When William Marshal arrived at Winchester in mid-July with instructions to unlock Eleanor’s prison gates, he found the lady already at liberty, no one having dared detain her a single hour after news of the king’s death had reached England. To William’s astonishment, the sixty-seven-year-old woman advanced to greet him with all the grace and civility he remembered from her court in Poitiers. Even though the years that should have been filled with contentment and enjoyment of the honors due great queens had been stolen from her, she had somehow managed to preserve herself, physically as well as mentally. If Marshal had anticipated a frail, doddering relic warped with bitterness and grief, he did not find it. It seemed as if she had used her enforced tranquility to purge her spirit of imprudence and self-indulgence, to broaden her understanding of politics and sharpen her instincts about the affairs of humankind. For sixteen years she had looked deeply into her soul to glean eternal truths, and now that her hour of liberation had come, she was ready.
William carried with him letters from Richard giving his mother full command of the realm until he had settled his affairs in Normandy and would be able to join her. But Eleanor, perhaps using that clairvoyance credited her by the archdeacon of Wells, had already taken the first steps toward assumption of the regency, and to Winchester subjects were flocking, eager to pay homage at the court of “Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England.” After Marshal’s arrival, she immediately gathered up her household and set off for London, where she convened her court at Westminster and summoned the barons and prelates of the realm to make their oaths of allegiance to the new king. All the while, she evidently felt that this act was not sufficient to secure for her son the love of the English. Although born in Oxford, he had never considered his birthplace any more than an easily rectified accident. Since childhood, he had made only brief visits to the island; he neither spoke English nor did he have more than a vague familiarity with the terrain of the kingdom. Aquitaine was his home, and from infancy Eleanor had been instrumental in directing her heir’s eyes away from the island kingdom, the feudal prerogative of her eldest son, and toward her own provinces, where one day he would be master. Circumstances having overturned a lifetime of careful planning, she now saw that the situation must be remedied as quickly as possible. At this late date there was, obviously, little that she might do to instill in her son a belated affection for England, but she could do something to promote the island’s enthusiasm for the foreigner whom they called “Richard the Poitevin.”
With a sagacity that recalls her introduction of Richard to her southern vassals in the late sixties, she abandoned London after a few days in favor of a tour of England, “moving her royal court from city to city and from castle to castle, just as she thought proper.” There is no doubt that the sight of the Eagle in her new incarnation helped to reassure the English and, to a great extent, dulled the memories of those who a few weeks earlier had been shaking their heads in alarm over the unnatural conduct of King Henry’s disobedient son. As Eleanor well knew, it would take more than a royal chevauchée to blot out fifteen years of family brawling and implant in her subjects’ minds the idea that a new reign was beginning. In a frank appeal for popularity, she sent messengers to every county in England ordering that all captives be liberated from prison because “she had learnt by experience that imprisonment is distasteful to mankind and that it is a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be liberated therefrom.” Opening the dungeons “for the good of King Henry’s soul,” surely a barely veiled sarcasm, she issued a general pardon to all those who had trespassed against Henry’s forest laws, who had been imprisoned “by the will of the king or his justiciar,” and to those who had been jailed for a half dozen other reasons, the principal condition of release being a promise to support the new government in preserving the peace. Within days, the smallest village in the realm teemed with liberated jailbirds singing the praises of the liberal Richard Plantagenet. Only William of Newburgh had an acid word to say about this: “At that time the gaols were crowded with criminals awaiting trial or punishment but through Richard’s clemency these pests came forth from prison, perhaps to become bolder thieves in the future.”
But Eleanor’s largesse extended beyond the kingdom’s malefactors. Henry had been in the habit of stabling his horses in abbeys, the better to undertake his lightning dashes around the country, but a practice that caused no little inconvenience and expense to the chapters; Eleanor promptly relieved the clergy of this burden. She also made plans to introduce a new standard coinage that would be valid anywhere in England, as well as a series of uniform weights and measures for corn, liquids, and lengths of cloth. Roger of Wendover records that “she arranged matters in the kingdom according to her own pleasure and nobles were instructed to obey her in every respect.” In these summer days, the chronicler adds, was fulfilled the prophecy of Merlin, “The Eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third nesting.”
In a few short weeks, so thoroughly did Eleanor prepare the ground that when Richard dropped anchor at Portsmouth on August 13, his previous image as a parricide was quite forgotten in a tide of popular goodwill. In the midst of her journeying, Eleanor had not neglected preparations for his coronation. No doubt remembering those hectic days of December 1154 before her own hasty coronation, she determined to make Richard’s an occasion the English would never forget. It was significant that, on Eleanor’s advice, he was not crowned immediately. There was no need for haste; unlike every other king of England since the Norman Conquest, he had neither enemies nor rivals, and thanks to his mother’s proclamations, he had made a host of new friends. So complete was his security that the next two weeks were spent in a leisurely progress, marked at every stop by scenes of rejoicing and cheering. Briefly, Richard and Eleanor stopped at Salisbury; at Marlborough to witness the wedding of John to Isabelle of Gloucester; at Windsor, where they greeted Richard’s half brother, Geoffrey. On September 1, the royal party made a splendid entry into London, where, in Richard’s honor, the streets had been cleaned and spread with fresh rushes and the house fronts festooned with tapestries and blossoms. The crowning was set for Sunday, September 3, an unlucky day according to the calendar, but Eleanor could not be bothered with superstition. With her superb sense of pageantry, she had devised a ceremony not easily forgotten, and in fact, the coronation of Richard Plantagenet would establish the procedure, still in use today, for crowning a monarch of England. Through the nave of Westminster Abbey wound the royal procession: the taper bearers and censers, the abbots and bishops, the officials bearing Richard’s spurs, scepters, sword, bonnet, and royal vestments. And then came the tall figure of Richard himself, walking under a canopy of silk and and looking like a young god. At the high altar he took three formal oaths, swearing that he would honor the Church and its decrees, grant justice to his subjects, and keep the laws and customs of the kingdom. After he had removed his robes and was dressed in the royal vestments. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury anointed him with the sacred oils and then lifted the crown from the altar and placed it upon his head. With a golden scepter in each hand and the crown on his head, the new king was led to the throne, and the abbey was filled with the sound of the Te Deum. Richard, duke of Aquitaine, had become Richard I of England. Three days of festivities followed, each state banquet as decorous as it was lavish, and the guests “feasted so splendidly that the wine flowed along the pavement and walls of the palace.”
Eleanor had done her best to personally inaugurate her son’s reign with memorable splendor, but despite her exertions to ingratiate her son with his subjects, she could not disguise the fact that Richard regarded the island as little more than a milk cow for the sustenance of his most important concern, the Crusade to rescue Jerusalem. His dilemma was clear. He had committed himself to a military expedition that would require enormous sums of money; at the same time, the royal treasury at Winchester, which had been quickly canvassed the moment he had arrived, proved to be virtually empty, and after the Saladin tithe that Henry had levied before his death, the pockets of the new king’s subjects were equally empty. Unfortunately. Henry’s levy for the Crusade had already been handed over to the Templars. Now. perhaps to Eleanor’s astonishment, her son demonstrated an ingenious talent for extracting money where none seemingly existed. Two days after the coronation feasts had ended, he put up for sale everything that he owned—castles, towns, manors, lordships, public offices, favors of all kinds. Every sheriff in England found himself removed from office until such time as he could redeem his position with hard cash. William Longchamp, one of Richard’s favorite attendants, paid three thousand pounds for the office of chancellor. Cities discovered that they might obtain new and more liberal charters in return for sizable payments. Monasteries whose privileges were abruptly revoked were able to buy them back for a consideration. When Abbot Samson of Bury Saint Edmunds offered five hundred marks, the assessed value, for the royal manor of Mildenhall, Richard had the temerity to reply, “My Lord Abbot, the amount you offer is absurd. Either you shall give me a thousand marks or you shall not have the manor.” The chronicler goes on to note that Samson also paid Eleanor her queen’s gold in the form of a golden cup worth one hundred marks, but that she returned the cup “on behalf of the soul of her Lord King Henry.” Eleanor’s attempts to ameliorate the effects of the great national auction did not prevent the entire business from degenerating into a most undignified and jocular spectacle. Suddenly nearly everything in the kingdom could be had, if the price was right, and even those who had taken Crusader’s vows were able to find release. The king, people said, was most obliging in relieving all those whose money had been a burden, and Richard himself joked, “I would sell London itself if I could find a buyer.”
