On Palm Sunday, Eleanor laid to rest her dearest son in the abbey church of Fontevrault, but circumstances permitted few moments of solitude in which to embrace her inexpressible sorrow. In those dark, confused hours following Richard’s death at Châlus, she had been torn not simply by grief but by a sense of impending doom, and yet, she refused to stand by helplessly. Messengers had been secretly dispatched to publish the tragic news to those who must know: John, who was, ironically, visiting her grandson Arthur in Brittany; Berengaria; William Marshal; the Abbess Matilda of Fontevrault; and a few others. To the rest of the world, she announced nothing, and it was not until the dead king’s cortege began to make its long, slow journey through the Limousin that men and women came out of their halls and huts and markets to huddle in silent amazement by the side of the road. Coeur de Lion was dead, but who among them could hail long life to his successor? Indeed, it was a matter of uncertainty who would be the next king.
The fact that on his deathbed Richard had designated John as his heir was influential but, as Eleanor understood, not at all decisive. The confusion about the rules of hereditary succession that had so troubled Henry that he had made an archbishop of his chancellor and had crowned his eldest son with illusions of grandeur now came to rest resoundingly around the queen’s head. She was all too familiar with the debate circulating among contemporary jurists as to whether John Plantagenet or Arthur of Brittany took precedence. Ranulph de Glanville, Henry’s justiciar, had expressed doubt whether a king’s younger brother or the son of a dead brother had a better claim to the inheritance and, after presenting arguments on both sides, he had ended by favoring the nephew; on the other hand, a Norman legist had decided that “the younger son is the nearer heir to the father’s inheritance than the child of the elder brother who had died before the father.” Although there is no way of knowing Eleanor’s private views about this question, it is reasonable to assume that she felt much the same as William Marshal. On the evening of April 10, the news of Richard’s death reached Marshal at his lodgings near Rouen just as he was going to bed. Dressing hurriedly, he hastened to the residence of Archbishop Hubert Walter of Canterbury, who was staying nearby. Apart from their grief and consternation, what most troubled the two men was the future.
“My lord,” said Marshal, “we must lose no time in choosing someone to be king.”
“In my opinion,” declared the archbishop, “Arthur should rightfully be the king.”
Marshal disagreed. “I think that would be bad. Arthur is counseled by traitors and he is haughty and proud. If we put him at our head, we shall suffer for it because he hates the English.”
“Marshal,” asked the archbishop quietly, “is this really your desire?”
“Yea, my lord, for unquestionably a son has a nearer claim to his father’s land than a grandson. It is only just that John should have the crown.”
“So be it then,” said Hubert Walter, “but mark my words, Marshal, you will regret this more than any decision you have ever made.”
Marshal had no illusions about John Lackland, whom he had known for thirty years. “Perhaps you are right,” he answered, “but I still believe it best.”
For Eleanor, as for William Marshal, the most important question was not which of Richard’s possible heirs had the better legal claim to the throne—it was not even which of the two would make the most satisfactory sovereign—but which would make the least unsatisfactory king. In the end, it was a matter of choosing between evils, and of the two, she was obliged to select John, a choice she did not make on the basis of kinship nor of his character nor of any personal feelings of affection. She knew John—by this time everyone knew John—and contemporary historians had already rendered their evaluation. “Hostis naturae Johannes, ” wrote William of Newburgh, “nature’s enemy, John.”
We do not know how well Eleanor knew Arthur of Brittany or, for that matter, whether she had ever met him. What the twelve-year-old boy might someday become was impossible to say, but still she knew enough about him to understand that he must not be permitted the throne. His very name was ominously significant. Arthur had been born to Constance of Brittany on March 29, 1187, eight months after Geoffrey’s death in Paris. Henry had wanted the infant to be named after himself and his grandfather, but Constance had defiantly refused; instead, as a badge of Breton independence and hostility toward the Plantagenets, she had named the child Arthur after the legendary king who the Bretons, claimed had once ruled their land and who, the prophets said, would return. From the time of Henry’s death, Constance had more or less governed Brittany in her son’s name and trained him to insubordination against Plantagenet rule, but more alarming to Eleanor, Arthur had been taken into custody by Philip Augustus in 1196 and raised in Paris with Philip’s own son, Louis. To confer the Plantagenet throne on Arthur would be to lay the empire at the feet of the king of the Franks. It was the consciousness of this fact that had caused Richard to abandon any momentary thoughts of designating Arthur as his heir and that now made Eleanor, her eyes wide open to John’s faults, fight for his succession to the throne.
On Richard’s accession, Eleanor had been obliged to ingratiate him with the public, but Coeur de Lion had offered a splendid figure for this sort of exploitation; in John’s case, her task can only be described as thankless. She understood that some people possess a talent for ruling, while others do not; John clearly fell into the latter category. A lack of intelligence was not the problem, since he had very real ability and had inherited much of his father’s energy and genius for administration. When Henry twenty-five years earlier had dragged the bored Young King on a tour of England’s law courts, these lessons in the profession of governing had been wasted on his eldest son, but young John, who often accompanied his father, developed a lifelong fascination for public business and in years to come would prove himself an indefatigable ruler. He also possessed whimsical charm, the reason that Eleanor and Richard were able to treat his lapses as the peccadilloes of a wayward boy, and he was something of a farceur who could not resist a joke, even a dangerous one. By temperament inclined toward indolence, he loved to saunter through life enjoying the best food and drink, jewels and rich garments, pretty women and amusing companions with whom he could while away hours in chatter and eternal games of backgammon. But, as no one knew better than Eleanor, John had always lacked balance and self-discipline, his moods shifting unpredictably from brilliance to the most inordinate stupidity and cruelty. Whether responsibility would teach him discretion, perhaps even wisdom, remained to be seen, but she intended to keep him under close watch in the hope of preventing any fatal misstep.
During Richard’s last hours, Eleanor had sent messages to John instructing him to leave Arthur’s court at once and take control of the great fortress of Chinon that held the Angevin treasure, and at the same time she persuaded the seneschal of Anjou to surrender the castle and swear fealty to John as Richard’s successor. While these matters prevented John from attending Coeur de Lion’s funeral on Palm Sunday, he finally arrived at Fontevrault on the Wednesday before Easter in the company of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, whose low opinion of Eleanor’s son could not have been more apparent. Wishing to view his brother’s tomb, John pounded furiously on the choir door. He was told, however, that Abbess Matilda was away and no visitor, however eminent, might enter without her permission. Standing on the porch with the bishop, he withdrew an amulet from around his neck and said that it had been given to one of his forebears with the promise from Heaven that whoever of the Plantagenets owned it would never lose their dominions. Annoyed, Hugh advised him to trust in God instead of stones and, pulling him over to a sculpture depicting wicked kings being cast into eternal hellfires on the Last Judgment, delivered a solemn lecture on the perils and responsibilities facing a ruler during his brief time upon earth. John, unimpressed, dragged Hugh to another sculpture where angels were leading righteous kings to everlasting happiness. “You should have shown me these,” he said, “for it is the example of these kings that I intend to follow.”
