was wary of the word love on his tongue. At any event, by Easter of 1173, the dagger was poised for the thrust, with the Young King’s escape the signal for a widespread uprising against the king; in the half of western Christendom every baron with a grievance against his Plantagenet overlord saw that the hour had struck. The confederation, which months earlier had included mainly the queen, her sons, and her ex-husband, had now swollen to include a motley assortment of fresh recruits: the houses of Champagne and Flanders, liege men of the young princes, Poitevins burning for revenge, aggravated barons of Brittany, English lords eager to escape Henry’s crippling taxes, roustabouts who had followed in the wake of the popular Young King; in the far north, even King William of Scotland threw his support to Eleanor’s son. In England, Richard of Dover’s investiture as archbishop of Canterbury was broken off in midceremony by a messenger from the Young King protesting an election held without his consent. In Aquitaine, all officials appointed by the king were promptly shown the door; in Anjou, Brittany, and Maine, the king’s authority was stoutly repudiated. In that spring of 1173, only Normandy remained faithful to its overlord, and of all Henry’s family, “John alone, who was a little boy, remained with his father.” The Plantagenet edifice, constructed with such precision over the past two decades, seemed on the brink of folding like a house of cards.

Toward the end of June, the revolt began in earnest. On the twenty-ninth, Count Philip of Flanders invaded Normandy and captured Aumale north of Rouen, while Eleanor’s sons, “laying waste their father’s lands on every side with fire, sword and rapine,” received their first taste of real warfare at the siege of Driencourt Castle at Neufchatel. Louis Capet set up his stonethrowers and siege engines at Verneuil, one of Henry’s strongest fortifications on the Norman-French border. By midsummer Eleanor must have felt confident that Henry Plantagenet’s days on the throne were numbered. The king appeared to be stunned, not without good reason; Earl Robert of Leicester, the son of his former chief justiciar and one of his most loyal supporters, had deserted to the camp of the Young King, and the count of Flanders readied a fleet to invade England. Each day brought tidings of fresh disaster for the king and promises of a new regime for Eleanor. In August, however, the situation dramatically altered as the lion seemed to slowly shake himself awake and exhibit the speed he had shown in the early days of their marriage. With loyal vassals in short supply, certainly too few to form a decent army, Henry raided his treasury for funds to purchase mercenaries. Between August 12 and 19, he raced his army of ten thousand Brabantines from Normandy to Brittany at the rate of twenty miles a day. To Eleanor’s consternation, he began to stamp out, one by one, the fires of sedition.

As autumn drew near, Louis Capet decided to go home. His vassals had committed their time to Young Henry’s cause for only the traditional forty days of military service; if Louis remained in the field any longer, he would be obliged to pay them out of his own pocket, and even for his son-in-law, he would not go that far. From experience, Eleanor knew better than to trust Louis when it came to military ventures, but still she must have fumed to learn that he had requested a truce. On September 25, 1173, the two kings met under the spreading branches of a gigantic elm tree at Gisors in the Vexin, the traditional meeting place for the two rival powers. In the shade of the great tree, Henry’s three sons faced their father and listened impatiently to his offers of allowances and castles. Quickly, they realized that their situations had not changed, for Henry made no mention of authority. Rejecting what they considered bribes with the supreme disdain of those who have not yet tasted defeat, they confidently turned their backs on him and rode back to Paris with Louis. The fighting season had ended for the year, but in the spring they would strike again, and next time the attack would be aimed at the heart of his power, England.

It was late September now, and Eleanor must have sat uneasily in her high tower at Poitiers. Her sons may have been safe at the Capetian court, but no such security was vouchsafed to Eleanor, whose future suddenly appeared perilous. Rattling their way over the highroads of Normandy and Anjou came dismaying reports that her husband, having nothing to fear from Louis for the moment, was methodically moving his Brabantines in a southerly direction, slowly but unmistakably bearing down on Poitiers and eager to lay hands on the taproot of all his afflictions. In Touraine and northern Poitou he was capturing castles and razing walls, burning vineyards, and uprooting crops; hardly a day passed without the sight of terrorized refugees seeking safety behind Poitiers’s walls, their stomachs empty but their mouths full of horror stories about kin who had been captured and assigned to unknown Plantagenet dungeons. As the shadow of the king loomed closer, it was clearly time for Eleanor to leave her capital city, and yet she lingered. The reason for her delay can only be surmised: At that crucial moment when nearly the whole region north of Poitiers lay a smoking ruin, she must have disliked the idea of abandoning her province to the fury of her husband. Then. too, she must have experienced difficulty in coming to terms with the remaining alternative. If she fled, there was only one direction to go—the way of thousands of other refugees, including Becket and her sons. The wheel of fortune had made a cruel if complete revolution; at the age of fifty-one, was she reduced to abandoning her duchy and running to the Capets for protection? Undoubtedly, this was a step she wished to avoid at all costs, but in the end there was of course no choice. Even Ralph de Faye had deemed it prudent to winter along the Seine, and by the time Henry had set up his siege engines before the walls of Faye-la-Vineuse, he had already crossed into the Île-de-France. Only a few months earlier, one of Eleanor’s vassals had written boldly, “Rejoice, O Aquitaine, be jubilant, O Poitou, for the scepter of the king of the North Wind is drawing away from you,” but the rejoicing and jubilance had not survived the vintage.

When Eleanor finally decided to act, the last possible moment for flight had already passed. That she knew this is evident from the manner of her departure. She took with her no silken gowns or chests or maids. Disguised in a knight’s attire, she set out astride her mount, accompanied only by a few knights of her household. Along some road in the north of Poitou the queen’s little band was accosted, almost accidentally it seems, by a party of her own countrymen, unfortunately some of the few Poitevins still loyal to Henry Plantagenet and thus quick to assess the value of this prize that had dropped into their laps. Her capture was accomplished swiftly and silently. No chronicler had access to the facts, neither the date nor the place nor the names of her captors. The sole annalist to mention the episode was Gervase of Canterbury and then only to record his surprise that the most dignified queen in Europe should be found in men’s clothes—“mutata veste muliebri”—with her legs vulgarly straddling a horse. A twentieth-century historian suggests that her betrayers were four Poitevin barons who later received valuable grants from Henry; if that were truly the case, the men would have been known to her, no doubt vassals who had sworn homage, who had lazed about the Great Hall of her palace listening to the troubadours and partaking of her hospitality, and on whom she had tried to graft an enlightened consciousness. Whatever the manner of the confrontation between these men and their liege lady—whether men and horses crashed to the ground as her escort attempted a defense, whether her party was led away in helpless silence—the betrayal took place with secrecy and murderous efficiency. Nor did the king advertise the capture of his royal prisoner of war. Her proverbially disloyal countrymen had neatly taken care of his problems, both marital and martial, and now he would deal with her privately as the poorest villein would punish a faithless wife. Swiftly, the unrepentant queen was stored in a convenient fortress, Chinon perhaps, but for many months her whereabouts must have remained a mystery to her sons and supporters. She had disappeared as if swallowed up by an extraterrestrial invasion party. At one point, however, Eleanor and Henry must have faced each other in bitter colloquy. Did Henry threaten to execute her for treason? Did he fly into one of his Angevin rages and roll on the floor? The answers to such questions lie hidden in the mists of history, if indeed they were ever publicly known. Perhaps Henry forewent the pleasure of a tantrum and informed her with a deadly calm worse than rage that her future lay solely at his disposal. Despite the propaganda emanating from her court of love, she was, after all, his property. The principles of feudalism rode triumphant.

