Eleanor was sixty-five years old. Fifteen years had passed since she had last enjoyed any significant autonomy in her own life, beyond the day-to-day distractions permitted in her captivity. She was no longer young, by any measure, and she had lost two of her sons while she waited for the liberation of her husband’s death. No one who had witnessed her earlier lives as queen first of France and then of England could have been in any doubt of her uncommon calibre, but in the circumstances few could have predicted that she would re-emerge into the political world with an urgency and momentum that would have been remarkable in someone half her age. And she did so with a composure of judgement at which her fortitude in enduring the indignities of her imprisonment had already hinted. The monastic chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, in recounting the tale of the rebellion that had cost her freedom, described the queen as ‘prudens femina valde, nobilibus orta natali bus, sed instabilis’ – ‘an extremely astute woman, sprung from noble stock, but unsteady’. Unsteady she might have been, once, in her lack of matrimonial loyalty and her willingness to take spectacular risks; but now she brought a judiciously calm control to the business of working to establish her son’s regime.
For weeks after his father’s death, Richard was occupied in Normandy, stamping out the disorder that he himself had done so much to unleash. And so, along with the order for his mother’s release, the new king despatched to England a command that Eleanor (in the words of the historian Ralph of Diceto) should have ‘the power of doing whatever she wished in the kingdom’. This was not only a stunning reversal of fortune, but a transformation unprecedented even in a life marked out by overwhelming upheaval. Eleanor’s years as a queen in France and in England had been spent as a consort, her authority, such as it was, acquired as a satellite of her husband the king. Even in Aquitaine, which was properly her own, she had not controlled the levers of power, in the form of money and men. Now, however, she would exercise the power of a king in England. This was not an official regency: her role was not defined or circumscribed in any technical form. Instead, her son had given her the same freedom to command that he himself enjoyed.
That much was clear from Eleanor’s rapid progress around the country in the month before Richard’s arrival in Portsmouth that August. She travelled ‘from city to city and castle to castle just as it pleased her’, the chronicler Roger of Howden reported, at the head of her ‘queenly court’ – the unusual Latin adjective reginalis emphasising the rare spectacle of a woman alone at the helm of English government. And the measures she took demonstrated the breadth of her authority. She ordered the despatch, Howden wrote, of ‘a body of trustworthy men, both clergy and laity … throughout all the counties of England’ to reform the abuses of local officials, to extract from all free men an oath of loyalty to Richard, and to empty the kingdom’s jails – the newly liberated Eleanor remarking with delicate understatement, according to Howden, that ‘she had learned by experience that confinement is distasteful to mankind, and that it is a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be set free therefrom’.
This was independent action on a scale and of a kind that the Empress Matilda would have viewed with incredulous envy. Yet – unusually for Eleanor, whose career had hardly been uncontroversial – it did not attract critical comment. Her authority, unconstrained though it might be, was so completely identified with that of her son that the fact of her sex was barely noticed: power in the hands of an anointed queen mother, it seems – as opposed to an anointed queen regnant – challenged no fundamental political preconceptions. At sixty-five, moreover, she was an elder stateswoman, not the flighty foreign presence that a queen consort could all too easily appear. And, perversely, the long imprisonment that had been her punishment for rebelling against her husband had turned her into a figurehead for loyalty and unity. The only part she had played in fifteen years of bitter conflict between her sons and their father was to make possible the transient peace settlement of 1185. As a result, she now stood above the fray, uncontaminated by more than a decade of treachery and warfare, and unbendingly committed to the continued existence of her husband’s empire under the government of her son.
For as long as Richard was absent from English soil, then, Eleanor ruled in his name; and she helped plan the coronation by which he became England’s king. In Westminster Abbey on 13 September 1189, the queen mother stood draped in a costly new fur-trimmed gown to watch as her favourite son was touched with holy oil upon the head, breast and hands in the rite that transformed a man into a monarch. Then, newly dressed in the richest of ceremonial vestments, Richard was crowned with a massive diadem of gold encrusted with precious stones, a crown so heavy that two earls stood by to support its weight.