During the next three days at Fontevrault, John assumed a posture of exaggerated piety so completely uncharacteristic that he only succeeded in arousing suspicion. Finally, on Easter Sunday, his mask of humility dropped suddenly to reveal that prospective kingship had not altered his behavior one whit. At High Mass, Bishop Hugh took the occasion to preach, for John’s benefit, a lengthy sermon on the characters of good and bad kings and the future rewards of each. The congregation, which probably included Eleanor, listened patiently, but John, who had as little patience as his father for sitting still in church and receiving lectures from the clergy, began to grow fidgety. Three times during the sermon he interrupted the bishop with demands to cut short his sermon. He wanted, he declared loudly, his dinner. When Hugh ignored him, he horrified the congregation by jangling some gold coins that he had brought for the offering. Finally, Hugh could tolerate the disturbance no longer.
“What are you doing?” he called out to John.
“I am looking at these gold pieces and thinking that, if I had had them a few days ago, I would not have given them to you but put them into my own purse.”
Blushing vehemently, the bishop said, “Throw them into the dish and begone.”
On the very day that this appalling levity scandalized the Easter worshipers at Fontevrault, Eleanor’s worst fears were rapidly materializing only thirty miles away. An army of Bretons led by Arthur and Constance had marched on Angers and won it without striking a blow, after which a gathering of barons from Anjou, Maine, and Touraine accepted Arthur as their rightful sovereign. On the Monday after Easter, John hurried to Le Mans, but its citizens received him coldly, and the garrison refused to admit him. Learning that the Breton army and a force under Philip were converging on the town, he only just escaped capture by slipping away before daybreak on Tuesday. That day, Philip and Arthur triumphantly entered Le Mans, where Arthur did homage to the Capetian king for the counties of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. With the capitals of Anjou and Maine under enemy occupation, John had no choice but to flee for the safety of Normandy, where he was proclaimed duke at Rouen on Sunday, April 25. The ceremony, notable for its lack of dignity, tells us as much about John’s unreliable character as it does about the causes of Eleanor’s apprehension. While the ducal coronet of golden roses was being placed on his head by Archbishop Walter, a group of John’s cronies began to chuckle audibly and make mocking remarks about the solemn rites, no doubt the idea of their boon companion as hero of the ceremony being too much for them. From time to time, John himself turned around to join in their revelry. At the moment when Archbishop Walter presented him with the ducal lance, he was paying attention to his snickering friends, and the lance slipped from his hands to the ground. In later years, this untoward incident would be interpreted as an omen, but the horseplay that had caused the mishap was ominous enough in itself.
Meanwhile, Eleanor was left to staunch the anarchy that her son’s death had loosed. Even though Philip and Arthur had been quick to seize the moment, she determined that their triumph should be short-lived. With her at Fontevrault she had Richard’s mercenary captain, and now she ordered Mercadier to bring up his routiers from Chalus, where they had been left at Richard’s death. Unheeding of her age or the possibility of danger, she herself went to recover Angers with her hastily recruited army of cutthroats. Apparently Arthur and Constance did not expect such alacrity from John and certainly not from an aged queen, because at her approach they hastily retreated and fell back to Le Mans, while Mercadier ravaged Angers and took a throng of prisoners. Inspired perhaps by his mother’s example, John collected an army of Normans and marched south to Le Mans, but by this time Arthur had moved on, and John was only able to wreak his vengeance by pulling down the city’s walls, razing its castle, destroying houses, and seizing its leading citizens. But the danger was by no means over. Twice the Plantagenets had tried to capture Arthur, twice they had bungled. For John to remain now in the southern counties would have been to leave Normandy open to attack and very likely to risk capture himself. Leaving Anjou and Maine to the care of his mother and Mercadier, he retreated to Normandy, and at the end of May, sailed for England with a few close friends. On May 27, he was crowned at Westminster in a ceremony that the chroniclers disposed of briefly and matter-of-factly: seventeen prelates, ten earls, and “many barons” were present; twenty-one fat oxen were supplied for the banquet afterward. Other than this, they have little to say. Obviously, Eleanor’s touch was missing.
Back at Fontevrault, Eleanor quickly took stock of the crumbling Plantagenet empire. It was hard to believe that decades of planning could be overthrown in a few weeks. Brittany was irretrievably lost, and despite her exertions, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine floated precariously within her grandson’s grasp. For the time being, she remained fairly sure of Normandy, if only because the Normans had no wish to put themselves under the rule of a Breton, and as for the English, there was never a moment’s question about their aversion to Arthur. Her own estates of Aquitaine remained a question. There was little that spoke of hope in the spring of 1199, but Eleanor, her iron determination never more in evidence, resolved to secure what provinces she could for John and check the aggressions of Louis Capet’s son. Toward the end of April, she left Fontevrault with a small escort and set off on a political tour of the land of her birth. Avoiding only the Limousin, where Richard had been killed, she paid official visits from the border of Anjou to the frontier of Spain: On April 29, she was at Loudon; on May 4, at Poitiers; and then she sped southwest to Niort and La Rochelle. On July 1, she visited Bordeaux, and on July 4, Soulac. Aware that her people had grown heartily weary of Plantagenets, she did not come as a herald of any son but instead cut a wide swath through her lands as duchess of Aquitaine and demonstrated the largesse that had characterized the grandest of her forebears. As she explained in one of the many charters granted at this time, God having still left her in the world at the age of seventy-seven, she felt obliged to provide for the needs of her people and the welfare of her lands. Her political insight honed to a fine edge, she understood that the time had passed for buying support with gestures such as emptying jails and relaxing oppressive laws. In this crisis, she felt the necessity of securing loyalties with more durable coin. From her ducal inheritance she plucked castles, tithes, and privileges, dispensing them with an open hand to the abbots and castellans who flocked to her side. Justice was dispensed, old grievances redressed, manors and castles traded for fortresses, and one of the assets she bartered away in this manner was the ducal hunting grounds at Talmont, the seaside preserve that had been her father’s favorite and where the newly wed Louis Capet had very nearly lost his life in an ambush.
On this last grand tour of Aquitaine, a castle wall, the dip of a hill, an abbey, a mill, the sudden glimpse of a river brought back a flood of bittersweet memories. Here she had been born when the century was still young, and now, in a few months’ time, she would see the beginning of a new century. Around her that spring crowded unseen presences, ghosts from the far-off days of her youth: her quiet, sweet-faced mother and the baby William, who had deserted her so suddenly; William the Troubadour and his voluptuous viscountess of Chatellerault; her handsome father, who could eat enough for eight men and who had not returned from Compostela with the promised cockleshell; her uncle Raymond, the blond lion of a boy who could bend an iron bar and who had deliberately sought the blade of a Saracen sword in Outremer. Their bodies slept in crypts and churchyards all over Christendom, their souls had moved on to unknown planes, but the memory of their passages through these lands remained with her. Petronilla as a small, naughty girl who followed her like an adoring puppy; Petronilla, who could not live without her count of Vermandois; and later still, Petronilla with her only son, who had contracted leprosy. And there must have been others, too. The troubadours whose songs still eddied in her mind—Jaufre Rudel, Bernard of Ventadour, Marcabru with his cynical woman-hating verses. And the husbands that destiny and her own desires had brought to her—Louis Capet with his endless prayers and simple smile, and the man whose shouts of “By God’s eyes!” would always reverberate dimly in her ears. Henry FitzEmpress, Henry Plantagenet, King Henry II of England.