On Whitsunday, May 12, 1174. Henry himself arrived in Poitiers to scoop up the remnants of Eleanor’s court—Queen Marguerite and the Princess Alais; Henry’s sister, Emma of Anjou, Constance of Brittany and Alice of Maurienne; his daughter, Joanna—and then he proceeded to clean house. The chevaliers and songsters were sent on their way, idlers and tourneyers banished, key rebels flushed from their burrows and assigned to chains. Trustworthy men were placed in charge of the duchy. Eleanor’s famous court, the scene of brilliant fêtes and female fantasies of power, stood empty now. The Young King had gone, and Richard and Geoffrey—all moved on to challenge their destinies in the Île-de-France. Countess Marie, who had remained until shortly before Henry’s purge, was now back in Champagne with her tales of Arthur and Guinevere. The countess of Flanders had returned to Arras, where her husband, refusing to tolerate Amazons or goddesses, hung a young man who had dared to practice the principles of Andreas’s De Amore. The court of love was vacant now and the land in which it had flourished left to the winds of anarchy.

All through that dreary winter and spring of 1174 we hear nothing of Eleanor. The kings and knights, bishops and castles, even the pawns, still moved about the political chessboard, but the queen had been deftly removed and pocketed. It can be supposed, however, that her hope of release remained high, and if communications from the outside reached her, she would have been encouraged to learn that the Young King and Philip of Flanders, their army and fleet assembled, now waited only for a favorable wind to speed their flotilla across the Channel. The revolt by no means over, there always remained the chance of rescue, either by her sons or by Louis or by some sympathetic jailer.

Suddenly in July, doors were unbarred and drawbridges lowered, but not by friends. Eleanor was carried under close guard to the port of Barfleur “where a considerable number of ships had been assembled against the king’s arrival.” In fact, forty vessels had been hired to transport across the Channel Henry’s assortment of captive rebels and innocent bystanders; amid the crowd could be found the queen with her jailers, the Plantagenet children and daughters-in-law anxiously bewildered, and a number of well-known earls, countesses, and barons dragging their chains. The Channel was rough and the Norman coast lashed by summer storms. The first time Eleanor had watched the foaming breakers and waited for weather in this port, she had been thirty-two years old and held the world in the-palm of her hand. In a storm, she had crossed with her virile young husband to claim a crown, but now, in another storm, she may have seen the Channel as a runway to the tomb. She was an elderly woman whose moment had come and gone.

Storms had not stopped Henry in 1154, and they surely did not deter him now. To the terror of his sailors and captives, he ordered the fleet to sail on the morning of Monday, July 8. Standing on the deck of his ship, he lifted his eyes to the stormy skies and shouted above the gale a message to God, his attitude toward the Almighty always being that of one businessman to another, an equal from whom he expected fair dealing. “Lord, if in my heart I nourish plans which will bring peace to the clergy and the people, if the King of Heaven has decreed in His infinite mercy that my arrival shall mark the return of peace, then may He grant that I come safely to harbour. If He is opposed to my purpose and has decided to punish my kingdom, may I never be allowed to reach its shores.” The fleet rode into Southampton that same evening.

It was high summer in England, but the sun did not shine. Instead, rain and fog shrouded Southampton, and it was cold. Henry had no time to waste on his captives. Declining a proper meal, he wolfed down water and a chunk of bread before he disposed of his excess baggage with a promptness that suggests he had already allotted some thought to the matter. Marguerite and the other young ladies were sent to Devizes, his chained prisoners to Porchester, and the less dangerous to Winchester. But neither in Winchester nor in London nor in Oxford would he incarcerate Eleanor, nor in any site where a rising tide of sympathy and interest in the queen of England might lap at her walls. The queen was immured in the strong tower of Salisbury, not the Salisbury we know today but Old Sarum, where she would have ample time to examine her conscience and reflect upon the error of her perfidy. As for Henry, he felt the need to look into his own conscience. The next morning, he set out on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Three miles from the town, he dismounted and walked the rest of the way barefoot. “His footsteps along the road seemed to be covered with blood and really were so; for his tender feet were being cut by the hard stones.” It was a year since Thomas the martyr had been canonized, more than three years since the crime had taken place. Entering the crypt, Henry prostrated himself before the tomb and then stripped his pilgrim’s smock for the lashes of the bishops, abbots, and monks. “There he remained in prayer before the holy Martyr all that day and night. He neither took food nor went out to relieve nature but, as he had come, so he remained and would not permit a rug or anything else to be laid under him.” At daybreak on Sunday the thirteenth he heard Mass and received a phial of the martyr’s blood. The following Wednesday evening the king, resting at Westminster after his exertions and fasting, was halfway between waking and sleeping when a messenger beat loudly on his chamber door. At that particular time he must have dreaded the approach of any courier, since nearly all reports turned out to be alarming; King William of Scotland was harrying his northern borders, mercenaries of the count of Flanders had already landed in East Anglia, and momentarily he expected to see the Young King himself at the head of an army. Under the circumstances, he braced himself for evil tidings: “Brien, what news do you bring?”

“The King of Scotland is taken and all his barons.”
“Then,” says King Henry, “God be thanked for it,
And St. Thomas Martyr and all God’s saints!”
And the King is so merry that night and so joyful
That he went to the knights and woke them all up:
“Barons, wake up! This has been a good night for you!
Such a thing have I heard as will make you joyful:
Taken is the King of Scotland, so it has been told me for truth.
Just now the news came to me, when I should have been in bed.”

The next morning, the bells rang in every church in London, and in the course of the next two months, Henry quenched the fires of rebellion in England and then on the Continent. On September 29, he met with his rebel sons at Montlouis, between Tours and Amboise, to dictate the terms of peace. Stripping them of independent authority, he gave the Young King two castles in Normandy and an income of £3,750 sterling a year. Richard was allotted two castles in Poitou and half the county’s revenues, while Geoffrey was to have half the income from Constance of Brittany’s marriage portion. His provisions for John, which had so provoked the Young King earlier in the year at Limoges, were now substantially increased, and instead of the three castles originally promised, he was to receive property in England, Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, as well as considerable revenues. “Furthermore, King Henry, the son of the Lord King, and his brothers gave assurance that they would never demand anything more of the Lord King, their father, beyond the determined settlement” and that they would “withdraw neither themselves nor their service from their father.” And so the cubs were pulled back into the fold so successfully that people said it must have been due to the intervention of the Blessed Saint Thomas. The king and his four sons, all very models of filial obedience, kept Christmas court at Argentan, where they feasted on “the meat of four score deer sent to the King beyond the sea.” In victory, Henry had shown himself magnanimous, excusing his sons’ treachery on the grounds of youth and blaming their excesses on troublemakers. His leniency did not, however, extend to his wife.

At Salisbury, the queen dined on disappointed hopes. There is no evidence she was confined to a cell or in any way physically mistreated, but at the same time there is no doubt that she remained very much a prisoner, always kept under strict surveillance by one of the king’s watchdogs. Her pride shredded, her hopes and ambitions utterly destroyed, she who had been mistress of all she surveyed was now estranged from her children and cut off from the world’s commerce, forced to rely on her keepers for news. With her she had a small household—her maid, Amaria, and perhaps a few other familiars—but she seems to have lived a comparatively mean existence. If the pipe rolls record the total extent of the allowances for her maintenance, her income would have permitted only the most spartan of lives. There had been method in Henry’s disposition of her, a cruelty that comes of knowing a person intimately, for he understood that she had not the slightest passion for solitude. On the contrary, she gloried in the converse of people, and of course, she abhorred idleness. In clipping the Eagle’s wings, he had deliberately condemned her to what he believed would be a living death.

Her state of mind at this time was as much a matter of conjecture to the twelfth century as it is now. In Aquitaine, her subjects cried out in vain against the imprisonment of their duchess, but whether their laments reached Salisbury cannot be determined.