But this formal inauguration of Richard’s reign did not mean that Eleanor could step back into retirement. Instead, she remained by the king’s side, noted by the chroniclers as an influential presence in his councils. She was closely involved, for example, in her son’s attempt to find a settlement to a viciously protracted dispute between the archbishop of Canterbury and the monks of his cathedral priory. For eighteen months the monastic community had been barricaded within the priory’s walls, kept alive only by the townspeople’s gifts of food, while the cathedral itself fell silent and empty. Richard was determined not only to enforce a compromise (an unlikely outcome, it seemed, given how much vitriol had already been expended in the debate, but one which he achieved within three months of his coronation) but, crucially, to do so without intervention from Rome; and it was on Eleanor’s authority that the pope’s legate, Giovanni da Anagni, was detained when he stepped off his ship at Dover in the autumn of 1189 to prevent any possibility of papal meddling.
While Richard was in England, then, his mother was at his right hand, her power unmistakable in the politics, as well as the ceremonial, of his court. But the king remained in England for only seventeen weeks. On 12 December 1189, he took ship for the continent, where he began raising the men and money needed to launch the crusade to which he had committed himself two years earlier. The scale of his task was almost unimaginably vast, but Richard set about it with irresistible purpose and unprecedented speed. ‘He put up for sale everything he had,’ Roger of Howden reported; and by the summer of 1190 he was ready. His father had taken the cross in 1172, as part of his penance for the death of Thomas Becket, but had never set out for the Holy Land. It was in his mother’s footsteps, therefore, not his father’s, that Richard rode to Vézelay to undertake a perilous journey that Eleanor had completed more than forty years earlier. His starting-point and his destination were the same as hers, but, unlike her, he eschewed the overground route across Europe in favour of travelling south to Marseille and on by ship to rendezvous in Sicily with his own huge fleet and that of his crusading ally, Philippe of France.
Once arrived in Sicily, Richard stayed for six months, delayed not only by the closure of the Mediterranean shipping lanes in winter, but by two pressing political problems. The first was the status of his sister Joanna, who had been queen of Sicily until the death of her husband, William II, in 1189, and who was now the unwilling hostage of the new king, William’s illegitimate cousin Tancred of Lecce. A briskly successful assault by Richard’s forces on the city of Messina rapidly secured not only Joanna’s freedom but payment of her dower, a store of gold of a size to gladden the heart of a crusading king who had already liquidated the assets of the kingdom he had left behind.
The second problem, meanwhile, required political finesse rather than the application of force. Richard had been betrothed to Alix, half-sister of Philippe of France, for more than twenty years, but he had never shown any particular urgency about the business of marrying her – not least, perhaps, because the two decades she had spent as his wife-in-waiting at his father’s court had given rise to persistent rumours that Henry himself had made her his mistress. Whatever her personal entanglements, the French princess had been the plaything of Anglo-French politics for the whole of her adult life – her betrothal summarily cancelled or abruptly revived by each new sequence of negotiations – and Richard, it transpired, had now tired of his own part in this diplomatic merry-go-round. He saw a new opportunity to protect the southern frontier of his territories through an alliance with the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, and had spent some time in Aquitaine laying the groundwork for a marriage with Berengaria, daughter of the Navarrese king Sancho VI. Philippe initially resisted this public slight to his long-suffering sister; but now – with the crusade already under way, and Richard threatening to expose Alix’s supposed liaison with his father – the French king had no option but to abandon her cause.
And while Richard negotiated his escape from his former fiancée, his mother set off to bring him his new one. Eleanor, who had spent fifteen years all but immobilised as her husband’s captive, now seemed to have limitless reserves of energy to expend in the service of her son. In the autumn of 1190 she was in Bordeaux, luxuriating in the great city of her childhood for the first time since she had regained her freedom. From there she travelled nearly two hundred miles south across the Pyrenees to the Navarrese capital of Pamplona, where she was welcomed in great state to the court of King Sancho. There she met her prospective daughter-in-law Berengaria, described from afar as ‘more prudent than pretty’ by the chronicler Richard of Devizes, and more blandly as ‘a wise maiden, a fine lady, both noble and beautiful’ in the first-hand account of Ambroise, a Norman poet in Richard’s crusading company.