Her mind had become a library cataloguing the history of her time, all of which she had observed and much of which she had helped to make, and yet, unlike many aging people, there is good evidence that she refused to dwell in the past. Keenly aware of the changes that had taken place in her domains, she concentrated on the present and future. Where there once had been only cities and deserted countryside, now new conglomerates of people had sprung up, and in fact, the phenomenal growth of cities and towns had been the predominant characteristic of her era. These burghers and artisans who were proving so troublesome to local lords she released from their feudal obligations and invested with the civic liberties for which they clamored. At La Rochelle, she granted to the citizens a corporation “which shall enable them to defend and preserve their own rights more effectively,” and at Poitiers, where sixty years earlier Louis Capet had herded the burghers’ children into the main square as hostages because they had dared proclaim themselves a commune, Eleanor now presented the city with its charter of freedom. By granting these conciliatory charters of independence to town after town and releasing them from their obligations to local lords, she made it compulsory for them to contribute to their own defense, a strategy of such shrewdness that it would shortly be adopted by Philip Augustus. Did Eleanor perhaps foresee that one day these communes would impose on anarchistic Aquitaine the law and order that Henry had never been able to accomplish with fire and sword? One cannot know.
Between April and mid-July, Eleanor covered over a thousand miles, but the most personally difficult part of her mission still lay ahead. In July, she swallowed her pride and sought out Philip Augustus at Tours, where she did homage for her patrimony. A declaration of her independence from the struggle between Plantagenet and Capetian, which now had dragged on for two generations, this legal act excluded John from any claim to her inheritance and at the same time robbed Philip as well as Arthur of Brittany of any excuse to launch an offensive against her part of the empire. The accounts of the chroniclers provide only the barest details of this meeting, which must have been an unpleasant ordeal for both Eleanor and Philip, neither of whom had any illusions about the other. Philip, giving her the traditional kiss of peace, could not dispute her right to that vast territory that so many men had eyed hungrily, but he must have suspected that she was playing her cards close to her chest. What he could not know was that two months later, she would prepare a legal document ceding the duchy to John “as her right heir,” commanding her vassals to do him homage and receive him peaceably but retaining to herself sole sovereignty for the remainder of her own life.
In September, Eleanor joined her son in Rouen, where she brought up urgent business. Shortly before Richard’s death, there had been talk of a family alliance between Plantagenet and Capet, a project that Eleanor believed might help to cement a lasting peace and that she now urged John to revive in the hope of stalling Philip’s schemes. But before Eleanor could put these plans into effect, she was beset with further tragedy. Her daughter, Joanna, former queen of Sicily, present countess of Toulouse, had not found happiness as the wife of Raymond VI, the son of Eleanor’s old betrayer. In the course of the queen’s tour that summer, she had unexpectedly encountered Joanna, who had a story of woe to tell. Her husband, evidently, had proved to be as unchivalrous as his father, and he treated Joanna, his fourth wife, with as little kindness or fidelity as he had shown his previous spouses. She had borne him a son and that year was pregnant again when, her husband away fighting one of his vassals in Languedoc, she had been compelled to put down a revolt. While besieging the castle of Cassès, some of her husband’s knights had betrayed her by sending supplies to the castle and, as the last affront, set fire to her camp. Somehow, Joanna had escaped, and unable to rely on her husband, she had been fleeing north to seek the help of Richard when she learned of his death. At Niort, Eleanor had taken charge of her grieving and ill daughter and had sent her to the nuns of Fontevrault to recuperate. In September, however, Joanna arrived in Rouen, where, to the astonishment of all, she demanded to be made a nun of Fontevrault. Despite the fact that such a proceeding would be highly irregular—she was married and pregnant—Joanna persisted, and no amount of reasoning would deter her. In the end, Eleanor had supported her aspirations, and canon law had been overridden. It must have been obvious that her daughter, sick and worn, had reached the end of her days. Unable to stand when she took her vows, she closed her eyes a few days later and, minutes after her death, was delivered of a son, who lived only long enough to be baptized. In Rouen that autumn, the queen mourned her many recent losses. Alix of Blois had gone, leaving a daughter who had become a nun at Fontevrault. The lovely Countess Marie of Champagne had died the previous year, some said of sorrow when she learned that her eldest son, Henry, the king of Jerusalem, had fallen to his death from the window of his palace in Acre. Then Richard, and now Joanna. Of the ten children Eleanor had borne, only two remained: her namesake in faraway Castile and John Lackland.
In the first days of January 1200, the kings of England and France met on their mutual border to formally conclude a five-year treaty of peace. John, finally accepted as Richard’s heir for the Plantagenet lands on the Continent, did homage to Philip as his overlord; Philip, for his part, relinquished his claims to Maine and Anjou in Arthur’s name and agreed that the boy should do homage to John for Brittany. He refused, however, to give up custody of the youth. The treaty was sensible and fairly simple. If John had to pay thirty thousand marks of silver for his overlord’s recognition, something neither Henry nor Richard would have been asked to do, times had changed, and such a sum of money only reflected the growing domination by the French monarchy in the affairs of Europe. At any event, part of the succession duty was designated as a dower for a princess of Castile, who, according to the treaty, should marry Philip’s heir, Louis. At the conclusion of the negotiations, Gervase of Canterbury reported, the two kings “rushed into each other’s arms.”
Eleanor’s chests had already been packed, her escort mounted, and once the treaty had been formally concluded, she set off with all possible speed to her daughter’s court in Spain to bring back a bride for the young Louis Capet. Her route took her south to Poitiers and then down the highroad toward Bordeaux. Just past Poitiers, she entered the territory of the Lusignans, that quarrelsome and very numerous tribe who, thirty years earlier, had tried to abduct her and against whom the youthful William Marshal had demonstrated his knightly prowess. That generation of Lusignans had passed away, but another, just as nasty, had risen to take its place; as if to prove that history repeats, Hugh le Brun waylaid the queen’s party and insisted that she visit his castle, a polite invitation to a kidnaping. Hugh did not intend to detain her unduly, only long enough to adjudicate a grievance that, apparently, she had overlooked during her goodwill tour a few months earlier. For some years, he had been vying with the lord of Angoulême for control of the rich sprawling county of La Marche to the east. Decades earlier, Henry had acquired the county from the Lusignans, and Richard had taken care to keep La Marche in his hands, but now Hugh made it clear that Eleanor would be released only on the condition that she surrender the highly prized fief. Knowing the uselessness of argument with Hugh le Brun, thrown back on her own resources, the queen exchanged the county for her freedom so quickly that within hours she was back on the road again. And so swiftly did she urge her escort through Gascony and over the Pyrenees that she arrived in Castile before the end of January.