Once the money began flowing in at a reassuring rate, Richard departed for the Continent; Eleanor, however, remained behind in a state of uneasiness. The popularity she had so energetically drummed up for him was already wearing thin as many dismayed subjects, reviewing objectively the new king’s actions during the first four months of his reign, declared that he must be unbalanced. Contrary to their expectation that he would be a more liberal sovereign than his father, he had multiplied their taxes until the kingdom had been squeezed dry, and he had recklessly overturned Henry’s government by firing experienced officials and giving their jobs to the highest bidders. No amount of public relations on Eleanor’s part could stifle these denunciations, nor could she scotch the persistent rumor that Richard never intended to return. How did it happen that a king would sell his income-producing property? It was said that he planned to turn over the kingdom to John and return to Aquitaine. It was said that he would mount the throne of Jerusalem. And it was said that he suffered from some secret malady and would never live through the Crusade. His arrangements for the administration of England during his absence struck many as dubious, and even Eleanor, who could find little fault with her son, would have recognized that he had inherited little of her political acumen and none of Henry’s knack for judging people’s characters. As regents, he had appointed two fairly sober and experienced men: William de Mandeville, a trusted friend of his father’s; and Bishop Hugh of Durham, a kinsman of the royal house and a man long experienced in politics, who nevertheless had been compelled to buy his appointment for ten thousand pounds. Unfortunately, de Mandeville died that autumn, and in his place Richard had substituted his chancellor, William Longchamp, a Norman making his first visit to England. Although Gerald of Wales’s description makes Longchamp seem like a repulsive, misshapen dwarf, no amount of tact could disguise his physical infirmities. He was short, lame, and unprepossessing; he spoke no English and, further, had an aversion to the country. On the positive side, he was unscrupulous in defending his master’s interests. Between the two regents, Richard left his mother as a balance wheel. Although some chroniclers and even historians of later periods have claimed that Eleanor was regent, this does not seem to have been the case. The most that can be said is that even though Richard gave her no formal appointment, he did regard her as an unofficial super-regent with full power to step in whenever circumstances warranted. Totally preoccupied with preparations for the Crusade, he must have felt that his mother, the most experienced sovereign in Europe, would guard his realm if the appointed officials failed in their duties.
In December, Richard kept his Christmas court in reasonable state at Bures in Normandy, but the minstrels, in whom he normally reveled, were missing. The talk was of ships and arbalests and the latest in military gadgetry. Having cut his teeth on Eleanor’s stories of the disastrous Second Crusade, he was determined to avoid the errors of Louis Capet, whom he had come to regard as an idiot. He would make no such stupid mistake as bringing his army overland through enemy territory, planning instead to travel to the Holy Land by sea. Already along the coast of England, the great fleet was being readied, one hundred ships and fourteen busses, “vessels of vast use, wonderful speed, and great strength. The lead ship had three rudders, thirteen anchors, thirty oars, two sails and triple ropes of every kind; moveover it had everything that a ship can want.” On board would be loaded the wealth of England translated into gold and silver, arms of all sorts, supplies of bacon, cheese, wine, flour, pepper, biscuits, wax, spiced meats, and syrups. No pilgrims or Amazons, no camp followers or troubadours, found their way into the ranks of Richard’s army. The Third Crusade, a purely military expedition, would be governed by strict rules of conduct. “Whoever shall kill a man on ship-board,” the king wrote, “shall be bound to the dead man and thrown into the sea.... If anyone shall be convicted of having drawn a knife, he shall lose his hand.... If any man shall curse, swear, or revile his fellows, he shall pay an ounce of silver for each offence.”
In February 1190, Eleanor left behind the fog and darkness of the English winter and crossed to the Continent as a free woman for the first time in seventeen years. Her memory, stretching back nearly seven decades, now enabled her to sort the chaff from the wheat. The crusading fervor that had enveloped Europe in a white heat of religious emotion lacked the power to rouse her, and with a cynicism reminiscent of her late husband’s, she saw the rescue of the Holy Land as a distraction from the important business of the Plantagenets. Let those who had nothing better to do fritter away their energies in Outremer; the real concern, as she saw it, was not Saladin but the preservation of the house of Plantagenet and especially the rock on which it had been built, England. In those months of early 1190, she detected a host of dangers threatening her house, both within and without. Perhaps at her insistence, a family council was held at Nonancourt in March to clarify the king’s arrangements for England and to weatherproof the kingdom during his absence. Present at the meeting were her youngest son and Henry’s bastard, Geoffrey, now archbishop of York, both of whom Richard required to take an oath that they would stay out of England for three years. His objective was fairly clear: to prevent two potential troublemakers from encroaching upon his royal prerogatives and to leave the regents a free hand in conducting the affairs of the kingdom. Eleanor did not, evidently, wholly agree with this policy, because soon afterward, she prevailed upon Richard to allow John’s return, no doubt believing this the lesser of two evils.
To judge from the charters she signed that spring and early summer, the queen resided in Anjou and Normandy. During this time, Richard made a trip to Aquitaine. but Eleanor, curiously, did not accompany him, nor did she visit her homeland on her own, the betrayals of 1173 possibly having left an unconscious residue of distaste for the land of her forebears. Despite her cynicism for the Crusade, she must have felt a pride in her warrior son that made up for all the years of imprisonment and struggle on his behalf. Already Richard Plantagenet was being extolled as the hero of the century, a prince to whom no amount of praise could do adequate justice. His contemporaries, unable to compare him to any great personage of their own time, looked to the pantheon of heroes from the past; he-had, they vowed, the valor of Alexander and Roland, the eloquence of Nestor, the prudence of Ulysses. “But why need we expend labour extolling so great a man? He needs no superfluous commendation. He was superior to all others.”
The Third Crusade was not, of course, a project of Richard alone—the leadership was to be shared with Philip Augustus—but even before it departed, the Capetian had been shoved into the background. When the crusading host convened at Vézelay in the first days of July, it was Richard to whom the knights flocked for information and counsel, it was Richard who looked like a god in his mantle spangled with silver crescents and his cap of scarlet and gold, his Spanish stallion equipped with a gorgeous inlaid saddle and a bridle set with precious stones. Already people called him a lion, and perhaps on that field in Burgundy many remembered Bertran de Born’s waspish sirventès, “Tell Sir Richard from me that he is a lion and King Philip seems to me a lamb.”
Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that by the time the Crusade set off on July 4—Richard bound for Marseille to meet his fleet, Philip heading over the Alps to Genoa—the king of the Franks had fallen into a bad humor. In recent months, he had grown increasingly hostile to Richard, a phenomenon that so puzzled their contemporaries that some put it down to the work of the devil. Bedfellows only a year earlier, they now sniped and snarled, their great affection failing to survive Henry’s death. To Richard’s dismay, Philip had insisted upon renewing his tiresome harangues about his half sister Alais. Now that Henry was dead, there was, of course, no reason for delay, and yet Richard seemed no more eager for the wedding than his father had been. A few weeks before departure, Philip had issued an ultimatum: Either Richard must marry Alais immediately or return her to her kin, along with her dower. Richard, however, proved as slippery as Henry in the matter of Alais. Since women were forbidden to join the Crusade, he stalled Philip by promising that the marriage would take place on his return from the Holy Land. And with this, Philip had to be content.