Tell me, Eagle with two heads, tell me: where were you when your eaglets, flying from their nest, dared to raise their talons against the king of the North Wind? It was you, we learn, who urged them to rise against their father. That is why you have been plucked from your own country and carried away to an alien land. Your barons have cheated you by their conciliatory words. In the old days, with your taste for luxury and refinement. you enjoyed a royal liberty. You lived richly on your own inheritance, you took pleasure in the pastimes of your women, you delighted in the melodies of the flute and drum. And now, Queen with two crowns, you consume yourself with sorrow, you ravage your heart with tears. Return, O captive, return to your own lands if you can. You may ask yourself: Where is my court? Where are the members of my family? Where are my handmaidens, my counselors? Some have been torn from their lands and condemned to a shameful death; some have been deprived of their sight, others wander exiled in far places. Eagle of the broken alliance, how much longer will you cry out unanswered? The king of the North Wind holds you in captivity. But do not despair; lift your voice like a bugle and it shall reach the ears of your sons. The day will come when they will set you free and you shall come again to dwell in your native land.

But Eleanor’s voice trumpeted no farther than the moat at Salisbury. If she pleaded with Henry for her liberty, his ears were stopped against her words, and even her sons appeared deaf. She had played her dangerous game and lost, and now she must sustain herself with memories. One can imagine that her thoughts might have strayed back to the Île-de-France and the young man with whom she had intrigued on a few sultry August evenings twenty-five years earlier; she had loved him as passionately then as she now detested him. And she must have thought, too, of the children she had been so eager to bear. Her daughters, sensible girls bred for queenship, had never caused her grief: Matilda, prim, solid, always reliable; Eleanor and Joanna, spirited and beautiful. As for her sons, she could not have denied that they had become, in some curious way, thorns in her flesh. The Young King’s enormous charm could not disguise a kind of stupidity in his nature, just as Geoffrey’s sugared tongue could not overcome his craftiness and selfishness; John had the energy and nerve of his father, but in him Henry’s vitality became nervous weakness, his bravado merely underhandedness. Of all her brood it was the thought of Richard that must have warmed her most isolated moments—Richard her love, the child with the greatest spirit, the most cultured, the most intelligent.

As Salisbury the days were long. She must have used every trick to nourish her hope of release before she died, but there was no trick. She could only wait, in apprehension and eagerness, watching the seasons unfurl and die, waiting for news of her children, turning over in her mind her yesterdays, when she had dreamed of an unreal love as sung by the troubadours. So many cansos only half-heard, so many lovely days wasted, so many roads ridden over without turning her head aside to watch the trees and fields, so many goblets of wine drunk hastily, so much of life consumed but never tasted.

In 1175, Eleanor was offered a possible chance of escape. She may have been removed from Henry’s sight but not from his mind; indeed, one of his chief problems was her final disposition. Ironically, his dilemma was the same that had perplexed the king of the Franks some twenty-five years earlier; how to rid himself of the queen without also losing her duchy. Clearly, he had excellent grounds for divorce, because she was more closely related to him than to Louis, but he could also see that divorce might not be the answer. He had no intention of repeating Louis’s mistake, for in setting Eleanor free, he would lose half of his Continental domains at one stroke to her and Richard. Surely it would be madness to place such weapons in the hands of a woman who hated him and a son who had already proved his intransigence. Still, other alternatives might remain that the spineless Louis had not dared to attempt. At the end of October 1175, Henry welcomed to England Cardinal Hugh Pierleoni, who had come on other matters but unexpectedly found himself the recipient of an astounding royal largesse. At Winchester, Henry loaded him with gifts and sweet words; indeed, the amount of silver that passed into the cardinal’s hands suggested a barely concealed bribe. What Henry proposed was a divorce, after which the ex-queen of England should relinquish worldly pursuits and retreat into some honorable establishment for women where she could do no harm. Perhaps, he suggested, the queen might be prevailed upon to retire to Fontevrault, not as an ordinary nun but in the prestigious position of abbess. There in that famous and noble nunnery she might live out her few remaining years in the company of other rich old ladies, leaving him free to form a new alliance.

During that year, plague raged in England “so that on most days seven or eight bodies of the dead were carried out of every church for burial and immediately after this deadly mortality a dreadful famine ensued.” The winter was so severe that snow and ice covered England from Christmas to Candlemas. How tempted Eleanor must have been by the prospect of returning to the southern abbey where she had always felt an unearthly serenity. And in the end, how vehemently she rejected the offer, even, it is said, appealing for aid to the archbishop of Rouen, who, despite his admonitions in 1173, apparently agreed that she had no vocation for the religious life. One can only surmise from this incident that she had not given up hope of eventual release, even though there seemed to be little foundation for such a hope. In truth, she was as much cloistered at Salisbury as she would have been in a cell at Fontevrault.

In the summer of 1176, her daughter Joanna came to Winchester prior to her departure for Sicily, where she was to marry King William. Entries in the pipe rolls suggest that Eleanor was temporarily released from Salisbury, probably at Joanna’s intercession, to spend these last days in England with her daughter and that, moreover, she accompanied Joanna to Southampton. This was the first time that she had seen any of her children in two years. Perhaps due to Joanna’s indignation about her mother’s confinement, after Eleanor returned to Salisbury in the fall, her standard of living gradually began to improve. “For 2 cloaks of scarlet and 2 capes of scarlet and 2 grey furs and 1 embroidered coverlet for the use of the Queen and her servant girl, 28£, 13s. 7d., by the King’s writ.”

While time seemed to stand still for her, life surged on for those at liberty to order their existences as best they could. In 1177, the chroniclers duly reported the doings of Queen Marguerite, who, “being pregnant, went’ to Paris and was delivered of a stillborn son.” And equally momentous events found their way into the records. “In this same year,” noted Hovedon, “on the thirteenth day before the calends of July, it rained a shower of blood for two whole hours in the Isle of Wight, so much so that linen clothes which were hung out upon the hedges were stained just as though they had been dipped in blood.” But of Queen Eleanor there is not so much as a single line. To her contemporaries, it was as if she were dead.

In the end, it was not Henry’s queen who entered a nunnery but his mistress, Rosamond Clifford, with whom he had consoled himself in recent years. After Rosamond died at Godstow, about 1176, Henry took other women into his bed, one of whom must have filled Eleanor with more rage than she had ever felt for the Rose of the World. Alais Capet, the princess who had been promised to Richard at Montmirail and who had been reared in Eleanor’s court, was sixteen in 1176. Although she was certainly of a marriageable age, Henry appeared to have forgotten her betrothal to his son, and after the court at Poitiers had been shuttered, she had been brought to England, where, rumor said, she had become the king’s mistress. Gerald of Wales, an annalist who virtually made a career of chronicling Henry’s vices, said that he consorted openly and shamelessly, first with Rosamond and then, after she had departed from the scene, with his son’s betrothed, whom he intended to make queen of England. So uninhibited was Henry in his relations with Alais that rumors circulated thickly. It was said that Henry planned to disinherit his three eldest sons and name as his heir the only child whose mind had not been poisoned by his mother, and that Alais’s hand would be conferred upon John Lackland. It was also said that, once he had divorced Eleanor, he would disinherit her ravenous eaglets and sire a new batch from his Capetian hostage. Despite the peace of Montlouis and his seeming affection for his sons, he was said to be disgusted with the lot of them. Had he not publicly declared to his bastard son. Geoffrey, “My other sons have proved themselves bastards but you alone are my true and legitimate son?” In any case, by 1177, the stories about the hapless Alais had become so rife that Louis Capet felt compelled to make inquiries, and receiving no satisfaction from Henry, appealed to Pope Alexander to enforce his daughter’s marriage to Richard.