Lively and charming, polished at the court of Poitiers for her high calling, Eleanor Plantagenet had been only nine years old when she had bid farewell to her mother and departed for the Castilian court. During the three intervening decades, it is doubtful whether they had met, and now,in the winter of Eleanor’s life, it must have been a shock to see that the little damsel of her memories had become a thirty-eight-year-old mother of eleven children. For all her hurry to fetch a bride for the Capets, Eleanor seemed entranced once she arrived. The court of Alphonse VIII wore a civility and gaiety reminiscent of her own famous court at Poitiers; it was a place where troubadours gathered and poets still composed verse for a queen-patroness, who, like her mother, knew the value of beautiful words. With the Pyrenees between her and the maelstrom of problems in Europe, Eleanor settled into the sunny southern haven to renew thirty years of events with her namesake and make the acquaintance of her grandchildren. For two months, she tarried in her daughter’s company, and when finally the moment for departure could be delayed no longer, she did not leave with the grandchild for whom she had come. The queen of Castile had three daughters of marriageable age: The eldest, Berengaria, had already been betrothed to the heir of León (and would become the mother of Saint Ferdinand of Spain). The second girl, Urraca, had been set aside for Louis Capet, but Eleanor’s attention kept turning to the youngest of the three, twelve-year-old Blanche. There was something about the child that reminded her of herself, a streak of energy and ambition, perhaps that same vein of female strength that had safely borne Eleanor through the violent ebb and wash of twelfth-century politics. To justify her choice and prevent hurt feelings, it was necessary, however, to make diplomatic excuses. Urraca’s name, the official explanation went, was too Spanish for the French people, the very sound of it would seem harsh to them. Blanche, on the other hand, would roll easily in the langued’oil. Thus, Urraca was promptly betrothed to the heir of Portugal, while Blanche set off with Eleanor shortly before Easter. The roads through the Pyrenees were crowded with Easter pilgrims making their way toward Compostela, and perhaps under other circumstances, Eleanor might have joined the procession and visited the shrine where her father lay buried. But she had no time to spare for personal business, and soon she and Blanche had arrived at Bordeaux, where they rested for a few days at the Ombrière Palace. Looking down at the Garonne River or out toward the hills of Larmont, she might have pointed out to Blanche the field where Louis Capet’s knights had raised their colorful tents and their banners fluttering the fleur-de-lis. Between the aged queen and the young girl, who, like Eleanor herself, would someday take her place as the queen of a Capet named Louis, there must have been many words, the oral history that women pass from one generation to the next, as well as the whole chronology of hatred between Plantagenet and Capet.
Tutoring her granddaughter for life among the Capets, the queen strolled in the dappled shade of the Ombrière gardens, but her strength suddenly began to diminish. Weary past weariness, she nevertheless participated in the Easter festivities and dutifully received her vassals, one of whom was the man upon whom she had relied so heavily in recent months, the mercenary Mercadier. Now, however, another prop was abruptly removed. “While she was staying at the city of Bordeaux on account of the solemnity of Easter, Mercadier the chief of the Brabantines came to her and on the second day of Easter week he was slain in the city by a man-at-arms in the service of Brandin.” Come to pay his respects and escort his liege lady through Poitou, he had been killed in a street brawl. “After this, Queen Eleanor being fatigued with old age and the labour of the length of her journey, betook herself to the abbey of Fontevrault and there remained; while the daughter of the king of Castile, with Archbishop Elias of Bordeaux attending her, proceeded to Normandy and there was delivered into the charge of King John, her uncle.” On May 23, 1200, Blanche and Louis were married at Portmort in Normandy, just across the border from France. The bride could not be married in her new land because the kingdom lay under an interdict as a result of Philip’s misdeeds with a mistress; indeed, the king himself was not permitted to attend the ceremony. Nevertheless, he provided handsomely for entertainment. The sun shone, the banners flew, and the fields rang with song and the clashing of arms from the jousting arena.
At Fontevrault, the black-cowled figures silently trod the cloisters; the queen of England remained in her chamber, attended by her women. The chroniclers do not specify the nature of her illness, and perhaps at her age no explanation was necessary. Her travels during the past year had taxed her strength beyond the breaking point, and whatever maladies she might have suffered, no doubt exhaustion could be counted among them. From deep within herself she had dredged up unsuspected reserves of energy, and perhaps only when the crisis had passed did she allow herself to give way to natural fatigue. She had, for the first time, illusions about the future: She had secured the succession for John, she had placated Philip to some degree by doing homage for Aquitaine, she had married her granddaughter to the Capets. Henry’s empire—her empire—remained more or less intact. Although she did not underestimate Philip and his dream of Carolingian domination, there seemed to be nothing more that she could do for the moment.
In the first summer of the thirteenth century, there was peace. Secure in his relations with the Capets, John cautiously undertook a tour of Aquitaine, making sure, of course, to bring along a sizable army. He was in the merry mood of a man who has just become a bachelor after a decade of dull matrimony. For ten years, he and Isabelle of Gloucester had barely tolerated each other. She had not been crowned with him the previous May; indeed, she rarely saw him and had borne no children. Perhaps at Eleanor’s instigation, John had begun to consider his own posterity, and finding canonists to declare some glaring flaw in the marriage bond, he had become a single man again at the age of thirty-five. Undoubtedly, he had discussed with his mother the necessity of a second marriage as well as possible candidates, and their eyes had turned south to Portugal, where the king had a marriageable daughter. Early in 1200 tentative negotiations had begun, and during that quiet summer, John had dispatched an embassy to Lisbon for further discussions. Within weeks of its departure, however, the king’s eyes had settled elsewhere. In July, he was in Poitou visiting the ancestral castle of the Lusignans, who, now that they had unceremoniously wrested La Marche from Eleanor, were anxious to make peace with their overlord. Although John could not have been pleased with their fait accompli, he had no choice but to make the best of it. Arriving at Lusignan during one of those great fêtes for which the south was famous, he found that the gathering included Count Aymer of Angoulême, a traditional enemy of the Lusignans and until recently a rival contender for La Marche. Lately, however, the difficulties between these two unruly houses had been patched up, and Hugh le Brun of Lusignan had been betrothed to Aymer’s daughter, Isabella.
John, unlike Coeur de Lion, appreciated women, especially attractive ones. The twelve-year-old Isabella of Angoulême, as lovely and fresh as a newly budded rose, attracted him with a violence that completely knocked out of his head any marriage with an unknown Portuguese princess. Here, truly, was a feast to set before a king. Undismayed by Isabella’s youth, on the contrary probably aroused by it, he began to outline in his mind a bold plan. Under the roof of his unsuspecting hosts, he pulled aside Count Aymer and dangled before his astonished eyes the vision of his daughter on the throne of England, an offer that caused the count to immediately discard any idea of Hugh le Brun as a son-in-law. It was agreed, however, that in view of the well-known violent disposition of the Lusignans, their conversations should remain secret. “On seeing that the king of England had a fancy for her,” Aymer unhesitatingly removed the damsel from the household of her betrothed and whisked her back to Angoulême, while John found a pretext for dispatching the Lusignan brothers on missions to remote regions. Then he too left the region and continued south as far as Bordeaux. Not until August 23 did he casually arrive at Angouleme, but by this time he had added to his entourage the archbishop of Bordeaux. On Sunday the twenty-fourth, the date originally set for Isabella’s marriage to Hugh le Brun, Archbishop Elias married the king to his child bride. Before news of this event could reach the Lusignans, John took the precaution of leaving the neighborhood and hastily beat a path to the safety of Chinon.