Not without cause did Eleanor despise Alais Capet. When Louis’s nine-year-old orphaned daughter had arrived at Poitiers in 1169, Eleanor had treated her as one of her own children, even going out of her way to love the child and polish her as a fit partner for her special son. Alais had been thirteen when Henry brought her, along with Eleanor and his other captives, to England in the summer of 1174, and somehow, soon after, he had seduced the girl. Eleanor did not know how that unnatural relationship started, but it affected her more deeply than Rosamond Clifford or any of Henry’s other women. Even though her husband had made his court a brothel after she had left him, Eleanor could excuse the other women who shared his bed. Lowborn, they could be charitably forgiven for responding to the overtures of a mighty king. But apparently she could not excuse a royal princess. In her eyes, Alais must have willed the affair, and for that, Eleanor could never forgive her. She knew, too, that Alais had borne Henry a child, although it did not survive. For years, Alais must have eaten at her like a cankerworm, because one of her first acts after Henry’s death had been to order her imprisonment. That a woman who had opened the dungeons of England because she knew the miseries of confinement firsthand would have decreed that selfsame fate for Alais Capet is an excellent measure of the intensity of her feelings.
The cries of Philip Augustus for Richard’s marriage to Alais affected the queen as little as the birds chirping in the trees. As she knew and as she had made Richard understand, the shopworn Alais Capet was no longer marriageable, at least not to the king of England. Eleanor was not above advising Richard to lie when it was necessary, and so Philip had been pacified with promises of Alais’s marriage at the conclusion of the Crusade. In the meantime, Eleanor determined to take the matter into her own hands. Her greatest anxiety since Henry’s death was the question of the succession. Of the five sons she had borne, only two remained, lion-hearted Richard and light-minded John, and the insecurity resulting from that unalterable fact must have been overwhelming. At the age of thirty-two, Richard still had not wed; he had no direct heirs, and if he should perish in the Holy Land, what would become of the Plantagenet empire?
There were three possible aspirants to the crown, none of them acceptable to Eleanor: her grandson Arthur, a child born posthumously to Geoffrey, was only three years old, but both the boy and his mother, Constance, were loathed by the Plantagenets. The second possibility was Henry’s illegitimate son, Geoffrey. Eleanor distrusted him, for despite his bastardy, she saw him as a possible pretender, and perhaps she had taken undue alarm over a report that he had placed a golden bowl on his head and called out in jest: “Is not this skull fit to wear a crown?” In order to discourage Geoffrey from any further thoughts in this direction, Eleanor reluctantly considered Henry’s deathbed wish that his son become archbishop of York. Geoffrey, hotheaded and quarrelsome, was noted for neither learning nor piety and, as far as Eleanor was concerned, totally unqualified for the position of archbishop. Nevertheless, she decided to support his cause, because the taking of holy orders would render him ineligible for further mischief. The third candidate for the throne was her youngest son, a strange and self-centered boy in whom she had no confidence whatsoever. In fact, the idea of John on the throne of England was a possibility not to be contemplated without crying aloud. In view of these distressing alternatives, Eleanor determined that Richard must marry quickly and produce heirs of his own. Quite apart from her wish to secure the succession, there was another special reason for her great concern over Richard’s marriage. Although he had always been close to her and even though he had been reared in a feminine court where women were to be respected, he did not like the female sex. Not only was he averse to marrying Alais because she had been his father’s mistress, he objected to marrying any woman. It would be interesting to know how this knowledge initially affected Eleanor, but surely it must have caused her some pain. For good or ill, she had molded him into a beautiful, glorious warrior, the Coeur de Lion, whose name would still be synonymous with valor eight centuries later. The only flaw in her planning was that her son was a homosexual.
- Despite the delicate nature of the subject, the question of Richard’s homosexuality seems to rest in the area of certainty rather than of probability. While contemporary historians were unwilling to discuss the matter at any length, they made repeated innuendoes about his unnatural appetites while at the same time making the nature of their charges abundantly clear. Not only was it backstairs gossip in every court in Europe, but Richard himself confessed to homosexual affairs on two occasions. Certainly, Philip Augustus, who may have been one of his partners, understood that Richard felt no inclination to marry Alais or any other woman. Whatever the dismay or grief Eleanor may have felt about this matter, in the end she came to view it as an irrelevancy. Richard’s unconventional sexual habits did not negate his primary duty as king: to marry and sire a male heir. She knew that he slept with women occasionally, because he had an illegitimate child from a woman of Cognac, a son then about five years old who had been named Philip in honor of his closest friend.
In those months between Henry’s death and the departure of the Crusade, Eleanor brought Richard to terms with the necessity of marrying and marrying quickly. Scanning the royal houses of Europe for a possible bride, one who would not be disqualified by consanguinity, Eleanor was careful to take Richard’s preferences into consideration. It seemed that some years earlier he had briefly made the acquaintance of the daughter of King Sancho of Navarre. While attending a tournament at Pamplona in the company of the king’s son, one of his favorite jousting companions, Richard had even addressed some passionate verse to the Princess Berengaria. This was enough for Eleanor. Barely had the Crusade left Vézelay than she stored Alais Capet, securely guarded, in Rouen and began a chevauchée into the deep south, traveling either to Bordeaux or, according to some accounts,. as far as Navarre to fetch the princess. On meeting Berengaria, the queen must have realized that this was not a woman to reverse Richard’s history of sexual deviation. There was no fault to be found with her; she was attractive enough, and even though the chroniclers called her “more learned than beautiful,” they also described her as “a prudent maid, a gentle lady, virtuous and fair, neither false nor double-tongued.” But Berengaria, for all her admirable virtues, lacked spirit. Unlike Eleanor, she was a passive female who would allow herself to be buffeted by the winds of circumstance and never raise a finger in her own behalf. No doubt overawed at the prospect of becoming Coeur de Lion’s queen, she delivered herself into Eleanor’s hands like a lamb being carried to slaughter.
The passage of time pressed heavily upon the queen’s shoulders. She had no intention of waiting until the Crusade had returned for Richard to be married—the risks of death in the Holy Land were all too familiar to her—and before Christmas, with Berengaria in tow, she was already on the road, hastening to overtake the army. The prospect of a winter journey through the Alps would have daunted the hardiest knight, but Eleanor, like Henry, refused to wait for weather. Fortunately for her purposes, the combined armies of Richard and Philip were wintering at Messina in Sicily, and it was there that the queen hoped to present her son with a bride, although one receives the impression that she would have followed Richard to the gates of Jerusalem if necessary. For several months her exact whereabouts are unrecorded, but next she comes to light at Lodi, near Milan, and then it is possible to trace her steps down the western side of the Italian boot from Pisa to Naples and finally to Brindisi, where one of Richard’s ships waited to bring her safely to Messina. The terrain was not unfamiliar; forty years earlier, a Crusader herself, she had come to Brindisi, sick in mind and body, to collect a shipwrecked husband. It was in these lands that she had learned of Raymond of Antioch’s death and here that she had laid her hopes in the hands of a kindly pontiff, only to be outsmarted. Louis, Raymond, Eugenius, all of her generation and even some of the next already lay in the dust.
Her arrival at Messina on March 30, 1191, created a sensation among the Crusaders, and perhaps it was inevitable that her appearance would call forth those tangled legends that clung like barnacles to her reputation. “Many know what I wish none of us had known,” wrote Richard of Devizes. “The same queen, in the time of her former husband, went to Jerusalem. Let none speak more thereof; I also know well. Be silent.” Even half a lifetime was not enough, evidently, to completely wash away the gossip of her youth, although by this time her contemporaries were compelled, on the basis of her age if nothing else, to view her with a certain degree of awe. “Queen Eleanor, an incomparable woman, beautiful and chaste, powerful and modest, meek and eloquent, which. is rarely to be met with in a woman; still indefatigable in every undertaking, whose power was the admiration of her age.” Eleanor remained in Messina only four days, but this was sufficient to bring her up to date on events of consequence. Meeting in family council, the Plantagenets —Eleanor, Richard, and Joanna, whom the queen had not seen for fifteen years—traded information and reached decisions. Eleanor received the latest news on her son’s continuing quarrel with Philip Augustus over the future of his sister. Declared Philip violently, “If he does put her aside and marries another woman, I will be the enemy of him and his so long as I live.” To which Richard had replied that on no account would he marry Alais “since the King of England, his own father, had been intimate with her and had had a son by her.” Before a convocation of the crusading barons and prelates, Philip had been compelled to release Richard from his oath, and Richard had promised to return Alais’s dower. But despite the settlement of this old question, Philip’s wrath for the Plantagenets had not abated, in fact so anxious was he to avoid his father’s first wife that he set sail for the Holy Land on the morning of her arrival.