From Pamplona the two women, with a train of bodyguards and attendants, rode north and east, crossing the Pyrenees once again in order to reach the greater challenge of the western Alpine passes. As the Empress Matilda had discovered before them, a crossing of the Alps in the middle of winter was not to be undertaken lightly. More than a hundred years earlier, when the Emperor Heinrich IV, Matilda’s father-in-law, had crossed the Mont Cenis pass in the freezing temperatures of an especially bitter December, his queen and her ladies had been forced to make the descent sitting on sledges improvised out of ox-skins on which they could slide down the steeply treacherous ice. The chroniclers tell us nothing of what Eleanor and Berengaria endured, which suggests that their journey, in less extreme weather, was less dramatically dangerous. Still, it can only have been a relief to reach the foggy and monotonous flatness of the plain of Lombardy.
At Lodi, twenty miles south-east of Milan, the once and future queens met the new German king, Heinrich VI, who had inherited his crown six months earlier when his father, Friedrich Barbarossa, died en route for the Holy Land in the vanguard of the crusade. This encounter necessitated a delicate diplomatic dance, since Heinrich had come to Italy not only for his coronation as emperor at the hands of the pope, but to claim the throne of Sicily in the name of his wife, Constance, legitimate sister of the dead king William II and aunt of the bastard-born Tancred. And, as both Eleanor and the emperor were well aware, her son was currently a guest and ally – a forcefully imposing one, but an ally nonetheless – at Tancred’s court. Eleanor herself, however, skirted elegantly round this impromptu meeting – perhaps assuring Heinrich as she passed that Richard had no interest in staying to defend Sicily when he could be leaving to attack Jerusalem – and rode on to Naples, where she and Berengaria intended to take ship for Messina. Instead, they were required to wait for a few weeks at Brindisi while Richard broke the news to Philippe that he would not, after all, be marrying his sister. When the two women finally disembarked at Messina harbour on 30 March 1191, it was to discover that the king of France had pointedly sailed away a few hours earlier, his former intimacy with the king of England now turned to bitter rancour.
Despite the arrival of the bride, there was no immediate prospect of a royal wedding, since the Church did not allow marriages to be celebrated during the penitential season of Lent. Berengaria therefore joined the travelling establishment of Richard’s sister Joanna, the widowed Sicilian queen, when the immense crusading fleet headed eastward to Cyprus on 10 April. By then, however, Eleanor was long gone. At sixty-seven, she had needed only three days to recuperate from a journey that had taken her over two mountain ranges and across half of Europe. While Richard set his sights on the Holy Land – a voyage in the course of which he married Berengaria and conquered Cyprus – Eleanor returned, as Ambroise noted, ‘to look after his land that he had left’. And the king knew that it would be in safe hands. Her status could not have been clearer when, visiting Rome on her way northward through Italy, she intervened with the newly installed Pope Celestine III to secure approval for the consecration of her dead husband’s illegitimate son Geoffrey as archbishop of York. Geoffrey’s election to the see had been controversial, and Eleanor’s involvement did not damp down the furore, but the fact that she could act with such authority at the papal curia spoke volumes about the power she now wielded.
Quite how much that power was needed had already become obvious in England while Eleanor herself was away. Archbishop Geoffrey was not the only one of Henry II’s sons causing trouble there. For Eleanor’s youngest child, John, the knowledge that he was his father’s favourite had done nothing to counteract the baleful effects of the fact that he was last in line when it came to the partition of the Angevin territories. The question of what political provision should be made for John had been a cause of repeated familial conflict ever since the rebellion of 1173 that had led to his mother’s imprisonment, and his insubstantial title as ‘lord of Ireland’ had provided him with predictably little satisfaction. Richard had now given his brother the Norman county of Mortain and a generous portion of lands and revenues in England, to which John’s marriage in the summer of 1189 to the heiress Isabella of Gloucester added still more. But for John – who was clever, insatiably grasping and implacably narcissistic – it was not enough.