At fifty-nine, Louis was beginning to feel the weight of his years. Wishing to put his affairs in order, he determined to have his son, Philip, now fourteen, anointed and crowned king of France. For the date of the coronation, he chose the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, August 15, 1179, and summoned his vassals to assemble at Reims. Shortly before the appointed day, he and his son set out for Reims in a leisurely fashion, breaking their journey at Compiègne for rest and entertainment. Philip and his young friends eagerly went out to hunt in the forest, but the prince, chasing a boar, became separated and lost his way. Panicked, he spurred his horse this way and that, succeeding only in burying himself deeper in the woods. At dusk, after hours of shouting and weeping, he stumbled into a clearing where a charcoal burner made his home, a rude forest dweller who was no doubt more surprised to see a prince appear before his hovel door than Philip was to find him. Returned to his father, Dieu-Donné fell ill of a fever. Not only was it necessary to cancel the coronation, but the boy’s life was despaired of.

Beside himself with anxiety, Louis slept fitfully, and on three successive nights dreamed of Thomas Becket. Said the martyr, “Our Lord Jesus Christ has sent me so that you may know that if you believe and with a contrite heart go to His servant Thomas of Canterbury, the Martyr, your son will recover from his illness.” Although Louis’s barons warned him of the perils he risked by undertaking a pilgrimage in Plantagenet lands, nothing would shake his resolve. On Wednesday, August 22, “assuming now the name and dress of a pilgrim, he most devoutly visited England, which neither he nor any of his predecessors had ever visited.” Henry met him at Dover, and together the two kings traveled to the cathedral town, where Louis laid on the martyr’s tomb a cup brimming with gold. Four days later, he returned to France to find that Prince Philip had completely recovered. The coronation was rescheduled for All Saint’s Day, November 1, but “King Louis, laboring under old age and a paralytic malady, was unable to attend the coronation; for after he had returned from England and was staying at Saint-Denis, being struck by a sudden chill, he had an attack of paralysis and lost the use of the right side of his body.” On September 18, 1180, in his city of Paris, the most pious and Christian king of the Franks “laid aside the burden of the flesh and his spirit fled to the skies to enter upon its eternal reward with the elected princes.” In perhaps a more impartial obituary, William of Newburgh said, “He was a man of warm devotion to God and of great gentleness to his subjects and of notable reverence for the clergy, but he was rather more simple-minded than is becoming to a prince.”

Eleanor’s duplicity had affected Henry more than he cared to admit. He who could not tolerate having his will flouted or his trust abused had been forced to contend with two major betrayals, and as a result, he had developed an exaggerated suspicion of everyone’s motives. There occurred an almost complete metamorphosis of personality, from the affable, forthright young man whom Eleanor had married to a suspicious, middle-aged tyrant replete with persecution complex, and still later to a dissembler whose promises and oaths were deemed worthless. His imprisonment of Eleanor may have solved one of his personal problems, but four even more agonizing ones remained—his sons who constantly harried him “until he could find no abiding state of happiness or enjoyment of security.” When the rebellion had ended in 1174, Henry promptly resolved to straighten out the Young King, only to find that he had fled in terror to Paris lest he, too, suffer the same fate as his mother. It was not until the spring of 1175 that he came to his father at Bures and fell flat on the ground begging him with tears to receive his homage and allegiance. Finally, promised a larger allowance and assured repeatedly of his father’s love, he agreed to return to England with the king. Ralph of Diceto described the remarkable amity between father and son at this period by saying that “every day at the stated hour for meals they ate at the same table” and at night slept in the same chamber. In his father’s company, he made a progress around the island for the express purpose of learning to administer the kingdom that had the most ordered government in the world; he attended synods and council meetings, received foreign embassies, and destroyed illegal castles. But Henry’s tutoring was lost on the youth, who found the routine of assizes and exchequers irksome. Indolent by temperament, he longed for tournaments and the company of those gallants whose freewheeling existence revolved about tourneying, drinking, and boasting. His father’s insistence that he remain in England and the continual surveillance under which he lived suggest a state imprisonment little freer than his mother’s imprisonment at Salisbury. Determined to escape at all cost, he requested permission to make a Lenten pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela, a ruse that his father saw through immediately. Henry understood all too well that the boy fevered to join his profligate friends on the Continent, and it is a measure of his strong will that he succeeded in detaining the Young King for an entire year. Finally, able to hold him no longer, he gave permission for his son and Marguerite to visit Paris, with the stipulation that after they had paid their respects to Louis, the Young King should travel on to Aquitaine and give Richard a hand in his continuing struggles with the southern barons. In that way, Henry meant to give him useful work, and he further attempted to limit his carousing by allotting him only a modest allowance and assigning one of his trusted men, Adam of Churchdown, to travel with the youth as a “chancellor.”

Upon the Young King’s arrival in the Île-de-France in 1176, he immediately justified the king’s worst fears. Seeking out young men with similar tastes, those very gallants whom Henry had dismissed as undesirables, he spent the summer traveling from tournament to tournament and even persuaded his cousin the count of Flanders to outfit him with arms and horses so that he might tourney in a style appropriate to a king. In the autumn, however, with the end of the tournament season, the Young King slumped again into depression. Having nothing better to do, he drifted into Aquitaine to give Richard the promised aid, but it is clear that he did so with the greatest reluctance. Why should he help Richard to settle the affairs of his duchy when he himself had nothing he could call his own? The most that can be said for him was that he put in a brief appearance at Angoulême, where Richard was conducting a campaign, and then almost immediately departed for Poitiers, where he rallied his old friends from his mother’s court, many of them knights who had sided with him during the rebellion. In the southland, the kingdom of England seemed very far away indeed, and people talked candidly of subjects that were only mentioned in whispers elsewhere. The Young King’s grievances against his father were sympathetically supported, and he found himself an object of great solicitude, if not an actual hero. To Adam of Churchdown, the conversations that he overheard among these chevaliers sounded suspiciously treasonous, perhaps the beginning of a second rebellion, and he dutifully wrote a warning to King Henry. His letters, however, were intercepted by the Young King, who ordered Adam’s hands tied behind his back and the man to be whipped naked through the streets of Poitiers.

For some time the sporting life managed to absorb the Young King’s energies. “Henry the young king,” wrote a chronicler, “spent three years in tournaments and profuse expenditure. Laying aside his royal dignity and assuming the character of a knight, he devoted himself to equestrian exercises and carrying the victory in various encounters, spreading his fame on all side around him.” But in the end, no amount of fame nor diversion could ease his cankerous discontent, nor was his temper improved when he thought of his brother Richard, whose constant warfare to keep his duchy in check left him no time for mock battles. At eighteen, Eleanor’s heir proved a marked contrast to young Henry’s frivolity. He had set about stamping out rebellion in Aquitaine with a grim earnestness that soon won him the hatred of his mother’s vassals and, perhaps, the secret respect of his father. In 1176, he humbled the most persistent troublemakers, taking Limoges and Château-neuf-sur-Charente in the process, and in the following year, with the northern sector of Aquitaine quiet, he marched his army into the south, where he forced the Basques and Navarrese to recognize his authority. In 1179, he captured Geoffrey de Rancon’s supposedly impregnable fortress of Taillebourg and then, to the horror of the local citizenry, leveled it to the ground. Before he was twenty, Richard had already established a reputation as the most gifted military tactician in western Europe, a reputation which only fanned his older brother’s jealousy.

The contrast between the mock king of England and the conquering hero of Aquitaine was not lost on either young Henry or on his contemporaries in the south. The troubadour Bertran de Born was probably reflecting popular opinion when, in a tauntingsirventès, he termed the prince “lord of little land,” and the Young King’s position grew even more intolerable after 1177, when Henry crowned eleven-year-old John Lackland as king of Ireland.

