Ever since she was thirteen years old, Eleanor had stood at the heart of western European politics. For a decade and a half she had been queen of France; for two decades more she had been queen of England. Throughout, she had cherished her rights and responsibilities as duchess of Aquitaine. She had travelled to Jerusalem and back, and that dramatic voyage had been only the most extraordinary episode in a life lived in constant motion. Above all, perhaps, she had believed in her own agency. Though she could not command her husbands, she had an indomitable will and a tough political mind, and she had always had a choice about how she reacted to the circumstances, however difficult, in which she found herself.
Now, for the first time, she had no choice at all. How can we begin to imagine her response as weeks of captivity became months, and months became years, until it became clear that in this, as in so many things, Henry would be relentless? Her isolation was such that imagination is all we have. Even the place of her confinement is not known for certain, bar the fact that it was in England, where expenses for her keeping were periodically allowed at the exchequer. We know nothing of how she spent her days while the years of her middle age – the time she had hoped to spend ruling her homeland of Aquitaine – ebbed fruitlessly away. Nor can we be sure how much she knew about what was happening outside the walls of her prison (for that is what it was, however comfortable her accommodation). It is likely that Henry made every effort to restrict her contact with the outside world; it is equally likely that Eleanor did her utmost to subvert his orders.
We can only guess, therefore, what news she heard of her sons as they grew into adulthood without her. Was it a source of distress or consolation to know that her favourite, Richard, was ruling Aquitaine in her stead, and showing his worth as a soldier and a strategist? Her sons, at any rate, did not forget her. Henry must have hoped that her incarceration would serve to coerce their loyalty – although that was a happy side-effect of a policy rooted in his own rage at the perversion of his wife’s betrayal and the intolerable public humiliation it represented.
If Eleanor was a hostage for her sons’ co-operation, her plight did its work in harnessing Richard to her husband’s cause. His first task as his father’s lieutenant in Aquitaine, in command now of the troops and revenues Eleanor had never been granted for her own government there, was to raze the castles of his recently abandoned allies, those Poitevin lords who had backed his rebellion. The biting irony of the campaign did nothing to deter the eighteen-year-old duke from executing his task with grim efficiency. His next eight years were spent in the saddle at the head of his soldiers, suppressing a succession of revolts by Aquitainian lords unhappy with Henry’s imposing regime and its incarnation in their midst in the person of Richard himself. There could have been no more rigorous practical training in the art and science of military command, and it forged Richard into a leader of such implacable single-mindedness, such nerveless courage and pitiless brutality, that, despite his devotion to his mother’s homeland, he was loathed by many of his vassals there.
His elder brother Henri, meanwhile, was putting his military talents to more frivolous use. The Young King’s passion was for tournaments – the wild excitement and violent glamour of the mêlée – which he pursued across France and Flanders at the head of a following largely composed of landless knights, the younger sons of younger brothers who reaped the rewards of his careless extravagance. He had neither the application nor the stamina to learn from his father’s attempts to school him in statecraft and the harsh lessons of real, rather than counterfeit, warfare, but repeated demonstrations of that fact did nothing to dent his conviction that he was the victim of outrageous injustice in being kept from the exercise of power. At first his father placated his tantrums and threats – Henry rendered indulgent in this, as in no other area of his life, by his love for his son and his blind determination that Henri would, in time, come to appreciate the scale of his future responsibilities. But by 1183 it had become starkly apparent that no moment of self-realisation – nor any concern for his incarcerated mother – would restrain the Young King from following the dictates of his bloated ego.