That Richard knew his brother well was clear from the king’s insistence, before his departure from Vézelay, that John should swear an oath to stay away from England for three years during his own absence in the Holy Land. Eleanor, too, was under no illusions about John’s ambitions, but disagreed about the best way of containing them. At her urging, the oath was modified to allow Richard’s chief minister in England, the Norman-born Guillaume de Longchamp, to decide when and if John should be admitted to the country. In all probability, neither plan would ever have kept him in check, and in practice it took only a matter of months before the cracks began to show.
The catalyst of the crisis was a twofold threat to John’s hopes of inheriting his brother’s crown encapsulated first in the treaty Richard agreed at Messina with Tancred of Sicily – which named the king’s three-year-old nephew Arthur of Brittany as his heir presumptive, for the diplomatic purpose of marrying him to one of Tancred’s daughters – and second in Richard’s own marriage to Berengaria of Navarre, which promised in time to give him sons of his own. Simultaneously, John was presented with an irresistible opportunity to make his own bid for power in England by the unpopularity of his brother’s justiciar Longchamp, who was fast alienating the great English lords with high-handed exactions that were resented all the more for being imposed by a low-born Norman.
By the summer of 1191, both John and Longchamp were in the field at the head of armed troops. Longchamp laid siege to John’s supporters in Lincoln Castle, while John himself seized the royal fortresses at Nottingham and Tickhill in reprisal. But by that time Eleanor had arrived back in Normandy, accompanied by the Cornish-born archbishop of Rouen, Walter of Coutances, whom Richard had despatched from Messina with the express task of resolving the hostilities that had erupted in the kingdom he had left behind. Eleanor remained at her manor of Bonneville-sur-Touques, a couple of miles inland from the Norman coast between Caen and Rouen – a station from which she could hope to oversee Richard’s domains on both sides of the Channel – while the archbishop sailed for England. There he negotiated a fragile peace, which was reinforced that autumn when Coutances himself took over the justiciar’s duties from the discredited Longchamp. In February 1192, however, Eleanor herself took ship for Portsmouth. John’s unique capacity to undermine the stability of his brother’s kingdom, it transpired, was such that it required his mother’s unique authority to curb his excesses.
Her intervention was prompted by information that John – having been thwarted in his attempt to install himself as regent by the arrival of Walter of Coutances – had applied himself instead to conspiring with Philippe of France, who had returned from crusade after less than four months spent in the Holy Land. Philippe’s antagonism towards Richard was now unshakeable, and he saw in John’s amoral ambition the perfect vehicle for the destabilisation of his enemy’s kingdom. He made John a tantalising offer: take the hand in marriage of his sister Alix, Richard’s humiliatingly repudiated bride, and receive with her the Angevin lands in France of which Philippe was overlord. John did not hesitate; his existing marriage was conveniently consanguineous and easily cast aside for a prize of this magnitude. He sent word to Southampton that a ship should be prepared for his flight to France.
But he had reckoned without his mother. ‘And who could be so savage or cruel’, Richard of Devizes rhetorically inquired, ‘that this woman could not bend him to her wishes?’ Cruelty and savagery were John’s stock-in-trade, but even he could not override Eleanor. She was an anointed queen, who spoke with the authority of the absent king. The right to rule Aquitaine was hers as much as it was Richard’s. And John himself would need her support to claim the inheritance of which he dreamed if his brother failed to return from the east. Self-interest pure and simple, if nothing else, dictated that he could not afford to defy her completely. And, while the great men of England contemplated the risky business of treading an uncertain path between the demands of loyalty to Richard and the reality that, given the dangers of crusade, John might in fact become king at any moment, Eleanor alone stood above the fray. She was mother to both men, and her insistence that the younger should not rule while the elder still lived had the compelling force not of political partisanship but of unquestionable royal legitimacy.