At Messina, problems confronted the queen on every side. Her daughter Joanna, widowed only four months earlier, twenty-five and childless, had lost her throne after King William’s death and it was only with the greatest difficulty that Richard had been able to secure her property from William’s illegitimate nephew, Tancred, who had seized the throne. Joanna’s bed, her gilded table twelve feet long, her dinner service of twenty-four gold and silver plates and cups had been returned, but what to do now with a throneless daughter and with the Princess Berengaria were questions Eleanor pondered and then resolved quickly. Since it was Lent and Richard could not be married immediately, she remanded the maid of Navarre into the custody of her experienced daughter and, ignoring the crusading ban on women, directed that the two ladies accompany Richard to the Holy Land, where the marriage could be celebrated at the end of Lent. In Eleanor’s view, the wedding could take place none too soon, for at Messina she doubtless heard the disturbing tale of how a few weeks before her arrival, Richard had presented himself, in only his breeches, at the door of a local church and had made a public confession of his homosexuality. Such an immoderate spectacle of penance would not have convinced her that her son would mend his pederastic ways, nor would she have been reassured by the news that he had recently referred to his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, as heir if he himself died without issue.
At this meeting, Eleanor reported the news from England: John’s perambulations around the country as though he were king, his outrageous announcement that Richard would not return from the Crusade, his collusions with Geoffrey of York. And as if all this did not forebode enough trouble, Eleanor already had her suspicions about Richard’s chancellor, William Longchamp, who, said a chronicler, “acted entirely in such a way that he seemed to strive to put himself on a level with God.” Already the mistakes of both Eleanor and Richard were being brought - home: Eleanor’s error in convincing Richard that John would do less harm in England than on the Continent, Richard’s foolish choice of William Longchamp as a regent. At any rate, Eleanor took steps to deal with any and all eventualities, and before she left Messina on April 2, she had secured the necessary royal permissions to curb Longchamp or, for that matter, anyone who required curbing. Her homeward journey took her first to Rome, where she conferred with Pope Celestine III, whom she had known as an archdeacon twenty years earlier, and where she straightened out the matter of Henry’s illegitimate son. Against the opposition of the suffragans of York, she secured the pope’s approval of Geoffrey to the see of York and then, remaining in the Eternal City only long enough to borrow eight hundred marks from a moneylender, she struck off for the Alps. By the end of June, she was back in Rouen, where she settled down with one watchful eye trained on the Continent and the other on developments across the Channel.
In England, disorders soon began to mount. Geoffrey of York, banished from England during Richard’s absence, now felt secure enough after Eleanor’s negotiations on his behalf to ignore the prohibition. As soon as he stepped ashore at Dover, however, he was not only prevented from taking possession of his see but also arrested by Longchamp and thrown into a Dover dungeon, where he was treated in a manner most people believed grossly inappropriate for an archbishop. John, loath to pass up a profitable opportunity, now saw the chance to rid himself of the arrogant chancellor whom he regarded as his chief enemy. Calling together the bishops and justiciars at Reading, he convinced them that Longchamp, a man who “moved pompously along bearing a sneer in his nostrils,” had overstepped his authority and should be called to account, but when this message reached the chancellor, he pleaded illness and retired to the security of the Tower of London. Soon after, however, an assembly convened at Saint Paul’s Cathedral stripped Longchamp of his authority and banished him from England. Thrown into a panic and doubtless in fear of his life, Longchamp apparently believed it safest to leave the island in disguise. “Pretending to be a woman, a sex which he always despised, he changed his priest’s robe into a harlot’s dress” and made for Dover, where he hoped to find transport. Sitting on a rock near the shore, his green gown and cloak attracted the attention of a sailor “who wished for some sport with the women” and began to embrace him. In the course of their colloquy, the sailor discovered that Longchamp was a fake. “Come here, all of you,” he shouted to his companions. “Come here and look at a man in a woman’s dress!”
After this humiliating adventure, the deposed chancellor finally managed to reach the Continent and headed straight for Paris, where he made contact with two cardinals and managed to rouse their concern for his plight, even persuading them to plead his cause with Eleanor. That lady, however, only too happy at Longchamp’s expulsion, had no intention of negotiating with the cardinals. When they attempted to cross the border at Gisors without first asking her for right of passage, they found the drawbridge hastily raised and the seneschal of Normandy on hand to explain the necessity of safe-conduct letters to two foreigners who perhaps were not familiar with local customs. A gale of excommunications resulted from this incident, but the queen stood firm. In December, she was holding her modest Christmas court at Bonneville-sur-Touques when she got word of an altogether more alarming piece of information: Philip Augustus had just arrived in Paris to be greeted as a hero by an overwhelmed citizenry, and he had repaired to Fontainebleau for his Christmas court. Philip’s arrival brought the first eyewitness accounts of the war, although, to be sure, they were from the Capetian’s point of view and totally unreliable in Eleanor’s eyes. According to Philip, the capture of Acre on July 12 had been the doing of his heroic Franks, and as for his sudden abandonment of the Crusade, that was due to the treachery of Richard Plantagenet, his sworn ally, who had forced him to request release from his Crusader’s vow and flee from the Holy Land lest he be murdered. It was true that Philip had suffered at Acre: the oppressive Syrian climate, the mosquitoes, the pestilential trenches where his soldiers had died like flies, the nightmarish mountains of unburied corpses—all had filled him with disgust. He had fallen ill, and although God had mercifully granted his recovery, he had to his horror, lost his hair and the nails of his fingers and toes. Suspicious of plots against his life, he recklessly charged that his illness had resulted from a poisoned drink. In truth, Philip suffered from other maladies that, in the end, proved far more critical.
On Saturday, June 8, he had stood on the shore at Acre when Richard and his great-sailed ships, pennants streaming from the masts, had sailed into the harbor to be greeted by a fanfare that might have roused a greater man than Philip to the most intense jealousy. Even though Philip had been at Acre for six weeks and had enjoyed a certain prestige, he counted for nothing from the moment of Coeur de Lion’s arrival. That day the crusading camp went delirious with jubilation. Those who were guarding the camp deserted their posts and rushed down to the strand; knights and squires jumped into the water and swam to Richard’s ship; the frantic shouts of acclaim from the shore drowned out all other sounds; there was not a man in the Holy Army who that day was not in love with Richard, king of England, the deliverer of the Promised Land. Walking among the masses of soldiers, towering a head above Philip, Richard grasped the hands outstretched to him in love and adoration. That night, there was singing and the music of horns, drums, and lutes. Wine cups were filled over and over. So many candles were lit that the whole valley became a sea of lights, and Saladin, watching from his headquarters ten miles southeast of the besieged city, feared that the Christians had set the plain on fire.
Shortly after Richard’s arrival, both he and Philip were stricken with a kind of malarial fever that raged in epidemic proportions throughout the Crusaders’ camp. Although Richard’s bout with the fever seems to have been more severe than Philip’s, he was anxious to get on with the business of capturing Acre and had himself carried in a silken litter to the walls of the besieged city, where he supervised the crews operating the latest in war machinery: the great crossbows mounted on platforms; the spring-loaded espringals, which loosed spearlike missiles powerful enough to impale a horse; the wheeled mangonels, which catapulted rocks and bundles of tar-soaked straw over the walls; the massive trebuchets for hurling showers of flint; the assault towers sixty feet high; the ladders, grappling hooks, and battering rams. Day and night the army rained missiles on the beleaguered city, while its defenders retaliated with burning pitch and the explosive Greek fire. On Friday July 12, after a month of ceaseless fighting, the Moslem garrison had no choice but to raise the white flag, and then the Crusaders had poured into the city, their standards soon fluttering from buildings and walls. Richard, along with his sister and wife, took up residence in the royal palace. On the day of his entry into Acre he noticed another banner flying from the royal palace and, upon inquiry, was told that it belonged to Duke Leopold of Austria. Grossly offended that the duke should dare to infringe on his glory, Richard ordered his men to pull down the Austrian banner and fling it into the filth of the moat; Richard himself, apparently in the grip of an Angevin fury, personally addressed a number of insults to Leopold. That very night, the duke of Austria and his followers withdrew from the Crusade amid vows of vengeance on the arrogant Plantagenet.