Later, the chroniclers would date John’s subsequent troubles from this unprecipitate marriage, charging that Isabella had bewitched him, that in the grip of passion he had forgotten questions of policy or the possibility of repercussions. Actually, this does not seem to have been completely the case, although as often happens in matters of political policy, personal factors certainly played a role. The idea of the two rival houses of Angoulême and Lusignan resolving their differences could only have distressed John, and further, the prospect of Hugh le Brun eventually becoming lord of Lusignan. La Marche, and Angouleme would have disturbed him even more deeply. With Hugh ruling an area as large as the whole duchy of Normandy, the balance of power in Aquitaine would have been threatened: one way to avert this danger was for John to marry Isabella himself. At the same time, however, the exploit appealed to his sense of humor; at one stroke he could curb the Lusignans, take revenge for their kidnaping his mother and stealing La Marche, and possess a nymphet for whom he lusted. These delights far outweighed any fear of Hugh le Brun’s indignation over the loss of his fiancee.
It has been suggested that John consulted Eleanor before he took this important step and that she gave her approval if not her joyful consent. But Eleanor’s attitude has not been recorded, and perhaps her illness prevented her from accurately gauging the risks that John was taking in alienating the Lusignans. In the hands of an adroit king, such an exploit could be conducted successfully, but with John one never knew. It is possible that she, too, felt overjoyed to see Hugh le Brun cut down to size after his presumption in accosting highway travelers. At any event, John and Isabella visited her at Fontevrault that autumn, and as evidence of her goodwill toward the couple, she dowered Isabella with the cities of Niort and Saintes. At the beginning of October, the newlyweds went to England, where they were crowned together in Westminster Abbey on the eighth. Across the Channel, it was easy to forget the Lusignans; the king and queen made a grand tour around the country, one of those sweeping trips Henry had so loved, with John poking his nose into the tiniest hamlets, accepting homage from his vassals, hearing law cases, visiting Bishop Hugh of Lincoln in his last illness and remaining to act as a pallbearer at his funeral. During these months, the English could not help but make comparisons, and after a decade of absentee kingship, no matter how glorious Coeur de Lion had been, they felt grateful for a king who liked them well enough to live in their midst. It was, some people said, almost like a return to the days of old Henry FitzEmpress. By the middle of March 1201, John and Isabella were still in England, and on Easter they made a pilgrimage to Canterbury, where they wore their crowns and attended a lavish banquet as the guests of Archbishop Hubert Walter.
With the royal couple thus occupied, Eleanor continued to watch for trouble in the Continental provinces. Weak and bedridden, she nevertheless retained her sensitivity to gathering storms, and one of the areas on which she trained her ears was the Lusignan fortress in Poitou; indeed, it would not have required a seeress to anticipate trouble. Curiously, however, the clan had nursed their injuries in silence since the previous summer, hoping perhaps that John would recompense them for their loss. But John had no such intention, and for that matter, success having bred overbearing confidence, he deliberately provoked them further by authorizing his officials to take back the county of La Marche from Hugh and to attack Ralph of Lusignan’s county of Eu and “do him all the harm they could.” Disturbed by rumors of imminent defections and conspiracies, Eleanor sent for Viscount Amaury of Thouars, a kinsman and one of the most powerful barons of Poitou. In the uncertain days after Richard’s death, he had joined Eleanor in her attack on Angers, and John, no doubt at his mother’s behest, had rewarded the viscount with the wardship of Chinon and also made him seneschal of Anjou and Touraine. Once the danger had passed, however, he had taken these offices away again. Now, fearful of war in Poitou, Eleanor hastened to remedy this blunder and to reattach the viscount to their side. Writing to John of her diplomatic triumph, she said:
I want to tell you, my very dear son, that I summoned our cousin Amaury of Thouars to visit me during my illness and the pleasure of his visit did me good, for he alone of your Poitevin barons has wrought us no injury nor seized unjustly any of your lands.... I made him see how wrong and shameful it was for him to stand by and let other barons render your heritage asunder, and he has promised to do everything he can to bring back to your obedience the lands and castles that some of his friends have seized.
Both Eleanor and the viscount wrote to warn of impending trouble and urged John to return immediately to the Continent.
The king, for whatever reason, took his good time in answering their appeals and delayed his arrival until June, at which time he must have decided that his ailing mother’s anxieties were completely groundless. It was true that Ralph and Hugh le Brun of Lusignan had renounced their allegiance and appealed to the king of France with complaints that John had unjustly attacked them. But even though Philip accepted the appeal, he handled the matter cautiously. When John arrived at Barfleur, Philip persuaded the Lusignans to suspend their attacks against the Poitevin government and went to meet John personally at Chateau Gaillard, where they talked the matter over. And a few days after that, John and Isabella paid a state visit to Paris, where they were entertained lavishly at the Cite Palace, Philip himself having vacated the palace in their honor and retired to Fontainebleau. In this atmosphere of conviviality, the two kings worked out a reasonable compromise on the question of the Lusignans: Philip would not press their appeal for redress if John would give them the chance to submit their grievances at a formal trial. Having reached a sensible solution and drunk vast quantities of champagne, the rivals parted with embraces and protestations of brotherly love.
In the summer of 1201 not a cloud marred John’s horizons. His mother’s fears had proved baseless: Philip Augustus had behaved like a lamb; Aquitaine had been secured by John’s friendship with Amaury of Thouars and his new father-in-law Aymer of Angoulême; Constance of Brittany had died, and hopefully there would be no further trouble with Arthur. His future, at last, seemed secure. That summer, too, no more was heard from Eleanor, who seems to have vanished among the shadowy cloisters. Unfortunately, security had the effect of arousing John to further exhibitions of high-handedness, or perhaps it was only a manifestation of his bizarre sense of humor. Instead of giving the Lusignans their day in court, he charged them with treason and invited them to prove their innocence by fighting a duel. The ordeal of battle, while no longer fashionable, was nevertheless still recognized as legally proper. The Lusignans, however, scorned to fight the professional duelists whom John had recruited, insisting that they were answerable only to their peers. Once more, they protested to Philip Augustus that they were being denied justice. Throughout the autumn and winter, the diplomatic farce continued, with John fixing dates for trials and then inventing elaborate excuses why the trials could not take place. Again Philip intervened, and again John promised the Lusignans justice.
Normally an impatient man, Philip Augustus had personal reasons for staying his hand. For the past decade, he had been involved in a distressing scandal with women. In 1192, the widowed Capetian had married Princess Ingeborg, sister of the king of Denmark, and had her crowned queen of France. The day after the wedding, however, he changed his mind and attempted to send her back to Denmark, but the outraged queen retreated only as far as a convent at Soissons, where she sped an appeal to Pope Celestine. While the aged Celestine did little for her restoration, he was succeeded by the more forceful Innocent III, who supported Ingeborg’s claims, and in 1200, lowered an interdict on Philip’s lands, not only for having forsaken Ingeborg but also for contracting an illegal union with a German heiress, Agnes of Meran, who had borne the king a daughter. Overwhelmed by these marital and extramarital problems, Philip spent much of his time negotiating with Rome. In the previous year, he had been forced to take back Ingeborg as his lawful wife, but he imprisoned her and continued to live with Agnes, who had a second child, a son. It was not until July 19, 1201, that “his German adulteress” relieved him of his problems by conveniently dying. Now only one legal entanglement remained—Rome’s recognition of Agnes’s children as legitimate—and until he received a favorable response from Innocent, he dared not make a move against the Plantagenets lest he jeopardize his case.