By the end of 1182, Henry had grown desperate. His every attempt to appease his twenty-seven-year-old son had failed, including promises of a more generous allowance, and he was forced to admit that he had lost control of the situation. Frantically casting about for some means of humoring his heir, without, of course, giving him authority or land, he determined to hold a particularly sumptuous Christmas court of the sort that might appeal to a young man who doted on splendid banquets. Choosing the city of Caen as the gathering place, he forbid all local baronial courts in his provinces and invited noblemen and prelates to renew their homage at what the chroniclers would call the most splendid court ever held in Normandy. A crowd of over one thousand arrived to keep the cheer with their overlord that year: Geoffrey with his testy Breton barons; Richard trailing the vassals and troubadours of the absent queen; Matilda and Henry of Saxony, exiled from Germany by the Holy Roman emperor, along with their children and an enormous household; Queen Marguerite, haughty, beautiful, barely on speaking terms with her husband because of his unfounded jealousy of William Marshal, who, he believed, had dared to love his wife. The Young King arrived at Caen in a sullen humor and immediately made himself unpleasant to everyone. For all Henry’s elaborate preparations, the young man ignored the tables groaning with good wines and game and fowl and, throwing venomous glances at Richard, began his usual plaints. Richard, he declared, had erected a castle along the frontier between Poitou and Anjou—but he had had the impudence to build his fortress on the wrong side of the border. His brother, young Henry demanded, must give up this stronghold, which clearly lay outside of his patrimony.

When Henry failed to show any particular concern over Richard’s lone castle, the Young King flew into a temper, renewing his ceaseless pleas for power to match his titles. Beset by devouring jealousies, he was reduced to threats and ultimatums: Unless his father met his demands immediately, he would renounce those absurd empty titles: he would take the cross and go to Jerusalem, never to return; he would, he vowed in a burst of angry tears, take his own life.

Henry demonstrated a remarkable capacity for self-deception when it came to his eldest son. No matter how outrageous the youth’s attempts at blackmail, he viewed him with a merciful eye, and on this occasion, to mollify his distraught son, he called together all three of his boys and asked Richard and Geoffrey to do homage to their older brother for their lands. While Geoffrey expressed willingness, Richard utterly refused even to consider the suggestion, saying that he held Aquitaine, not from his father, but as a gift from his mother. Not only had he been crowned duke with Eleanor’s consent, but three years earlier, she had succumbed to Henry’s pressure and ceded him the duchy; furthermore, he had already done homage for it to the king of France, the lawful overlord of the dukes of Aquitaine. Shaking with cold fury, he went on to bluntly inform his father what he thought of his mother’s imprisonment. As for his older brother, if he wanted land, let him go out and fight for it. With that, Richard turned on his heel and strode out, “leaving nothing behind save threats and defiance.” It is impossible to say which enraged Henry more, his son’s defiance or his bringing up the subject of the queen, but in a passion, he turned to the Young King and gave him permission to “curb Richard’s pride.”

Young Henry, accompanied by Geoffrey, rode into Poitou in early 1183, where he ostentatiously joined those very discontented barons whom Richard had been fighting for the past eight years. Within a few weeks, it was plain to Henry that he had made a serious mistake; the rivalry between his sons had somehow escalated into a full-scale revolt, which now included Philip Augustus, the duke of Burgundy, and the count of Toulouse. Quick to perceive that unless he rescued Richard, Aquitaine would be lost, Henry himself went to Limoges in February to reason with his heir. Arriving before the walls of the city, he was greeted by a shower of arrows, one of them, to his horror, piercing his cloak. That evening young Henry paid a call on his father to explain that the arrow had been an accident, the random shot of a trigger-happy burgher. Nevertheless, nothing about the young man’s manner inspired Henry’s confidence. Dressed in his coat of mail, he refused either to lay aside his arms or to sit down and dine with his father. Eager to be off, he swore that he would persuade the rebel barons to submit to the king, and if he could not, he would leave them to their own devices and rejoin his father. Once back in Limoges, however, he urged the rebels to begin fortifying their city against the king’s attack. When Henry saw them . furiously digging moats and tearing down churches for stones to feed their catapults, he wearily rode up to the city walls a second time to plead with young Henry and Geoffrey. Once again he was greeted with arrows, this time very nearly taking his life; only the sudden rearing of his horse caught the arrow that would have pierced his chest. After this ominous incident, the Young King again came to Henry’s tent with apologies and assurances of his fidelity, this time, as if to dispel suspicion, giving Henry his armor and remaining for several days. While he was keeping the old king occupied, however, Geoffrey, was leading a band of mercenaries on a plundering expedition in the neighborhood, looting monasteries and stealing altar vessels.

The Young King’s behavior at Limoges revolted his contemporaries. “War was in his heart,” observed Walter Map, who went on to term him a parricide who lusted for his father’s death. “Where is your filial affection?” demanded Peter of Blois. “Where is your reverence? Where is the law of nature? Where your fear of God?” It was said that the Young King, at twenty-eight, had fulfilled Merlin’s prophecy of him: “The lynx, penetrating all places, will strive for destruction of his own race.”

While Henry was occupied with the siege of Limoges, a mood of madness seemed to take possession of his son, who fitfully careened about the Limousin like an overgrown adolescent delinquent. Bored with the fighting, he looked for means to enhance his funds, since Henry had cut off his allowance. Toward the end of May 1183, he wandered south with William Marshal and a band of mercenaries, plundering and spreading terror throughout the countryside. In early June, they scaled the rocky heights of Rocamadour, that famous shrine in the Dordogne where pilgrims had long flocked to gaze upon the great iron sword of Roland. Young Henry grew reckless: If his father insisted upon keeping him a starveling, then he would find other means of succor. To the amazement of the pilgrims who had climbed up the steep and narrow steps to the shrine, the Young King and his rowdies looted the altar, stuffed their bags with treasure, and rode off in the burning June heat. Before they had traveled more than a few miles, however, the Young King complained of feeling ill, and they were forced to turn into the village of Martel, where they took lodgings in the house of a burgher, Etienne Fabri. There the Young King was seized by fever and dysentery, that “flux of the bowels” that accounted for so many deaths in the twelfth century. As his condition worsened, a messenger was sent to fetch the king.

Henry’s advisers, remembering the arrows before the walls of Limoges, adamantly opposed any such trip. He should send a physician or money, but he should not expose himself to possible treachery. In the face of his son’s bizarre behavior of late, Henry reluctantly agreed, and the messenger returned to Martel with a precious sapphire ring that the king had inherited from Henry I. On Saturday, June 11, the dying Young King ordered a bed of ashes spread on the floor. Naked, he prostrated himself on the ashes and had bare stones laid at his head and feet. It was late afternoon when he died. Since none of his companions felt eager to face the king, a monk from Grandmont was sent to tell him of the death. He found Henry near Limoges, taking refuge from the afternoon heat in a peasant’s cottage.

“What news have you?” the king asked calmly.

“I am not a bearer of good news,” said the monk.

Dismissing those who had crowded into the hut to hear the latest reports, the king interrogated the monk for every detail of his son’s last days, and then when there was no more to learn, he “threw himself upon the ground and greatly bewailed his son.”

Soon after, Henry sent Thomas Agnellus, the archdeacon of Wells, to inform the queen. Arriving at Salisbury, Agnellus was surprised to learn that Eleanor already knew of her son’s death. Their interview provides one of the few clues to Eleanor’s life in detention, and only now does it become obvious that prison walls did not prevent her from keeping abreast of the world’s news. In all probability she received information from sympathetic jailers and informers, although obviously this was not a fact that she wished to advertise. In a speech that reads as if it had been well rehearsed, she explained to the archdeacon that she had been notified of young Henry’s passing in a dream. He had appeared to her wearing two crowns, one the crown he had worn at his coronation, the other a band of pure light that shone with the incomparable brightness of the Holy Grail. She asked Agnellus, “What other meaning than eternal bliss can be ascribed to a crown with no beginning and no end? And what can such brightness signify if not the wonder of everlasting joy?” Solemnly, tactfully, she sent the archdeacon on his way praising her “great discernment,” “strength and equanimity,” and her clairvoyance.