Eleanor’s actions were reported to posterity in acceptably feminine terms. She was, after all, seeking to preserve power for her son, not for herself. ‘Her maternal heart was moved and pained …’, Richard of Devizes wrote, and she succeeded in preventing John from leaving for Paris ‘through her own tears and the prayers of the nobles’. But it is clear nevertheless that her intervention was resolute and decisively authoritative. She convened four great meetings of England’s barons in rapid succession, at Windsor, Oxford, London and Winchester, to bring pressure to bear on her youngest child, that ‘light-minded youth’, as Richard of Devizes called him. Whatever the emotional resonance of any tears she shed at those gatherings, they only lightly veiled the steely threat that John’s lands and castles in England would be confiscated if he defected to France. John’s ambitions, his greed and his disloyalty, were still on open display; but, thanks to his mother, they were at least temporarily caged.
The bars of that cage, however, were soon to be broken. In the autumn of 1192 Richard agreed a three-year truce with his enemy Saladin and set sail at last for home, two years and three months since he had turned his horse southward from Vézelay with such expectation. He had not reclaimed Jerusalem from infidel hands, but he had won glory nonetheless, capturing Acre and Ascalon and securing the coast of the Holy Land from Tyre to Jaffa. He had also made enemies. Philippe of France had returned to Europe a year before him, humiliated by the rejection of his sister and smarting at the extent to which Richard had overshadowed him on their joint campaign. And, less obviously but no less significantly, the English king had earned the hatred of Duke Leopold of Austria, who had fought at the siege of Acre with the tattered remnants of the dead Emperor Friedrich’s German forces. Leopold had raised his banner next to those of England and France to fly over the defeated city – and Richard’s soldiers had torn it down, their king refusing to contemplate the idea that an insignificant third party might have a claim on the spoils of his victory.
Acre was only the first of Richard’s triumphs, and in the burning heat of Palestine the hostility of a departed German duke seemed of little moment. A year later, however, it became clear that the incident had cast a long shadow. The returning king reached Corfu in November 1192 – too late in the year to pursue his homeward journey by sea even if he could have found a safe port on the western Mediterranean shore that was beyond the considerable reach of Philippe of France and the Emperor Heinrich of Germany. Richard can have been in little doubt of the consequences of his breach with Philippe, and Heinrich had been alienated by the English alliance with Tancred of Sicily even before the French king and German emperor met and made common cause at Milan in late 1191. Richard was a victorious crusader coming home to an empire that had held firm in his absence, thanks in no small part to his remarkable mother. But the profoundly uncomfortable fact of the matter was that his enemies now barred his way. One option remained. Heinrich of Saxony, husband of his sister Matilda, held north-eastern Germany in defiance of the emperor, and Richard could hope to find a secure passage home via the Baltic if he made his way through his brother-in-law’s lands and under his protection. To get there, however, he first had to pass through the territories of Leopold of Austria.
Compared to the might of France and Germany, the resources of the Austrian duke were limited – which meant that, in the absence of a viable alternative, the route was a risk worth taking. Richard travelled under cover in the guise of a long-bearded pilgrim, attended by only a small handful of servants. But disguise proved difficult to sustain for a king who was accustomed to unquestioned command and expenditure on a scale that attracted attention wherever he went. He was still fifty miles from safety when he was arrested by Duke Leopold’s men at a village outside Vienna. By Christmas Day, he was a prisoner in the forbidding fortress of Dürnstein, perched on a craggy rock above the raging waters of the Danube.
This was extraordinary news, and it travelled fast. By 28 December Leopold’s lord, the Emperor Heinrich, was dictating a letter in delight to Philippe of France. ‘We know this news will bring you great happiness’, he wrote, ‘… in as much as he is now in our power who has always done his utmost for your annoyance and disturbance.’ While England waited expectantly for Richard’s arrival, Philippe wrote in his turn to the one man among the English king’s subjects for whom the revelation that he would not return would be a cause of unalloyed joy. John immediately set off for Paris, where he did homage to King Philippe for Richard’s French lands and promised to marry poor discarded Alix. Together, John and Philippe now planned to seize this unexpected moment by launching an invasion of England.