In March 1202, just as Philip’s patience with John neared its limit, he received word that the papal curia had legitimized his son and daughter as royal heirs of the house of Capet. On April 28, Philip was ready to realize the ambition of his life, the destruction of Plantagenet power. Using the Lusignans as his pretext, he ordered John to answer charges in Paris and to undergo sentence by a court of French barons. John airily replied that, as duke of Normandy and king of England, he could not be summoned to a Parisian court, to which Philip retorted with equal aplomb that he had addressed the summons to John as duke of Aquitaine, count of Poitou, and count of Anjou. It was not his fault that John happened to be duke of Normandy and king of England as well. John, quite understandably, did not appear in Paris on the appointed day, and therefore “the assembled barons of the King of France adjudged the King of England to be deprived of all his land which he and his forefathers had hitherto held of the King of France.” Fifty years earlier, John’s father had treated a similar summons with scorn when he had married without the permission of his overlord—but John was not Henry, and Philip Augustus bore little resemblance to Louis Capet. Philip could hardly be called a man of courage—he would mount only the most docile horses, and he saw assassins behind trees—nor was he a venturesome military tactician. But what he lacked in boldness he made up for in cunning and persistence.
The man born to be a hammer to the king of the English had pounded doggedly but, in the end, impotently upon the shields of Henry Plantagenet and Richard Coeur de Lion, but time had fought on Philip’s side. Finally, there remained only the feckless John, and even though it was common knowledge that he followed his mother’s advice, the eagle-eyed grandam, half dead at Fontevrault, had not been heard from in some time. When John failed to answer his summons, Philip first declared forfeit all John’s lands except Normandy and England and then he fell upon eastern Normandy. Not for Philip Capet any bold conquistadorial sally down the valley of the Loire; instead, he attacked piecemeal, raiding border towns, snatching a county here, besieging a castle there. At Gournay, in July, he knighted Arthur in the presence of the French barons and received the boy’s homage not only for Brittany but for all the Continental lands inherited by John save Normandy, which Philip intended to keep for himself. Furthermore, he betrothed Arthur to his five-year-old daughter by Agnes of Meran and then endowed his prospective son-in-law with two hundred Frankish knights and instructions to take possession of his inheritance. The first target: Poitou.
Hearing of these events, Eleanor took violent exception to Philip’s disposition of her domains. At eighty, she could not deny that her end was drawing near, but duty, pride, and no doubt anger would not allow her to lie in her abbey bed while Louis Capet’s hated son dismembered the Plantagenet empire. She must have acknowledged the likelihood that someday Philip and Arthur would seize Anjou and Maine, but one humiliation she would not tolerate: She would not permit them to have Aquitaine while she possessed life enough to stop them. Accompanied by a small escort, she left the safety of Fontevrault toward the end of July and set out for Poitiers, where perhaps she believed that her presence alone might stiffen her vassals’ resistance to Arthur’s onslaught. We do not know the precise state of her health that summer; it is conceivable that during her convalescence she had regained some of her strength, but even so, it is not hard to imagine her weakened condition. For this reason, she was compelled to travel slowly and break the fifty-mile journey now and then. In the last week of July, she was at the castle of Mirebeau on the border of Anjou and Poitou.
During that same week, John was in the vicinity of Le Mans. Ever since his peace treaty with Philip two years earlier, English barons had taunted him with a new nickname, John “Softsword,” but at this stage of the crisis he was behaving with remarkable capability. In the hope of diverting those Bretons intending to join Arthur, he had sent part of his forces to harass eastern Brittany, and his Norman garrisons he left to fend off Philip’s attacks. He himself rode south with a hastily recruited army of mercenaries to protect Maine and Anjou, the vulnerable heart-land of the empire.
In the meantime, Arthur, flushed with confidence and “marching forth with a pompous noise,” had arrived in Tours with his force of borrowed French knights. While waiting there for the arrival of his Breton barons and making preparations for the assault on Poitou, he was joined by three of the Lusignans. Impatient and full of strategies of their own, the brothers disdained to wait for the Bretons and instead urged an immediate attack on Poitou: indeed, they proposed an even bolder plan. Intelligence had come to their ears that the old queen was stopping at the castle of Mirebeau.
For fifty years, the Lusignan family seems to have been obsessed with the idea of kidnaping Eleanor. Twice before they had made attempts, the most recent of which had worked out with unexpected success. In this situation, her worth as a hostage would be considerable, for it would enable them to wrest from John any concession they liked. The loss of his mother would rob the king of his most sagacious counselor; furthermore, as duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, it was in Eleanor’s power to make Philip’s declaration of forfeiture null and void in Aquitaine so long as she lived to assert her claims. While Arthur had no feelings of loyalty or affection for his grandmother, he hesitated on the grounds that he wished to wait for reinforcements from Brittany. But in the end, the impetuous Lusignans prevailed. It would be an easy matter to take Mirebeau: The queen’s escort was insignificant, the risks minimal, and her capture would bring the soft-sworded Plantagenet king to his knees. In the closing days of July, the boy duke of Brittany and his Frankish knights followed the Lusignans down the back roads toward Mirebeau.
Of all the places that Eleanor might have stopped to rest, Mirebeau was the least secure. A half century earlier it had been a formidable castle; Geoffrey Anjou had bequeathed it to his younger son, and when the young Geoffrey planned his uprising against Henry in 1155, he had added fortifications to make it impregnable. By the summer of 1202, however, the walled castle encircled by a walled town had become as invincible as a child’s sand castle. Not only did it totter on the brink of collapse, but it was not stocked to resist a siege.
Arthur’s arrival did not catch the queen unprepared. She, too, had her sources of information, and before the first thud of hoofbeats reached her ears, she had already sent a messenger riding hard toward Le Mans in search of her son. It is generally believed that this was an urgent plea for rescue, but since John was not known for speed or military prowess, it seems equally likely that she dispatched the messenger only as a means of informing the king of his enemies’ movements. In any case, she knew that she could not hold out long. Few details of the siege have been preserved, but it seems that Arthur coolly opened negotiations with his grandmother by demanding her surrender and offering a promise of release if she would confirm Philip Augustus’s arrangements for her inheritance. In no position to disdain parley, Eleanor pretended to bargain, but she took care to play for time by drawing out the negotiations as long as possible.
By Monday, July 31, Arthur’s army had taken possession of the town as well as the castle, forcing Eleanor to withdraw into the keep with a few soldiers. Only the portcullis stood between her and capture. That evening she could stare down upon the comings and goings of her besiegers. Having barricaded all the town gates except one, which they left open to receive supplies, the soldiers began to settle themselves for the night. It was a warm evening with a sky full of magnificent stars. With their quarry at their mercy, the men seemed to be in a casual, almost festive mood. Putting aside their armor, they made their beds in the streets and in the inner enclosure of the castle under the open sky, and they fell asleep knowing that in the morning they could storm the keep without losing a man.