The Young King’s untimely death placed Eleanor’s preux chevalier, her valorous Richard, as heir to the throne of England, at once upsetting twenty-five years of dynastic planning and causing enormous apprehension for all concerned. Obviously, the Plantagenet inheritance must now be redistributed, but exactly how the king intended to arrange matters was a question that Eleanor must have pondered with some anxiety. She had not long to wait for an answer. Three months after young Henry’s death, the king summoned his three remaining sons to Angers, where he ordered Richard to surrender Aquitaine to his youngest brother and, at the same time, said absolutely nothing about making him heir to young Henry’s patrimony. This unexpected move staggered Eleanor no less than it did Richard. It was clear to her that Henry meant to disinherit her son. What other meaning could she read into his order, except that John, his darling now, was to have not only England, Normandy, Anjou, and Maine but Aquitaine as well? She could not have helped but look upon Henry’s decision as another expression of his hatred for her; he had destroyed her, and now he would destroy the person she loved best. Clearly another bitter power struggle loomed ahead, only this time, Eleanor, a captive, was in no position to fight. At the same time, however, she realized that Richard was an adult capable of waging his own battles. He had left Angers without a word, and after riding back to Poitou, he had sent his father a message. Under no circumstances would he yield his land to anyone so long as he lived. For the time being, then, the matter rested there uneasily.

One of her dead son’s last requests had been that Henry show mercy to the queen. Whether or not as a result of this, Eleanor suddenly found the restrictions upon her begin to slacken. In 1184, she received permission to leave Salisbury and travel through her dower lands, a strange order indeed, for as far as she knew, she no longer possessed any dower lands. Soon, however, she understood that Henry, who never did anything without a reason, was using her as a pawn in his own political games. Soon after young Henry’s death, he had encountered trouble from Philip Augustus, who demanded that the widowed Marguerite’s dower—the Vexin and certain manors in England—be returned to the Franks; Henry had countered by brazenly asserting that these lands had already been bestowed upon the queen, and now, to prove his point, he wished Eleanor to make a tour of “her dower.”

After April 1184, her name begins to figure more frequently in the pipe rolls. Apparently, her household had been considerably enlarged, because there are payments for expenses to her clerk, Jordan. Between Easter and Saint John’s Day—April 1 to June 24—thirty-four pounds fourteen shillings were paid for her allowance. We know that she spent Easter at Thomas Becket’s former manor of Berkhampstead, and then, as if determined to revisit other sites of strong memories, she visited Woodstock; in June, she joined her daughter Matilda and the duke of Saxony at Winchester, where Matilda delivered another child, and in July, the party moved on to Berkhampstead for the remainder of the summer. Reveling in her freedom, Eleanor spent liberally on clothes and wine, and if she was forced to tolerate the presence of one of Henry’s mistresses, one can safely assume that she was long past caring:

“For clothes and hoods and cloaks and for the trimming for 2 capes of samite and for the clothes of the Queen and of Bellebelle, for the King’s use, 55 pounds, 17s.” It is possible that Bellebelle may have been Eleanor’s maid, but if so. she hardly would have been styled “for the King’s use.” Although Henry had released the queen from solitary confinement, there was no question of his accepting her back into his affections or totally restoring her freedom of movement. The rules were made quite clear. She was permitted a limited degree of freedom at his pleasure, but, like Bellebelle and Alais Capet, whom he kept at Winchester, she existed solely for the king’s use, and as his property, he would deploy her as he saw fit. Perhaps to Henry’s surprise, old age had not warped her faculties, and if anything ten years at Salisbury seemed to have instilled in her those feminine traits that she had sorely lacked during her younger years—subservience and reasonability. As he soon discovered, however, there were limits.

On November 30, the court convened at Westminster. It was both a meeting of the king’s council as well as a family reunion. Matilda and her family were there, and after a decade, Eleanor was able to see her sons again. The occasion was not, however, one of unalloyed rejoicing. Shortly, it became clear that both she and the boys had been assigned roles to play, and moreover, they were expected to perform according to Henry’s directions. Ordered to attend a council meeting, she was led to a place of honor, thus signifying to the assembled barons that she had once again taken her legitimate place in the royal family. That made clear, John and Geoffrey, who had spent the autumn burning towns in Poitou, and Richard, who had retaliated by raiding Brittany, were called forward to forgive one another and make peace. These public gestures of reconciliation completed to Henry’s satisfaction, the court moved on to Windsor for Christmas. No expense had been spared to make the holiday special, and the pipe rolls are full of entries recording purchases of wine, spices, wax, cattle, furs, and “entertaining trifles suitable for feasts.” The fragile picture of the harmonious Plantagenets presented at Westminster did not withstand the journey to Windsor, for now Henry asked Eleanor to endorse his new disposition of the empire. She refused. Ten years of imprisonment had not stripped her of stubbornness, nor her dislike of John, a young man who had little to recommend him as far as she was concerned. The conclave broke up in a flurry of indecision and bitter feelings.

The year 1185 opened with Richard’s return to Poitou and Geoffrey’s dispatch to Normandy to assume control of the duchy, an astounding move on Henry’s part and one that suggested to Eleanor that he contemplated making Geoffrey his heir. That winter, Eleanor stayed with Matilda and her family in England, where she watched developments with an anxious eye. The elevation of nineteen-year-old John continued when Henry knighted him in March and sent him off to assume the throne of Ireland. From the day of his landing, he demonstrated his total and utter irresponsibility. Greeted at Waterford by the Irish chieftains, John and his friends had burst into derisive laughter at the sight of the Irish in their long beards and native costumes. Not only had he pulled their beards and mocked them, he snatched lands and castles from English colonists and awarded them to his favorites, in one stroke alienating both natives and colonists before a week had passed. Even the Young King, with all his faults, would never have behaved so stupidly.

Meanwhile, on the Continent, Richard tried to make sense of his father’s puzzling actions. It seemed certain that Henry’s advancement of John and his appointment of Geoffrey as custos of Normandy foreboded his own downfall in one way or another. Actually, he did not really care if Henry passed over him in favor of Geoffrey or John, but the possible loss of Aquitaine, his home, was more than he could bear to consider. Arming his castles, he launched an attack on Geoffrey and, according to Hovedon, took his brother prisoner.

Those who cast their eyes to the future in search of auguries agreed that the world might gird itself for evil days. The previous year, the astrologers had unanimously forecast “slaughter by the sword, shipwrecks, scanty vintage, universal carnage, the fall of mankind and the sudden ruin of the world with mighty winds which shall destroy cities and towns.” Like most visions of holocaust, little of this happened, but in April of 1185, “a mighty earthquake was heard throughout nearly the whole of England, such as had not been heard in that land since the beginning of the world.” Whether Eleanor suffered hardship as a result we do not know, but it was recorded that Lincoln Cathedral was demolished and many houses destroyed. Undeterred by natural disasters, Henry crossed the Channel on the day after the quake to confront his warring sons. Apparently, his initial effort to reduce Richard to a state of obedience proved unsuccessful, because two weeks later, he was forced to devise some stronger means of persuasion. On his orders, Eleanor was brought to Normandy in late April, and shortly after her arrival at Bayeux, “the king immediately ordered his son Richard to give up Poitou, with its appurtenances, without delay to Queen Eleanor because it was her inheritance.” Furthermore, if Richard failed to comply, then Eleanor would be placed at the head of an army to take Poitou away from him by force. Eleanor could only have blinked at this bizarre proposal. Obviously, Henry had no intention of sending her back to that proverbially faithless province with an army. At sixty-two, however, she had grown adept at playing Henry’s games, especially when there was nothing to lose. On her advice, Richard surrendered the province to his mother’s representatives and returned to his father’s court in Normandy. “And then,” says a chronicler, “he remained with his father like a tamed son.”