Ten days after the fall of Acre, Philip Augustus sent a delegation of magnates to Richard’s palace. The Franks, weeping, could barely deliver their message. Richard, however, had no trouble guessing the nature of the mission.
“Cease your weeping,” he told them, “for I know what you have come to say. Your lord, the King of France, wishes to go home and you have come to secure my consent to this breach of our compact as brothers-in-arms.”
“Sire,” said Philip’s spokesman, “you have divined what is in our minds. We are compelled to ask your consent for our lord king will surely die if he does not quickly leave this land.”
There followed a rendition of Philip’s physical symptoms, from most of which Richard also suffered. His reply barely concealed contempt:
“If he leaves undone the work for which he came here, he will bring shame and everlasting contempt upon the Franks. I will not give my consent but of course if his life is in the balance, let him do as he sees fit.”
Back in Paris, Philip did not wait long before he came banging on Eleanor’s door. On January 20, 1192, he appeared below the walls at Gisors, and “producing the charter of the king of England which had been executed at Messina, he demanded of William Fitz-Ralph, the seneschal of Normandy, his sister Alais whom the king was to have taken to wife; the seneschal, however, refused to give her up.” On Eleanor’s instructions, Fitz-Ralph explained that he had no such orders from the king, at the same time reminding Philip that it was a clear breach of the Truce of God to lay hands on a Crusader’s property. Having foiled the Capetian, Eleanor strengthened her border defenses, reinforced garrisons, and continued to uneasily scan the frontier for Philip’s invasion forces. Within days, however, it became apparent that she had been facing the wrong direction: Trouble came from across the Channel with word that John was assembling a fleet and recruiting mercenaries at Southampton. “Fearing that the light-minded youth might be going to attempt something, by the counsels of the French, against his lord and brother, with an anxious mind she tried in every way to prevent her son’s proposed journey. With all her strength she wanted to make sure that faith would be kept between her youngest sons at least, so that their mother might die more happily than had their father.”
Even at the age of seventy, Eleanor was able to move faster than John. Unmindful of winter storms, she arrived at Portsmouth on February 11 and, ignoring her son, went straight to the kingdom’s barons. “All the great men of the realm were called together, at Windsor, at Oxford, at London and at Winchester. Through her own tears and the prayers of the nobles she was with difficulty able to obtain a promise that John would not cross over for the time being.” Without opposing her son directly, she shrewdly engineered the collapse of his foreign expedition, thus preventing him from offering his homage to Philip and handing over Gisors in exchange for Capetian recognition of his claims to the duchy of Normandy. Although John retreated sullenly to his manor at Wallingford, Eleanor was under no illusion that his retirement was anything but temporary. About this time, she began sending to the Holy Land messengers who described to the king the disorders in England as a result of John’s seditious plotting with Philip Augustus. Richard must, she urged, abandon the Holy War and come home, lest he lose his kingdom.
During the spring and summer of 1192, the war continued, and tales of Richard’s valorous exploits drifted back to Europe: glorious battles in which the desert sands had run red with the blood of Christian and Saracen; the king’s negotiations with Saladin to marry Joanna Plantagenet to his brother, Saphidin, and Joanna’s outraged refusal; his brilliant victory at Jaffa, where he had formed a wall of shields to repulse the Saracen horsemen; stories of Moslem women disciplining their children with threats that “Malik Ric” would get them. Twice the crusading army came within sight of Jerusalem but had been obliged to fall back, and in the end, Richard had been forced to conclude a truce with Saladin. For all the expense and the thousands of lives forfeited, the Christians were to retain only a strip of the coast between Tyre and Jaffa and the right to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem. After the truce, Saladin graciously invited small parties of Crusaders to visit the holy places. The bishop of Salisbury had toured the shrines, as had Richard’s jongleur, Ambrose, but the king himself refused to accompany them. Exhausted and suffering from a recurrence of fever, he had turned away from the domes of Jerusalem in tears. “Sweet Lord,” he had cried, “I entreat Thee. Do not suffer me to see Thy Holy City since I am unable to deliver it from the hands of Thine enemies.” On September 29, 1192, he put Joanna and Berengaria on a vessel bound for Brindisi, and he himself took ship at Acre ten days later. The Third Crusade was over.
In England, Eleanor was expecting her son home for Christmas. All through November and early December companies of Crusaders had begun arriving in the kingdom; in the ports and marketplaces there were firsthand reports of the king’s deeds in Palestine and plans for celebrations once he arrived. But the days passed without news, and newly arrived contingents of soldiers expressed astonishment that they had beaten the king home although they had left Acre after Richard. Along the coast, lookouts peered into the foggy Channel in hope of sighting the royal vessel, and messengers waited to race over the frozen roads toward London with the news of the king’s landing. Eleanor learned that Berengaria and Joanna had safely reached Rome, but of her son, weeks overdue, there was an alarming lack of information. She held a cheerless Christmas court at Westminster, her apprehension mounting with each day, her silent fears being expressed openly in the ale houses along the Thames: The king had encountered some calamity, a storm along the Adriatic coast no doubt, and now he would never return.
Three days after Christmas, the whereabouts of the tardy Richard Plantagenet became known, not at Westminster but at the Cité Palace in Paris. On December 28, Philip Augustus received an astounding letter from his good friend Henry Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman emperor:
We have thought it proper to inform your nobleness that while the enemy of our empire and the disturber of your kingdom, Richard, King of England, was crossing the sea to his dominions, it chanced that the winds caused him to be shipwrecked in the region of Istria, at a place which lies between Aquila and Venice.... The roads being duly watched and the entire area well-guarded, our dearly beloved cousin Leopold, Duke of Austria, captured the king in a humble house in a village near Vienna. Inasmuch as he is now in our power, and has always done his utmost for your annoyance and disturbance, we have thought it proper to relay this information to your nobleness.
Shortly after the first of the new year, 1193, the archbishop of Rouen was able to send Eleanor a copy of the letter, accompanied by a covering note in which he cited whatever comforting quotations he could recall from Scripture to cover an outrage of this magnitude.
Eleanor’s most imperative problem—finding the location where Richard was being held prisoner—she tackled with her usual energy and resourcefulness. From all points, emissaries were dispatched to find the king: Eleanor herself sent the abbots of Boxley and Pontrobert to roam the villages of Bavaria and Swabia, following every lead and rumor; Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, stopping in Italy on his way home from the Crusade, changed course and hastened to Germany; even William Longchamp, the exiled chancellor, set out at once from Paris to trace his master. It was not until March, however, that Richard’s chaplain, Anselm, who had shared many of the king’s misadventures, arrived in England, and Eleanor was able to obtain authentic details.
According to Anselm’s story, Richard had set sail in early October with Anselm himself, a clerk, the noblemen Baldwin of Bethune and William l’Etang, and a number of Templars, or men disguised as Templars. His original destination was Marseille, but three days out, perhaps while putting in at Pisa for news and supplies, he had learned on good authority that Count Raymond of Toulouse, still smarting over old wrongs, had ambushed the Mediterranean ports. Since stormy weather prevented him from traveling through the Pillars of Hercules and around Spain to his own provinces, he was forced to backtrack down the Italian peninsula and head for the island of Corfu off the Greek coast. There, approached by two Rumanian pirate ships, he came to terms with the brigands and arranged for them to take him up the eastern coast of the Adriatic, where he may have had some notion of crossing into his brother-in-law Henry’s friendly territory of Saxony. But once again the weather turned rough, and the king’s party, washed ashore at Ragusa in Rumania, had boarded another vessel only to be shipwrecked. About December 10, they landed in territories held by Count Mainard of Gortz, a vassal of Duke Leopold of Austria. Considering that he was on the worst possible terms with Leopold, Richard understood the potential danger of his situation. Adopting the disguise of a merchant, he sent a ruby ring to Count Mainard and asked permission for pilgrims to pass through his lands. The count, not unnaturally, asked for the names of these wealthy pilgrims. Baldwin of Béthune, he was told, and the merchant Hugo.