While Mirebeau slumbered, John and his forces were approaching the outskirts of the town. Traveling by day and night in an eighty-mile forced march from Le Mans, he had covered the distance in less than forty-eight hours with a suddenness reminiscent of Henry’s astounding ability to pop up in unexpected places as if carried effortlessly by the wind. With John came William des Roches, the seneschal of Anjou, who offered to lead the attack on the understanding that John would not put to death Arthur or any of the rebels, that captives would not be removed from the county until a truce had been established, and that des Roches would have a chief say in Arthur’s future. John agreed. Dawn was breaking on Tuesday, August 1, as des Roches and his men crept up to the one open gate. When they rushed in with drawn swords, Hugh le Brun and his brothers were having an early breakfast of roast pigeons, but most of the besiegers were still snoring or were slumped half-dressed. By the time that the sun broke through the clouds, the whole of Arthur’s forces had been either slain or captured; not a man escaped. Exultant over his victory, John himself described the feat in a letter to his English barons:
Know that by the grace of God we are safe and well and God’s grace has worked wonderfully with us, for on Tuesday before the feast of Saint Peter ad Vincula, when we were on the road to Chinon, we heard that our lady mother was closely besieged at Mirebeau and we hurried there as fast as we could. And there we captured our nephew Arthur, Geoffrey de Lusignan, Hugh le Brun, Andrew de Chauvigni, the viscount of Châtellerault, Raymond Thouars, Savary de Mauleon, Hugh Bauge, and all our other Poitevin enemies who were there, being upwards of two hundred knights, and not one escaped. Praise God for our victory.
Undoubtedly it was an astounding achievement for in a few hours, John had succeeded in capturing the most important of his rebel enemies. Some said that his demon ancestry had carried him to Mirebeau so swiftly, others called it a miracle, and Eleanor, continuing safely on her journey, may have felt for the first time in thirty-five years that her youngest son might be a great king after all. In Normandy, where the king of the Franks was occupied with the siege of Arques, the news of John’s incredible exploit cast the Capetian into a fit of depression. Dismantling his siege engines, he hurried south to see if anything might be retrieved from the disaster, but he was too late. His dream of reviving Charlemagne’s empire had been shattered by the stupidity of the Lusignans: Arthur captured, his best knights in chains, his Poitevin allies dispersed, the incompetent Lackland in control, and all for the sake of capturing an eighty-year-old woman whom the world would soon forget. Venting his frustration by setting fire to Tours, Philip Augustus could do nothing ultimately but smolder, and “at length he retreated to Paris and remained inactive there for the rest of the year.”
Meanwhile, John was making a leisurely progress through Anjou and Normandy, parading his manacled prisoners as a warning to those considering sedition. The spectacle of the leading barons and knights of France, Brittany, and Poitou in chains was not witnessed by Eleanor, who had reached Poitiers, but the wretched sight would be remembered by others and detailed with sad astonishment by the chroniclers. “Having secured his prisoners in fetters and shackles and having placed them in cars, a new and unusual mode of conveyance, the king sent some of them to Normandy and some to England to be imprisoned in strong castles.” Hugh le Brun, securely fettered, was consigned to a special tower at Caen, while less important prisoners were shipped to Corfe Castle and other strongholds in England, where some died of starvation and a very few managed to escape. As for the prize captive, the duke of Brittany was placed in a dungeon at Falaise on August 10.
That year, John kept Christmas court at Caen, “feasting with his queen and lying in bed till dinner-time,” but the holiday was marked by a sense of uneasy triumph for Eleanor. In Poitiers, safe in her high tower above the Clain, she had genuine reason for optimism in that, for the moment at least, the Plantagenets held the trump cards in their struggle with Philip Augustus. If someone had told her that the triumph of Mirebeau would be the last great victory of an English king on French soil until the fourteenth century and that within the next two years even Normandy, the most loyal of the Plantagenet fiefs on the Continent, would virtually be lost, she might have laughed in derision. And then again she might not have. Even by Christmas of 1202 the ominous signs were there for those possessing the perception to read them. She was aware that John trod on extremely delicate ground with regard to the imprisonment of Arthur and the rebels, since these imprisonments had followed ruthlessly on John’s oath to William des Roches at Mirebeau that he would not take vengeance. Perhaps Eleanor herself had genuinely, if naively, expected John to keep his promise. But after des Roches and Amaury of Thouars had seen their relatives and friends tied to oxcarts on the road to Normandy, these barons and others had turned away from John in disgust and transferred their allegiance to the French king. By midautumn they had captured Angers, the city Eleanor had personally retaken in the weeks after Richard’s death, and soon the roads between Chinon and Poitiers became unsafe for travel. As Eleanor might have told John, victory in itself is meaningless if one lacks the intelligence to profit from it, but the closeness of her relations with her son at this period is unclear. With the rebels holding much of the territory between Poitiers and Chinon, communications were often poor. However, from rumor if nothing else she would have known of the pressure being brought to bear on the king for Arthur’s release, some of his vassals even offering their homage to Philip for the duration of Arthur’s imprisonment. In November, John had released the Lusignans, a foolish concession, because despite their pledges of loyalty, they immediately joined the rebel party.
Admittedly, the question of what to do with Arthur was a thorny one, and perhaps on Eleanor’s advice, John tried to make peace with his nephew. According to Roger of Wendover, he visited Falaise in January 1203 and ordered the boy brought to him. “The king addressed him kindly and promised him many honors, asking him to separate himself from the French king and to adhere to the side of his lord and uncle.” But the boy regarded John as he would a worm in a bowl of porridge.
Arthur ill-advisedly replied with indignation and threats, and demanded that the king give up to him his kingdom of England with all the territories which King Richard had possessed at his death. Since all these possessions belonged to him by hereditary right, he swore that unless King John quickly restored the aforesaid territory to him, he would never give him a moment’s peace for the rest of his life. The king was much troubled at hearing his words.
More than “much troubled,” John was infuriated at the youth’s audacity. After six months in the dungeons of Falaise, an experience sufficient to humble the most stiff-necked, the boy’s overweening pride remained intact, and his haughtiness seemed as strong as ever. But more than outraged, John grew panicky. Something about the interview frightened him and frightened him so badly that he at once began to consider drastic measures. Perhaps he was convinced that the boy seriously meant his threats and would truly remain a source of anxiety and potential uprising for the remainder of John’s days. Afterward, a chronicler said, John took counsel with certain advisers (which ones are unspecified) who urged him to have Arthur castrated and blinded so as to eliminate him as a rival. Orders for the mutilations were given, but the two men sent to carry them out lost their stomach for the ghastly operation upon hearing Arthur’s howls and finally his jailer, Hubert de Burgh, sent them away. After countermanding the king’s orders, de Burgh took it upon himself to announce that Arthur had died of natural causes; bells were rung at Falaise, and the boy’s clothing distributed to charity. This quickly proved to be a miscalculation on de Burgh’s part, because instead of removing the wind from the Bretons’ sails as he had hoped, the announcement only roused Arthur’s partisans to new heights of hysteria, in which they swore undying vengeance on John. At this point, de Burgh hastily amended his report and swore that Arthur was still alive; no one, however, believed him.