By the spring of that year Aquitaine had emerged as his chosen battleground. Having failed to persuade his father to hand Normandy or Anjou into his control, Henri had toyed with the idea of leaving for Jerusalem in a fit of flamboyant pique, before deciding instead to pick a fight with his younger brother. Richard, in Aquitaine, already had the independence Henri craved; and the hostility of those Aquitainian lords who resented their imperious duke seemed to offer the Young King a chance to oust his brother from power, and to supplant him. At an extraordinary gathering of the royal court at Christmas 1182, with more than a thousand knights crowding his hall at Caen, the Old King sought, yet again, to broker a truce by which he might unite his fractured family. But once the extent of Henri’s disloyalty became known – once it was clear that he was mustering for war at the very moment he pledged his commitment to peace – even Henry had to concede that his heir could be indulged no further. The king summoned troops to the Limousin to fight alongside Richard and his forces, while Henri rallied the rebels of Aquitaine to defy them. Once again – and this time without Eleanor’s help – her husband and sons stood on the brink of the abyss.
But this time there would be no reconciliation. At the end of May, after an inconclusive siege of the Young King’s encampment at Limoges by his father and brother, Henri fell gravely ill with dysentery. When his doctors realised that he was beyond help, he sent urgently to his father, begging forgiveness and the privilege of a last meeting. But he had abused Henry’s trust too many times, and the king, fearing some new treachery, would not go. Henri died on 11 June 1183, at the age of just twenty-eight. The celebrity of this most glamorous and shallow of princes was such that the people of Le Mans kidnapped his corpse en route to its last resting-place at Rouen; only under threat of force did they disinter it from a new-made tomb in their cathedral and send the cortège on its way. And with his death, his revolt collapsed, along with his grief-stricken father’s plans for the future of his empire.
Eleanor, hearing in faraway England of the loss of the son she had not seen for a decade, was now fifty-nine. It was said that the dying Henri, overwhelmed with remorse and seeking absolution from his absent father, had entreated that his mother should be dealt with less severely for her part in his first mutiny. If the reports were true, his petition may help to explain the shock of Eleanor’s appearance at court almost eighteen months later. Dressed in gowns of fur-trimmed samite for which special funds were released from the exchequer, she spent Christmas of 1184 at Windsor with her sons Richard and John and her daughter Matilda, newly returned to England with her husband, Duke Heinrich of Saxony, who had been exiled from Germany by the Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. But this unexpected show of family unity did not foreshadow any greater liberation for the queen, nor any more general pardon granted by her estranged husband. Eleanor remained in Henry’s custody, to be summoned when there was advantage in doing so, and otherwise kept sequestered.
The nature of that advantage became clearly apparent in the spring of 1185, when she was once again called to her husband’s side, this time – necessitating her first cross-Channel voyage in more than ten years – in Normandy. The occasion was an unprecedented and startling ceremony in which Richard was required to surrender Aquitaine back into his mother’s hands as its rightful duchess. The cause, however, was no sudden apotheosis for Eleanor, but a symptom of new tensions that were wracking her family. Richard was now the king’s eldest surviving son, and was expected – not least by himself – to succeed his brother as heir to England, Normandy and Anjou. Henry did not seek to deny his son this royal inheritance, but he assumed that Richard would in turn cede Aquitaine to his youngest brother John, who would thereby be provided with the lands he had until now signally lacked. Richard, however, had not fought for his mother’s duchy simply to hand it over to a needy sixteen-year-old – especially if the proffered exchange was a status so insubstantial, while their father still lived, that it had provoked their dead brother to repeated rebellion.
And by 1184 it was clear that Richard was prepared, yet again, to fight for his right to Aquitaine. In an access of frustration at Richard’s recalcitrance, Henry declared that his youngest son should meet fire with fire and take the duchy by force – an outburst of fury rather than a declaration of strategy, given that John had no army and Henry no intention of supplying him with one. But that summer, the young prince did indeed launch a series of plundering raids into Richard’s county of Poitou. It was a provocative campaign made possible by an ally whose intervention in this conflict – like his previous participation in the Young King’s rebellions – was poisonously damaging to the cause of family harmony.