Mainard, as if he possessed some uncanny psychic powers, turned the ruby ring over between his fingers. “His name is not Hugo,” he said, “but King Richard. I swore that I would arrest any pilgrims who set foot on my shores. However, in view of the value of this gift and the high condition of him who thus honors me, I shall return the gift and give your lord leave to continue his journey.”
Distrusting such unusual magnanamity, Richard and his party hired horses and fled that very night. Several days later, still keeping his disguise as a merchant, Richard was recognized and very nearly taken, but his captor, a native of Normandy, burst into tears and sent him on his way. By this time, rumors of the king’s presence had flown through the region. Leaving behind Baldwin of Bethune to draw attention to himself as a person of consequence and perhaps be mistaken for a king, Richard took with him only William l’Etang and the young clerk, who spoke German, and headed for Vienna. After three days of riding without rest, they came to the small town of Ginana, a suburb of Vienna, where Richard, worn out and shaking from a recurrence of malaria, found lodgings at a tavern and fell into a fevered sleep. Meanwhile, his German-speaking clerk went out to buy provisions, but since he had no Austrian currency and attempted to make purchases with a gold bezant of the type used in Syria, he was detained and sharply questioned by authorities. Insisting that he was merely the servant of a very wealthy merchant, he was able to secure his release and run back to the tavern, where he urged the king to flee. But Richard, in a stupor, could not be roused. By December 20, the clerk was again compelled to return to the marketplace for food. This time he made the mistake of appearing with the king’s handsomely adorned gloves thrust into his belt, an accessory that immediately attracted attention. Arrested and tortured, he finally confessed the identity and whereabouts of his master.
In Vienna, Duke Leopold was holding his Christmas court when he received news that the insolent Coeur de Lion had miraculously fallen into his grasp, and he lost no time in ordering the tavern surrounded. Hearing the commotion, Richard improvised a new disguise. Running to the kitchen and pulling on a servant’s smock, he sat by the hearth, where he busied himself with turning some birds on a spit. His disguise fooled nobody, of course. Outnumbered and cornered, he demanded that Duke Leopold himself be fetched to accept his surrender. Two days later, he was taken from Vienna to Durrenstein, a remote castle in the hills above the Danube, and placed in strict confinement, his guards having been ordered to watch him day and night with their swords drawn.
Treachery was rife not only in Germany but in Paris and Rouen; it even percolated rapidly in the queen’s own family. Before Eleanor could take steps to secure Coeur de Lion’s release, she was faced with more immediate catastrophes in the form of Philip Augustus and his newest ally, her son John. These two proceeded on the assumption that Richard, king of England, was dead. Or as good as dead. But before Eleanor could take her youngest son in hand, he fled to Normandy, where he declared himself the king’s heir, an announcement the Norman barons greeted with disdain. John did not wait to convince them, proceeding instead to Paris, where he did homage to Philip for the Plantagenet Continental domains and furthermore agreeing to confirm Philip’s right to the Vexin. Heartened by these developments, Philip apparently felt justified in abrogating the Truce of God; on April 12, a few days after Easter, he once again fronted the fortress at Gisors and this time the seneschal surrendered it without protest. From Gisors, Philip moved directly to Rouen, where he demanded the immediate release of his sister. The seneschal of Rouen, a man whose lands had recently been restored to him through Eleanor’s intervention, knew on which side his security lay. He had no orders to release Alais, he said, but he would be happy to escort Philip, alone and unarmed, into the princess’s quarters for a visit. In the course of some on-the-spot reflections, it did not fail to occur to Philip, who had as keen an imagination as Eleanor, that he had only to step unarmed across the drawbridge at Rouen and the queen would have a superb hostage with whom to barter for her son. Furious at the realization that the queen had thwarted him, he smashed his own siege engines and spilled casks of wine into the Seine. Rouen, he swore, had not seen the last of him. In the meantime, Eleanor, “who then ruled England,” had taken the precaution of closing the Channel ports and ordering the defense of the eastern coast against a possible invasion, her hastily mustered home guard being instructed to wield any weapon that came to hand, including their plowing tools.
At this point, Eleanor’s dilemma in regard to her sons would have taxed the most patient of mothers. John, returning to England, swaggered about the countryside proclaiming himself the next king of England—perhaps he sincerely believed that Richard would never be released alive—and, never known for his sensitivity, constantly regaled Eleanor with the latest rumors concerning the fate of her favorite son.. Her actions during this period indicate clearly that she failed to take John seriously. Although he was twenty-seven, she thought of him as the baby of the family, always a child showing off and trying to attract attention. Her attitude was probably close to that of Richard’s when, a few months later, he was informed of John’s machinations: “My brother John is not the man to subjugate a country if there is a person able to make the slightest resistance to his attempts.” With one hand, Eleanor deftly managed to anticipate John’s plots and render him harmless; with the other, she worked for Richard’s release. After Easter, the king had been removed from Durrenstein Castle and the hands of Duke Leopold and, after some haggling, had been taken into custody by Leopold’s suzerain, the Holy Roman emperor. As the emperor’s prisoner, Richard found himself the object of high-level decisions. His death, it was decided, would achieve no useful purpose; rather the arrogant Plantagenets, or what remained of them, should be made to redeem their kin, but at a price that would bring their provinces to their knees: 100,000 silver marks with two hundred hostages as surety for payment. The hostages, it was specified, were to be chosen from among the leading barons of England and Normandy or from their children.
Relieved as Eleanor must have felt to learn that her son could be purchased, she could only have been appalled at the size of the ransom. The prospect of collecting such an enormous sum, thirty-five tons of pure silver, seemed impossible after Henry’s Saladin tithe and Richard‘s great sale before the Crusade. Where was the money to be found? Where were two hundred noble hostages to be located? At a council convened at Saint Albans on June 1, 1193, she appointed five officers to assist with the dreaded task. During the summer and fall, England became a marketplace to raise the greatest tax in its history. The kingdom was stripped of its wealth: “No subject, lay or clerk, rich or poor, was overlooked. No one could say, ‘Behold I am only So-and-So or Such-and-Such, pray let me be excused.’ ” Barons were taxed one-quarter of a year’s income. Churches and abbeys were relieved of their movable wealth, including the crosses on their altars. The Cistercians, who possessed no riches, sheared their flocks and donated a year’s crop of wool. Before long, the bars of silver and gold began slowly to pile up in the crypt of Saint Paul’s Cathedral under Eleanor’s watchful eyes. But not quickly enough to comfort her. Even more painful was the job of recruiting hostages from the great families, their lamentations and pleadings rising like a sulphurous mist all over the kingdom and providing constant agony for the queen.
From Haguenau, where Richard was incarcerated, came a flood of letters to his subjects and most especially to his “much loved mother.” He had been received with honor by the emperor and his court, he is well, he hopes to be home soon. He realizes that the ransom will be difficult to raise but he feels sure that his subjects will not shirk their duty; all sums collected should be entrusted to the queen.
Richard also addressed correspondence to his captor, Henry Hohenstaufen: As a king, he had no need to account for his actions to anyone but God, but nevertheless, he wished to set the emperor straight. What were his crimes that he should be held against his will like a common highroad robber? “It is said that I have not taken Jerusalem. I should have taken it, if time had been given me; this is the fault of my enemies, not mine, and I believe no just man could blame me for having deferred an enterprise (which can always be undertaken) in order to afford my people a succour which they could no longer wait for. There, sire, these are my crimes.”
As for Philip Capet’s calumnies upon the king’s good name, “I know of nothing that ought to have brought on me his ill-humour, except for my having been more successful than he.”