Eleanor remained on the Continent until the spring of 1186. The restoration of her queenly dignity still extremely precarious, she appears to have emulated the obedience she advised Richard to follow. Docile, she traveled with the king, keeping her eyes and ears open but her lips closed. From her vantage point, she had ample opportunity to form her own conclusions about many subjects, and one of these would surely have been the new king of the Franks. It was apparent that the prince for whom Louis had waited nearly three decades owed nothing to his father; no one would ever call Dieu-Donné “more simple-minded than is becoming to a prince.” Even at fifteen, when he had assumed the throne, he had worn his toughness like an ominous challenge to the Plantagenets. He had none of the charisma, none of the humor and grace, that marked even the least of Eleanor’s sons. In adolescence he had been ill-kempt, nervous, and subject to sickly fears and hallucinations; his intellectual gifts were modest—he cared so little for books that he failed to learn Latin—but, nevertheless, he owned a kind of keen practical intelligence. At twenty, he was clever, humorless, dogmatic, and coldly calculating. Obsessed by the dream of destroying Plantagenet rule on the Continent, he had already discovered that his most powerful allies against Henry Plantagenet were Henry’s own sons. “I wonder,” he had once mused idly to a courtier, “if it might ever please God to grant that I, or some heir of mine, should restore the kingdom to what it was in Charlemagne’s time?”

Such daydreams made Eleanor nervous. Although she could find little to like or trust about the bloodless Philip, it was apparent that her sons did not feel the same way. The Young King had preferred to spend his time in Paris, and now Geoffrey was following in his footsteps. During the year that Eleanor stayed on the Continent, Geoffrey lived with Philip Augustus at the Cite Palace, as close, some said, as a blood brother. Dissatisfied with his inheritance of Brittany, he stood now on this side of the Franco-Norman border, now on that, wavering between loyalty to his father and loyalty to Philip, who had made him seneschal of France. William of Newburgh claimed that “while engaged in active service with the King of France, he made great efforts to annoy his father.” The conspiracy they were hatching—an invasion of Normandy —Eleanor could only guess at. Leaving Geoffrey to his scheming, she returned to England with Henry on April 27, 1186. Three months later, on August 19, Geoffrey and his horse were thrown to the ground in a tournament at Paris. When he refused to yield to the knights who had attacked him, “he was so trodden by the hoofs of the horses and so severely shaken by the blows that he shortly finished life.” His body was laid on the high altar of Notre Dame, and “there he was buried with but few regrets from his father, to whom he had been an unfaithful son, but with sore grief to the French.” Overcome, Philip Augustus had to be forcibly restrained from throwing himself into the tomb, and the Countess Marie of Champagne, who was present at the requiem, demonstrated her abiding affection for her half brother by establishing a Mass for the repose of his soul.

Of the five male children Eleanor had born to her second husband with such relief and pride, only two remained.

In the autumn of 1187 a wave of consternation rippled throughout Europe. Every appalling portent uttered by the astrologers suddenly seemed to be materializing, not in the local spots where most had expected them but far away, in Outremer: Saladin, the most terrible Saracen of all, had wrenched Jerusalem from Christian hands; the citizens had been massacred and the king of Jerusalem taken captive; and, worst of all, the True Cross and the tomb of Christ had fallen into the hands of “infidel dogs.” The news had not been entirely unexpected by Eleanor, for in early 1185, Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, had visited England to warn of approaching disaster and to beg Henry to defend the Holy Land as king of Jerusalem. At the time, Henry had refused to even consider such a notion. Crusades were for the young and romantic, and instead, he had offered Heraclius fifty thousand marks, an offer that the patriarch had literally spat upon with contempt. Now the fever for crusading that had possessed Eleanor and Louis in the 1150s began to envelop the conscience of Christendom once more. The fall of Edessa, however, was as nothing compared to the idea of Jerusalem itself in the hands of Saladin. Young gallants in every castle and village square talked about taking the cross; King William of Sicily, Joanna Plantagenet’s husband, put on sackcloth and retired to mourn; Pope Urban III died, from grief some said. And Richard Plantagenet, receiving the news late one afternoon in early November, took the cross the next morning near Tours.

When Henry heard of his son’s action, he responded with a grief he had shown only upon the deaths of Becket and the Young King; he withdrew to his chamber and suspended all business for four days. At fifty-four, surely an age at which a man might expect peace, crises threatened him on every side. After siring a fine brood of boys, he was left with an eldest son whom he disliked, a boy as obstinate and headstrong as his wife; but even though he privately accepted Richard as his heir, he would not give him the pleasure of recognizing him as such publicly. For how much trouble had he not reaped by prematurely declaring his intention to the Young King? He had meant to discipline Richard by keeping him uncertain, but now the boy had foolishly run off and taken the cross. Not only was there Richard with whom he must contend but Philip Augustus with his embarrassing questions as well. How many times had he not met the Capetian boy under the elm at Gisors only to hear him complain of his half sisters Marguerite and Alais and their dowers? Why, the young Capetian asked repeatedly, was Alais still a maiden at the age of twenty-seven? When would her marriage to Richard take place? Can a man under suspicion of dishonoring a woman tell her kin that they lie, especially when they are not lying? Loath to give up his mistress, he had promised that the girl would be married soon, without of course committing himself to a definite date. Alais and the custody of the Vexin, these were needles with which Philip Augustus regularly prodded him.

On January 22, 1188, Henry and Philip drew up their retinues under the elm once more. They had scarcely settled down to business, those wearying topics of Alais and the Vexin, when the archbishop of Tyre arrived, having lately traveled across the Mediterranean and over the Alps for the express purpose of stirring Europe to action. By chance he found his way to the elm of Gisors, and so powerful were his exhortations that within a day both Henry and Philip Augustus had taken the cross. It was, people said, a miracle. To others, Eleanor perhaps, Henry’s sudden reversal suggested less lofty motives. A Crusade would, at the very least, distract Philip from his perennial harping about Alais; it would rid Henry of his two main irritants, his son and Louis Capet’s son; and in the end, there might be a way of wriggling out of his Crusader’s vow before the expedition set out, some fifteen months hence.

Back in England in 1188, Henry abruptly sent Eleanor into close confinement again at either Winchester or Salisbury while he solaced himself with Alais Capet and tried to forget Philip’s persistent attempts to harass him. By July, however, it was clear that Philip could be restrained by no other means than force. Despite Henry’s age, corpulence, and increasing ill health, he resolved to tolerate the impudent king of the Franks no longer, even blaspheming before his horrified prelates, “Why should I worship Christ? Why should I deign to honour Him who takes my earthly honour and allows me to be ignominiously confounded by a mere boy?” On August 16, he met with the “mere boy” under the Gisors elm, and for three days listened to Philip’s demands for the retrocession of the Vexin and the marriage of his aging sister. Henry, sitting in the shade, hardly bothered to give his attention. In his opinion, the Norman Vexin rightfully belonged to him. To treat it as the dower of a Capetian bride was wholly beside the point. To Philip, however, the Vexin and Alais were merely proofs of Henry’s bad faith. At some undetermined point in the negotiations, the Franks, who had been sweltering on the sunny side of the elm, suddenly rushed at Henry’s entourage with drawn swords, sending the English to the shelter of the nearby castle. Infuriated, Philip ordered the elm cut down so that no parley might ever take place there again with the treacherous Plantagenets. Seeing the mutilated stump, Henry calmly declared war, but although subsequently he plunged into France to ravage a few castles near Mantes, in truth he had no appetite for fighting.