Geoffrey, the middle of Henry and Eleanor’s surviving sons, was, at twenty-five, the ruler of Brittany, the inheritance of his young wife Constance. He was an able soldier and, like the dead Henri, a brilliant tournament fighter, but his relentless and unprincipled ambition won him as many critics as he had admirers. He was ‘overflowing with words, smooth as oil’, according to the censorious observer Gerald of Wales; a prince ‘possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the apparently indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue, of tireless endeavour and a hypocrite in everything’. Geoffrey had fought by his eldest brother’s side against Henry and Richard at Limoges in 1183; now, with troops from his Breton duchy at his back, he shepherded his youngest brother into an assault on northern Aquitaine in the hope of winning a larger slice of their father’s empire for himself.
In the circumstances, Eleanor’s sudden emergence from her enforced seclusion just a few months later, at Christmas 1184, becomes a great deal less shocking. That autumn, once news reached the Old King in England that Geoffrey and John were ravaging Poitou while Richard attacked Brittany in retaliation, Henry summoned all three of his unruly sons to his side and knocked their heads together, imposing on them a formal ritual of reconciliation at Westminster before the court moved to Windsor for Christmas. There could be no doubt that their mother’s presence during these manoeuvres, and the authority over Aquitaine that she still embodied, prisoner or no, was a significant weapon to be deployed in Henry’s campaign to break his sons to his will and keep them from destroying one another.
Just how significant became apparent when winter turned to spring. After renewed sniping and snarling between Richard and Geoffrey, over Normandy this time, Richard was ordered to relinquish Aquitaine into his mother’s keeping. And the most extraordinary aspect of the ceremony, which took place in Normandy in April 1185, was not Henry’s command, but Richard’s compliance. Without Eleanor, an end to the wrangling had been nowhere in sight. Richard would not concede Aquitaine to anyone who threatened his rights as its duke. And Henry would not brook any substantive challenge to his lordship over his domains in the present, or any diminution of his entitlement to determine their future. In that context, the position of a controversial queen became uniquely uncontroversial, an oasis of calm amid a storm of contention. Richard could resign his duchy into his mother’s hands because her authority there had always underwritten his, and because the closeness of their relationship offered reassurance for his rights as her heir. Meanwhile, the rights that Henry derived from Eleanor’s role as his wife guaranteed his own overlordship of Aquitaine, and his claims on its future.
For Eleanor, this was no moment of political resurrection or practical restitution. She was allowed no initiative, no freedom of movement or action; she was the static fulcrum around which her husband and sons could reorder their unstable relationships. But still, the measured dignity with which she played her part – betraying no public sign of bitterness at the confinement in which she had been kept for ten years – told its own story. At sixty-one, she had lost none of the instinctive political understanding that had always animated her steps through her public life, but there was a new patience, a new appreciation of risk to herself and her sons, behind her acquiescence when grants in Aquitaine were made in her name ‘with the assent and will of my lord Henry, king of England, and of my sons Richard, Geoffrey and John’.
More patience would be required of her yet. Her participation had helped to suppress the nascent conflict of 1184, but her husband and sons could not be kept at peace for long, and their divisions were lovingly fostered by the new king of France, Philippe II, the son and heir for whom Louis had waited so many years that the boy had been nicknamed ‘Dieudonné’, ‘God-given’. Young Philippe had suffered a life-threatening illness in the autumn of 1179, and Louis, in desperation, had crossed the Channel to pray at the Canterbury shrine of Thomas Becket, whose martyrdom had made him a saint little more than two years after his murder. Louis was accompanied on this pilgrimage by his ‘most dear brother’, King Henry – the two kings finding unlikely common ground at last while the woman they had each married was enduring her protracted imprisonment. But on his way home to France Louis suffered a debilitating stroke. He clung to life for another year, until in September 1180 Philippe found himself in possession of his father’s throne at the age of just fifteen.