Like his mother during her imprisonment, Richard never allowed his spirit to be broken. He was “always cheery and full of jest in talk. ... He would tease his warders with rough jokes and enjoy the sport of making them drunk and of trying his own strength against that of their big bodies.” Deeper feelings were expressed, however, in a sirventès that he composed for his half sister Marie of Champagne and that must have sorrowed Eleanor to the quick.
Feeble the words and faltering the tongue
Wherewith a prisoner moans his doleful plight;
Yet for his comfort he may make a song.
Friends I have many, but their gifts are slight;
Shame to them if unransomed I, poor wight,
Two winters languish here!
And they, my knights of Anjou and Touraine—
Well know they, who now sit at home at ease,
That I, their lord, in far-off Allemaine
Am captive. They should help to my release;
But now their swords are sheathed, and rust in peace,
While I am prisoner here.
Eleanor, sixteen years in confinement, read the despair behind those lines of verse. It is said that in her anguish she addressed three letters to Pope Celestine III imploring his assistance in securing Richard’s release and in her salutation addressed the pontiff as “Eleanor, by the wrath of God, Queen of England.” One of the letters reads:
I am defiled with grief, and my bones cleave to my skin, for my flesh it is wasted away. My years pass away in groanings, and I would they were altogether passed away.... I have lost the light of my eyes, the staff of my old age.
My bowels are torn away, my very race is destroyed and passing away from me. The Young King and the earl of Brittany sleep in the dust, and their most unhappy mother is compelled to live that she may be ever tortured with the memory of the dead. Two sons yet survived to my solace, who now survive only to distress me, a miserable and condemned creature: King Richard is detained in bonds and John, his brother, depopulates the captive’s kingdom with the sword and lays it waste with fire. In all things the Lord is become cruel towards me and opposes me with a heavy hand.... I long for death, I am weary of life; and though I thus die incessantly, I yet desire to die more fully; I am reluctantly compelled to live, that my life may be the food of death and a means of torture.
Why, she demands, does the sword of Saint Peter slumber in its scabbard when her son, a “most delicate youth,” the anointed of the Lord, lies in chains? Why does the pope, a “negligent,” “cruel” prevaricator and sluggard, do nothing?
These letters, supposedly written for her by Peter of Blois, are so improbable that it is surprising that many modern historians have accepted them as authentic. While preserved among the letters of Peter of Blois, who is undoubtedly their author—they are characteristic of his style and use his favorite expressions—there is no evidence that they were written for Eleanor or that they were ever sent. Most likely they were rhetorical exercises. No contemporary of Eleanor’s mentioned that she wrote to the pope, and not until the seventeenth century were the letters attributed to her. From a diplomatic point of view, they are too fanciful to be genuine; Eleanor, clearheaded and statesmanlike, was never a querulous old woman complaining of age, infirmities, and weariness of life. On the contrary, her contemporaries unanimously credit her with the utmost courage, industry, and political skill. A second point to notice is that the details of the letters misrepresent the facts of Richard’s imprisonment. He was never “detained in bonds,” and as both she and the pope knew, Celestine had instantly, upon receiving news of Richard’s capture, excommunicated Duke Leopold for laying violent hands on a brother Crusader; he had threatened Philip Augustus with an interdict if he trespassed upon Plantagenet territories; and he had menaced the English with interdict should they fail to collect the ransom. Under the circumstances, Celestine had done all he could. In the last analysis, the letters must be viewed as Peter of Blois’s perception of Eleanor’s feelings, a view that may or may not be accurate.
In December 1193, Eleanor set sail with an imposing retinue of clerks, chaplains, earls, bishops, hostages, and chests containing the ransom. By January 17, 1194, the day scheduled for Richard’s release, she had presented herself and the money at Speyer, but no sooner had they arrived than, to her amazement, Henry Hohenstaufen announced a further delay. He had received letters that placed an entirely new light on the matter of the king’s liberation. As the gist of the problem emerged, it seemed Philip Augustus and John Plantagenet had offered the emperor an equivalent amount of silver if he could hold Coeur de Lion in custody another nine months, or deliver him up to them. These disclosures, and Henry’s serious consideration of the counteroffer, provoked horror from the emperor’s own vassals, and after two days of argument, Henry relented. He would liberate Richard as promised if the king of England would do homage to him for all his possessions, including the kingdom of England. This request, a calculated humiliation, would have made Richard a vassal of the Holy Roman emperor, a degradation that the Plantagenets were hard put to accept. Quick to realize the meaninglessness, as well as the illegality, of the required act, Eleanor made an on-the-spot decision. According to Roger of Hovedon, Richard, “by advice of his mother Eleanor, abdicated the throne of the kingdom of England and delivered it to the emperor as the lord of all.” On February 4, the king was released “into the hands of his mother” after a captivity of one year six weeks and three days.
Seven weeks later, on March 12, the king’s party landed at Sandwich and proceeded directly to Canterbury, where they gave thanks at the tomb of Saint Thomas. By the time they reached London, the city had been decorated, the bells were clanging furiously, and the Londoners ready to give a rapturous welcome to their hero and champion. Her eldest son “hailed with joy upon the Strand,” Eleanor looked in vain for the remaining male member of her family, but the youngest Plantagenet was nowhere to be found. Once Richard’s release had been confirmed, he had fled to Paris upon Philip Augustus’s warning that “beware, the devil is loose.” Despite a certain anxiety about her son’s whereabouts, the next six weeks were to be ones of great happiness for Eleanor. It was spring in England, the air opaque and moist, the budding earth exhaling aromas of ineffable sweetness. With Richard, she made a relaxed progress to Nottingham, to the forests of Sherwood “which the king had never seen before and which pleased him greatly,” to Northampton, where they celebrated Easter, and finally to Winchester, where Richard was crowned a second time. Despite the holiday atmosphere, Richard was impatient to sail for Normandy. On April 25, he and Eleanor went to Portsmouth, but their crossing was delayed by bad weather for more than three weeks. Not until May 12 were they able to reach Barfleur, where the Normans greeted Richard with the same enthusiasm as had the English. Their progress took them to Caen, Bayeux, and around mid-May, to the city of Lisieux, where they spent a few days in the home of John of Alençon, a trusted friend and the city’s archdeacon. It was here that the junior Plantagenet, fearful and trembling, appeared one evening at dinnertime asking to see his mother. It is clear from the reception John received that Eleanor had already discussed him with the king. Neither of them took seriously the boy’s antics; he was, after all, their kin. If he had played the fool, they would not reproach him; rather they would deal later with those who had led him astray. The important matter was to bring him back into the family and convince him that his future interests lay with them rather than with Philip Capet.
When John was brought into the king’s room, he threw himself at Richard’s feet and let loose with a flood of tears. But Richard pulled him up and kissed him. “Think no more of it, John,” he said gently. “You are but a child and were left to evil counselors. Your advisers shall pay for this. Now come and have something to eat.” He ordered that a fresh salmon, which had just been brought in as a gift, should be cooked for his brother.
According to the chronicles, “the king and John became reconciled through the mediation of Queen Eleanor, their mother.” In the circumstances, it seemed the safest course as well as the wisest. There was no doubt in Eleanor’s mind that the boy, now twenty-eight, could not be held responsible for his actions, that he was, as Richard of Devizes termed him, “light-minded.” But at that moment, he was the last of the Plantagenets. With luck, Richard might reign another twenty-five years or more. Who was to say that he would not produce an heir of his own? Thus the queen must have reasoned in the spring of 1194 when her son, after so many adversities, had come home to her.