During the winter of 1188-89, Henry, ill and depressed, stayed at Le Mans in the castle where he had been born. He had developed an anal fistula, and by March it had grown badly abcessed. With him were his illegitimate son, Geoffrey, William Marshal, and perhaps, John. Richard he preferred not to think about. When he had last met with Philip in November, he had been shocked to see Richard among the retinue of the Capetian king. In the hearing of the courtiers, Richard had asked Henry to recognize him as his heir. Henry had refused. “Now,” cried Richard, “at last I believe what heretofore has seemed incredible!” And throwing himself on his knees before Dieu-Donné, he had done homage for all the lands to which he claimed inheritance and had sworn fealty to him as his liege man. Henry’s thirty-one-year-old son had ridden away with Philip, and soon curious reports were drifting back to Le Mans: The Capetian so honored his son that every day they ate from the same dish and at night they slept in the same bed. Such brotherhood was too remarkable not to be widely commented upon; gossip was rife, and people whispered of the sin of Sodom. Henry, ignoring the sexual innuendoes, mourned because he wanted his son back.

After a series of fruitless conferences with Philip in the spring of 1189. Henry returned to Le Mans, even though his bishops and barons warned him that Philip and Richard were leading an army through Maine, taking every castle in their path. It was not until Sunday, June 11, when Philip’s army appeared before the walls of Le Mans, that he was forced to acknowledge the danger. To avoid a battle, Henry ordered one of the suburbs set afire in the hope that he could drive the French away. Suddenly, however, the wind changed, and flames began to suck the walls of the city. In the blaze that followed, the French poured through the gates, while Henry had no choice but to rally his seven hundred knights and flee. On a hill two miles north of the city, he drew rein and turned for a last look at the inferno raging in his birthplace. The bitterness poured out. “O God,” he cried, “Thou hast vilely taken away the city I loved best on earth, the city where I was born and bred, the city where my father is buried. I will pay Thee back as best I can. I will rob Thee of the thing Thou lovest best in me, my soul!” According to Gerald of Wales, he said a great deal more, which the chronicler thought safer not to record.

With Philip and Richard hard on his heels, he pressed furiously north, while William Marshal covered his retreat. Out of a cloud of dust came the vanguard of the French army, with Richard in the lead. Marshal turned and leveled his lance.

“By God’s legs, Marshal,” shouted Richard in his only recorded instance of fear, “do not kill me. I wear no hauberk.”

“May the Devil kill you,” cried Marshal, “for I will not.” With that, he plunged his lance into Richard’s horse.

The day was extremely hot, the road narrow, the retreat confused, and many of Henry’s knights died from heat and fatigue or fell prostrate along the roadside. His advisers counseled him to strike northward to the heart of Normandy, where he could find reinforcements for his army or send to England for help. Although he agreed to send his troops on to Alencon, he himself turned south into Anjou. For two weeks he traversed the backroads that he knew so well, twisting and turning over nearly two hundred miles of trails, somehow evading Philip’s army, which had overrun the province. The killing ride combined with the heat opened his wound, and by the time he reached his great fortress of Chinon, the poison in his blood had virtually robbed him of the use of his legs, and he could neither sit nor stand comfortably. Aware that the roads were infested with Franks, that castle after castle had fallen to them, he clung feebly to Geoffrey and William Marshal. Somehow, in the melee, he had lost his youngest son. Where was John?

At dawn on the morning of Monday, July 3, Philip’s soldiers set up their scaling ladders against the walls of Tours, and by midmorning, the city had fallen. The following day, he summoned Henry to a conference at Ballan, a few miles southwest of the captured city. Racked by intense pain, Henry nevertheless set out from Chinon with William Marshal and a small party of knights to meet his victorious enemy. When they reached the house of the Knights Templar in Ballan, he was so exhausted that he fell upon a cot. “Marshal, sweet gentle sir,” Henry said, “a cruel pain has seized my toes and feet and is piercing my legs. My whole body is on fire.” Some of his knights rode off to the conference site to inform Philip that the king was ill, but Richard warned that his father was feigning; no doubt he had another trick up his sleeve. Stung when he learned of his son’s taunt, Henry made a supreme effort to rise and ordered his knights to seat him on his horse.

It was a clear sultry day, the sky cloudless and the air still. As Henry advanced toward Philip and Richard, a clap of thunder was heard and then another. At the sight of Henry’s ashen face, Philip, moved to pity, hurriedly ordered a cloak to be folded and placed on the ground so that Henry might sit. He had not come to sit, Henry replied, but to learn the price he must pay for peace. Remaining on his horse, his men holding him upright, he listened as the humiliating terms were read. He was to do homage to the king of France for all his Continental possessions. He was to place himself wholly at Philip’s will and pay an indemnity of twenty thousand marks. He must give up Alais Capet so that Richard might marry her on his return from Jerusalem. He must agree to Richard receiving the fealty of his father’s subjects on both sides of the sea as lawful heir to the Plantagenet lands. As a pledge of his good faith, he must surrender three major castles in Anjou or the Vexin, and to prevent him from taking revenge on any of his barons who had deserted to the Frankish camp, it was stipulated that they would not return to the king’s service until a month before the start of the Crusade.

Rolls of thunder rent the afternoon sky as Henry murmured his assent and motioned his knights for departure. Philip stopped him. He must give his son the kiss of peace. As Richard advanced for the embrace, Henry drew back and whispered fiercely, “God grant that I may not die until I have had a fitting revenge on you.”

An ailing lion savaged by jackals, he was carried back to Chinon on a litter, cursing the day he was born and calling down Heaven’s wrath on his son. In his fortress high above the Vienne, physicians were summoned, but the king, groaning on his couch, lay far beyond the reach of their potions. He had left behind one of his men, Roger Malchael, to secure from Philip a list of those who had deserted him and who were to be exempt from punishment. When Roger returned with the parchment and began to read, his voice suddenly failed. “Sire, may Jesus Christ help me!” he exclaimed. “The first name written here is Count John, your son.”

The king gave an anguished cry. “Is it true that John, my heart, John whom I loved more than all my sons and for whose sake I have suffered all these evils, has forsaken me?” Turning his face to the wall, he motioned Roger away. “Say no more. Now let the rest go as it will. I care no more for myself nor for aught in this world.”

The will to live had faded. He lapsed into delirium, sometimes appearing to sleep, occasionally breaking into wild moans of grief and pain. His son Geoffrey cradled his head and fanned away the flies. In the final hours, Henry was heard to cry over and over, “Shame, shame on a vanquished king.” Crying shame, he died on Thursday, the sixth of July, 1189, in the thirty-fifth year of his reign.

Because servants had ransacked the corpse for clothes and jewels, his friends had difficulty laying out the king’s body properly, and they collected makeshift trappings from wherever they could: a ring for his finger, an ersatz scepter for his hand, and for his crown a band of tattered gold embroidery donated by an obliging woman. The next morning, his body was borne on the shoulders of his few remaining faithful barons, down from the castle on the rock of Chinon, across a viaduct above the swampy meadows, and then northward along the left bank of the Vienne to the abbey church of Fontevrault, where the veiled sisters gathered to keep watch over the bier. William Marshal had sent word to Richard, but not until nightfall did he finally appear, slipping quietly into the church to stand and gaze down at his father. “One could not tell from his expression whether he felt joy or sorrow, grief, anger, or satisfaction.” Then he knelt to pray, remaining on his knees “scarcely longer than the space of a Paternoster.” At that moment, “blood began to flow from the dead king’s nostrils and ceased not so long as his son remained there.” It was, a chronicler said, “as if his spirit were moved with indignation,” the fiery king still venting his famous Angevin temper from beyond God’s other door.

In July of 1189, Eleanor of Aquitaine was sixty-seven years old. She had been her husband’s prisoner for sixteen years.