The new French king had met Henry’s sons Henri and Geoffrey when they attended his coronation at Reims, which had taken place, as was customary, during his father’s lifetime. His closeness to them was undoubtedly infused with the warmth of personal affection, but it was underpinned by the cold steel of Philippe’s implacable ambition to pick apart the English king’s empire and fashion the kingdom of France into a great power in its place. Henri was now dead, but when Geoffrey, chafing at the peace imposed on him in 1185, rode into Paris in 1186, Philippe welcomed him with open arms. Geoffrey’s capacity to make trouble was extinguished that summer with sudden violence, when he was unhorsed and trampled to death in a tournament mêlée; and at his funeral the French king made an extravagant show of his grief – by one account having to be restrained from casting himself into the open grave in the choir of Paris’s new cathedral of Notre-Dame. However, Geoffrey’s abrupt exit from the political stage presented Philippe with a new opportunity to disturb Henry’s hold on his territories, by claiming custody, as overlord of the duchy of Brittany, of Geoffrey’s two young daughters and the baby son, Arthur, to whom his widow gave birth seven months after his death.
By June 1187 conflict over Brittany and renewed tensions over the perennially controversial lands of the Vexin, the frontier between Normandy and France, had intensified to the point of open confrontation. Henry and Philippe drew up their armies in battle array at Châteauroux, 150 miles south of Paris, and for two weeks envoys moved between the enemy lines in search of a settlement. Neither the two kings, nor the noblemen they commanded, were eager to face the indiscriminate dangers of a pitched battle, accustomed as they were to the controlled risks of warfare by siege and raid, and after intense negotiations a two-year truce was agreed. But when Philippe retreated northward to Paris, he carried away an unexpected prize: Henry’s son Richard rode with him.
Richard could not have made his disaffection more plainly manifest. Philippe, already at twenty-two a master of the telling political gesture, kept his royal guest constantly at his side. ‘Every day they ate at the same table and shared the same dish,’ observed Roger of Howden, a clerk at Henry’s court, ‘and at night the bed did not separate them’ – this last a striking public demonstration of political, not sexual, intimacy. The cause of this overt estrangement between the king of England and his eldest surviving son was a familiar and familiarly intractable one: Henry’s refusal to make a settlement of the succession that was acceptable to his heir, and his heir’s refusal to accept the possibility that his younger brother John might have a claim on their father’s territories.
Richard’s ostentatious closeness to Philippe did not last, and by the end of the summer he was back in Anjou with his father. But the question of the succession continued to spread its venom. True, other concerns emerged to occupy Richard’s attention: in the autumn of 1187 he took the crusader’s cross, as his mother had done forty years earlier, to commit himself to the future rescue of Jerusalem (which had just fallen – in a catastrophic reverse for the cause of Christendom – to the Muslim forces of Al-Malik al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Yusuf, known to his enemies in the west as Saladin). But the fact that Richard omitted to consult his father before promising to fight in the Holy Land only served to emphasise the tensions between them, to such an extent that when revolt erupted yet again in Aquitaine in 1188, Henry was suspected of having a hand in encouraging the rebels. With his usual talent for manipulation, Philippe of France worked tirelessly to exploit the divisions between father and son, until at the beginning of 1189, once again, the Angevin dynasty was at war with itself.
By the late spring, Richard and Philippe were in the field together, attacking and overrunning a chain of Henry’s castles in Maine. The English king, hamstrung by his fear that Richard would betray him, had succeeded only in alienating his heir to such an extent that Richard now believed the rumours that Henry planned to disinherit him in favour of his youngest and favourite son, John. And Henry, at fifty-six, had at last exhausted the prodigious stores of energy that had kept him in almost constant motion since he had first begun to accumulate his vast territories more than thirty years before. His health had been faltering for months, and, in the oppressive summer heat, he could fight no longer. In his fortress of Chinon, he lay racked with fever, agonised by the failure of his plans. He was unable to forgive the son who would succeed him, and at the last his spirit was broken by the news that even John, the son on whom he had lavished his love, had deserted him. On 6 July 1189, Henry II turned his face to the wall and died.
When the news reached Richard, he rode as hard as he could to meet the cortège that carried his father’s corpse a few miles westward from Chinon, across the river Vienne to Fontevraud. It was dusk when the new king stepped into the silence of the abbey church where the royal bier lay. He stood for a moment, looking down for the last time at his father’s face. Then he turned on his heel and walked away; and sent word to England that his mother was now a free woman.