In her seventh decade, Eleanor grew impatient with wars and politics. It was as if Richard’s capture and ransom had drained her emotionally, and now she sought surcease from the confusions of courts and councils. She had preserved his kingdom from wolves, she had expended her dwindling energies to rescue him from his enemies, she had served her people as peacemaker. If she did not go quite as far as Henry when he had said, “Now let the rest go as it will, I care no more,” at least she was beginning to remember her age. In 1194, she put between herself and a demanding world the plain high walls of Fontevrault, not as the abbess that Henry had attempted to make of her twenty years earlier but as a royal guest accompanied by a modest household. There on the border of Poitou and Anjou, where the river Vienne wound its silvery path through valley and forest, she made herself comfortable among the devout and learned sisters. In addition to the convent, Fontevrault included a residence for penitent harlots, a monastery for monks and lay brothers, a hospital for lepers, and an old-age home for monks and nuns. There was a vast complex of halls and refectories connected by cloisters and an elaborate octagonal kitchen with five fireplaces and twenty chimneys. For a woman who had always believed in the superiority of her own sex, Fontevrault, where the monks and nuns were ruled by a woman, provided a refuge much to Eleanor’s taste. Then, too, she must have felt as though she had come home to rest among familiar surroundings—her grandmother Philippa was buried there, and in the nun’s choir of the domed abbey church slept Henry Plantagenet, his hands calmly folded upon his breast.
Protected against life’s burdens and annoyances, Eleanor could pick and choose her activities just as she liked, and from now on her name figures rarely in the official records. We know that on one occasion she supported the archbishop of Rouen in requesting that the king remit part of a fine due from Reading Abbey and that on another she aided the abbot of Bourgueil, who was having difficulty paying a local wine tax. Also during these years, she was instrumental in arranging for the marriage of her widowed daughter, Joanna, to Raymond VI of Toulouse, a settlement that no doubt gave her wry satisfaction after two husbands had failed to reclaim her inheritance.
The years passed in comparative quiet, although those interminable struggles between the Plantagenets and the Capets continued. Alais Capet, finally returned to her kin at the age of thirty-five, had been promptly married to one of Philip’s vassals, Guillaume de Ponthieu, and stepped forever from the glare of history. In 1196, Richard had been compelled to return the Vexin, a disaster that boded ill as far as Eleanor was concerned, for Normandy now lay open to possible incursions by Philip. But far more worrisome than the loss of the Vexin was Richard’s lack of an heir. Although he had married to please her, he had done nothing more. He had ignored Berengaria at Messina, he had married her at Cyprus and ridden off within hours of the wedding, and during the war in Palestine, he had treated her like a leper who must keep its distance. Berengaria, queen of England, had not yet laid eyes on her kingdom, and the marriage that Eleanor had been so anxious to arrange remained a mockery, if in fact it had ever been consummated. Since Richard and Berengaria had parted in the Holy Land, she had lived in seclusion, virtually a widow, on her dower lands in Maine, while the king satisfied his sexual needs with men. In 1195, a hermit visiting the king took the occasion to warn of God’s vengeance if he persisted in the sin of Sodom, a sermon that Richard did not accept kindly. Soon afterward, however, he fell seriously ill and suddenly recalled the hermit’s warning. Calling his confessors, he spilled out the details of his misdeeds and received absolution; Berengaria was summoned to join him, but their reconciliation did not result in a pregnancy.
Despite the Treaty of Louviers, which had restored the Norman Vexin to Philip, neither he nor Richard regarded the agreement as definitive, and desultory warfare continued on their frontiers. In the summer of 1196, Richard began to construct a fortress that he hoped would act as a deterrent to any future moves that Philip might be considering in the direction of Normandy. At Les Andelys, on the right bank of the Seine, stood a mighty rock that offered a panoramic view of the entire river valley, and on this promontory Richard laid out an imposing stronghold that he christened Château Gaillard. His Saucy Castle, with its impregnable walls and powerful bastions, took three years to build, and when it had been completed, Richard, who had personally supervised its construction, could barely contain his pleasure. It was, he crowed, his daughter. From its lofty eminence he could look down in derision upon the king of the Franks and his schemes for the conquest of Normandy. When finally Philip got his first glimpse of the Saucy Castle, he could only bluster, “If its walls were made of solid iron, yet would I take them!”
When his defiant boast was relayed to Richard, he countered with his own oath. “By God’s throat, if its walls were made of butter, yet would I hold them securely against Philip and all his forces!” And as if to prove his patience with the Franks exhausted, he proceeded to drive Philip out of the Vexin with such ferocity that Dieu-Donné was nearly drowned in the hasty retreat.
By the spring of 1199, Richard had turned his attention to other matters, one of them being the condition of his treasury. The construction of Chateau Gaillard had, unfortunately, helped to wipe out his resources. In March, his mind on the troublesome subject of money, he heard of an incident that immediately piqued his interest in that it seemed to offer the possibility of quick profit. A peasant plowing in a field on the outskirts of Chalus in the Limousin had accidentally unearthed what was claimed to be a treasure trove. The precious object was, the report said, a set of gold and silver figurines representing a king seated around a table with his family, perhaps some buried relic from Roman times. Viscount Aymar of Limoges, quick to claim the booty, failed to reckon with Richard’s interest, and when the king claimed his right, as overlord, to all buried treasures in his domains, Aymar apparently sent only a portion of the find. Richard’s response was to gather his mercenaries and hie himself to the Limousin. The castle of Chalus was but a puny fortress, virtually unarmed and surely no match for the great Coeur de Lion. Sappers were set to work on the walls.
After supper in the early evening of March 25, Richard went for a stroll around the walls to check on the sappers’ progress. Arrows flew sporadically from the castle’s garrison, but Richard, careless of his own safety, paid little attention. Perhaps he was amused when his men pointed out a fellow standing on the walls with a crossbow in one hand and a frying pan in the other. All day he had been fending off missiles by using his frying pan as a shield, and now, when he deliberately aimed an arrow at the king, Richard greeted the bowman with a shout of applause. Suddenly, however, another arrow whistled through the dusk and, unerring, came to rest in the king’s left shoulder near the neck. Without uttering a cry, Richard mounted his horse and rode back to camp as if nothing had happened. In the privacy of his tent, he tried to pull out the arrow but only succeeded in breaking off the shaft. The iron barb remained imbedded in the rolls of fat on his shoulder. A surgeon of sorts was summoned—Hovedon called him a “butcher” who “carelessly mangled the king’s arm”—and by lantern light finally managed to extract the arrow. Even though lotions and unguents were applied and the wound bandaged, it immediately became inflamed and began to swell. While Richard’s army kept up its assault on Châlus, his wound grew steadily worse, and when gangrene set in and he was forced to acknowledge the fact that he would not survive, he sent for his mother.
With an old friend, Abbot Luke of Torpenay, and a small escort, Eleanor set out for Limoges, over a hundred miles from Fontevrault. Even though she traveled day and night, her son was beyond anyone’s help by the time of her arrival. There remained only the disposition of his possessions. He bequeathed to John his lands on the Continent and his kingdom of England, the island for which he cared so little that in a reign of ten years he had spent only six months there, and to his nephew Otto, the son of his sister Matilda, he left his jewels. He further willed his heart to be buried at Rouen and his body at Fontevrault at the feet of his father. To Aquitaine, for their perfidy, he bequeathed his entrails, and to England, the land that would worship him as a national hero and fill their squares with statues, he left nothing. His affairs in order, he sent for the crossbowman who had wounded him. He proved to be little more than a lad.
“What evil have I done to you that you have slain me?” asked Richard.
“Because,” replied the boy, “you slew my father and my two brothers and you would have killed me. Take on me any revenge that you think fit for I will readily endure the greatest torments you can devise now that you, who have brought such evils on the world, are about to die.”
“I forgive you my death,” Richard answered, but the boy continued to stand there in scowling disbelief. “Live on,” Richard assured him, “and by my bounty behold the light of day.” He ordered the youth, variously called Bertran de Gurdun, John Sabroz, and Peter Basili by the chroniclers, who did not know his real name, to be released and sent away with a gift of one hundred shillings.
On Tuesday, April 6, “as the day was closing, he ended his earthly day” in Eleanor’s arms. Her son was forty-one and childless except for his bastard son, Philip. For his greed over a few gold figurines “the lion by the ant was slain,” and even his last act of chivalry came to nothing, because Mercadier, his mercenary chief, seized the boy with the frying pan and, once the king was dead, had him flayed alive.
One son remained.