In February or March, John “gave orders that Arthur should be sent to Rouen to be imprisoned in the new tower there and kept closely guarded.” And then, the chronicler added abruptly, “the said Arthur disappeared.”
The disappearance of Arthur of Brittany remained the great unsolved mystery of the thirteenth century. It is true that after the gates of Rouen clanged shut behind him, he was never seen again, but ugly rumors had circulated while he was still alive at Falaise. Sinister stories were told in Paris, in Brittany, even at the queen’s own court in Poitiers, to the effect that the king of England had murdered his own nephew. The fact is that no one, probably not even Eleanor, knew for certain what had happened to Arthur. The chroniclers could only report rumors: “Opinion about the death of Arthur gained ground by which it seemed that John was suspected by all of having slain him with his own hand; for which reason many turned their affections from the king and entertained the deepest enmity against him.” One of the few people in a position to know what actually happened was William de Braose, the man who had captured Arthur at Mirebeau and later the commander of the new fortress at Rouen, where Arthur was imprisoned after he left Falaise. One of John’s cronies, de Braose remained high in the king’s favor until about 1210, when he dropped so suddenly that he was forced to take refuge at the French court. Long after people had stopped guessing about Arthur’s whereabouts, monks at the Cistercian abbey of Margam in Wales set down in their annals a detailed account of the duke’s death. Since the de Braoses were patrons of the abbey, it has been concluded that the monks received their information from de Braose himself or some member of his family. The chronicler described the following events as taking place on April 3, 1203:
After King John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison for some time in the castle of Rouen, after dinner on the Thursday before Easter, when he was drunk and possessed of the devil, he slew him with his own hand and, tying a heavy stone to the body, cast it into the Seine. It was brought up by the nets of a fisherman and, dragged to the bank, was identified and secretly buried, for fear of the tyrant, in Notre Dame des Pres, a priory of Bec.
Toward the end of April 1203, Eleanor and her barons received a messenger bearing a letter from John, written at Falaise on April 16 and witnessed by William de Braose. “We send to you brother John of Valerant, who has seen what is going forward with us and who will be able to appraise you of our situation. Put faith in him respecting those things whereof he will inform you. God be thanked, things are going better for us than this man is able to tell you.” It has been suggested that this cryptic last line was John’s way of informing his mother that the Plantagenets had nothing more to fear from the duke of Brittany. If this was truly so and Eleanor was able to read between the lines of her son’s letter, she must have realized that Plantagenet rule in France had become no more substantial than a guttering candle.
It was spring again. The sap had begun to rise in the withered trees, the rivers gleamed like wax, plowmen turned over the good black earth, small birds swooped and dipped against the canopy of the sky. It was the season of renewal and also the season for going to war. The king of France roamed the Plantagenet provinces at will; sailing down the Loire by boat, he leisurely took possession of fortresses along his route, and in ensuing months, he would have those famous castles where Eleanor and Henry had kept their Christmas courts, brought children into the world, made love, and quarreled furiously: Domfront, Le Mans, Falaise, Bayeux, Lisieux, Caen, Avranches. “Messengers came to John with the news, saying that the King of the French has entered your territories as an enemy, has taken such and such castles, carries off their governors ignominiously bound to their horses’ tails, and disposes of your property at will without anyone stopping him. In reply to this news, King John said, ‘Let him alone! Someday I will recover all I have lost.’ ” By August 1203, Philip had reached the Rock of Andelys and cast his eyes up at Chateau Gaillard, the fortress that Richard had boasted he could defend if its walls were made of butter. The seat of Plantagenet power on the Continent, it was the one castle that by all logic the Capetian had no hope of winning and, by the same token, John had no fear of losing. Even so, Philip set up his siege engines and catapults.
“In the meantime,” Roger of Wendover writes, “the king was staying inactive with his queen at Rouen, so that it was said that he was infatuated by sorcery or witchcraft, for in the midst of all his losses and disgrace, he showed a cheerful countenance to all, as though he had lost nothing.” The chronicler omits a few important facts. At the end of August, John devised an imaginative plan for the relief of Chateau Gaillard, a night operation to bring supplies to the castle by land and water, but a miscalculation of the tides on the Seine turned the expedition into a disaster, and John’s army was repulsed with heavy losses. The king’s failure to relieve Chateau Gaillard provided the final blow to the confidence of his Norman barons. By the autumn of 1203, his military resources were exhausted, and even William Marshal bluntly advised him to abandon the struggle.
“Whoso is afraid, let him flee!” answered John. “I myself will not flee for a year.”
“Sire,” Marshal pointed out, “you have not enough friends. You who are wise and mighty and of high lineage and whose work it is to govern us all have not been careful to avoid irritating people.”
By the first week of December, there remained on the Continent little that John could call his own except Rouen, the beleaguered Rock of Andelys, and the Norman shores of the Channel. On December 5, he sailed from Barfleur with Isabella, William Marshal, and a few others. He was leaving, he said, to seek the aid and counsel of his English barons; he would, he promised, return soon. Exactly three months later, on March 6, 1204, the Saucy Castle hung out a white flag. Those Norman barons who had remained loyal sent couriers to England notifying the king of their precarious position, “to which messages King John answered that they were to expect no assistance from him but that each was to do what seemed best to him.”
Among those thus cast upon their own resources was Eleanor, but by this time she had, evidently, slipped into a coma, the annals of Fontevrault stating that she existed as one already dead to the world. She would not live to witness the loss of Normandy, to watch Louis Capet’s son march into Poitiers, to hear of Runnymede or Magna Charta, and of course she would never know that only one king of England would be named John. Perhaps even the fall of Coeur de Lion’s Chateau Gaillard failed to penetrate the private cocoon into which she had withdrawn.
The last months of her life are blank. The chroniclers were too busy documenting the smoking rubble of Henry’s great dream to concern themselves with an octogenarian queen, and later, they would not even agree on the place where she had spent her last days. The chronicle of Saint Aubin of Angers claimed that she died in her native city of Poitiers, but others declared that prior to her coma, she had made her way to Fontevrault, where she took the veil. During those last fatal months, whether at the ducal palace of her forebears or among the veiled women at Fontevrault, she had been a queen for sixty-six years, but she did not count the time. Born with one foot on fortune’s throne, crowned with garlands of rare intelligence and beauty, loving when she could and hating when she must, she had traveled a long weary road through the highest citadels of Christendom. On April 1, 1204, her turbulent pilgrimage ended.
Eight centuries later, the traveler driving along the Loire toward Tours may turn down N 147 at Montsoreau village and ride the few miles to Fontevrault Abbey. There in the cool south transept of the . church can be seen Eleanor of Aquitaine lying between the second of her husbands and her beloved Coeur de Lion. The Gothic effigy on her tomb, ravaged by time and revolution, shows her lying full length, her ageless face framed by a wimple, her expression radiating dignity and the faintest suggestion of a smile. Her graceful fingers clasp a small open book—and who can tell from the stone image whether it is a missal or a volume of those cansos that meant so much to her? In the shadows, alone with her book, she reads on in peace and serenity.