Eleanor, at sixty-nine, might have been forgiven for feeling as tormented by the activities of her living sons as by grief for her dead ones. In the prosecution of her public responsibilities, however, she showed no sign of frustration or exhaustion. And although she worked in close co-operation with the justiciar Walter of Coutances, the monastic chronicler Gervase of Canterbury was in no doubt that orders for the defence of the coast against the threat of a French fleet were given ‘by the mandate of Queen Eleanor, who’, he said, ‘ruled England at that time’.
While the king of France gathered his ships at the port of Wissant in the county of Boulogne, John returned to England to raise a revolt, justifying his insurrection with the spurious claim that Richard was dead. But both invasion and rebellion sputtered into nothing in the face of Eleanor’s composed resistance. She knew her youngest son every bit as well as did his elder brother: ‘my brother John is not the man to win lands by force’, Richard supposedly remarked when told of his treachery, ‘if there is anyone at all to oppose him’. And Eleanor was not just anyone. By the end of April John had met such concerted military opposition that he was forced into a truce: its terms permitted him to keep his castles at Nottingham and Tickhill but required him to surrender three more – Windsor, Wallingford and the Peak – to his mother. At Richard’s request, meanwhile, Eleanor secured the election as archbishop of Canterbury of Hubert Walter, the formidably able bishop of Salisbury who had been the king’s right-hand man on crusade and the first of his subjects to reach him in his German prison. She then addressed herself to the urgent task of raising the staggeringly large ransom – one hundred thousand silver marks – which Emperor Heinrich and Duke Leopold had between them agreed to demand in return for Richard’s freedom.
Gold and silver began to pour into St Paul’s Cathedral, where money from a levy of a quarter of the value of the movable goods of both clergy and laity, and treasure and plate from England’s churches, was collected in great chests under the seals of Eleanor herself and Walter of Coutances. Eleanor’s authority and the depth of the trust confided in her by her son were everywhere apparent in the letter concerning this ransom that Richard sent from the imperial palace at Haguenau, just north of Strasbourg, addressed to ‘Eleanor, by the grace of God queen of England, his much-loved mother, and to his justices and all his faithful servants throughout England’. The money gathered was, the king ordered, ‘to be delivered to our mother and such persons as she shall think proper’ – an instruction followed by the backhandedly intimidating request that Eleanor should send him a note of the individual sums contributed by his nobles, so that he might know how great were the ‘thanks’ (or something less palatable, reluctant donors might surmise) he owed to each.
Richard was not the only one writing letters. Peter of Blois, the scholar who had once, in the name of an earlier archbishop of Rouen, berated Eleanor for her rebellion against her husband, now took up his pen in the service of his queen. The letters he composed to be sent to Pope Celestine in Eleanor’s name, appealing for the pontiff ’s help in securing Richard’s release, cannot be read as an intimate outpouring of maternal grief. It is possible that they were not even commissioned by the queen; certainly, they were exercises in rhetoric, laced with scriptural quotation, and designed to give the greatest possible emotional and political weight to the argument they made. But their intensely passionate style does serve as a demonstration of the strength of Eleanor’s position. The irreproachable and spiritually resonant role of the afflicted mother now underpinned her actions just as much as the culturally unacceptable one of the rebellious wife had undermined her attempt at self-assertion twenty years earlier. One letter begged the pope ‘to show himself a father to a suffering mother’; the anguish of another draft, meanwhile, explicitly echoed the psalms of King David and his lament for the lost Absalom: ‘I have lost the staff of my old age and the light of my eyes … Would that I had died for you, my son.’
The aged Pope Celestine did not respond to these missives, if ever they were sent, but the diplomatic and military manoeuvres across Europe continued without him. Richard worked hard from his prison quarters to keep his chief captor, the Emperor Heinrich, at a safe distance from Philippe of France, who had failed to instigate revolt in England but had made alarming inroads into eastern Normandy, so that the French flag now flew for the first time over the great frontier stronghold of Gisors. Knowing Philippe as he did, Richard realised that his hope of freedom would be extinguished forever should he one day find himself in a French rather than a German prison. As a result, he was prepared to offer another fifty thousand marks of silver, on top of the hundred thousand already pledged, to agree a settlement with Heinrich that would keep the emperor away from a conference with Philippe that had been planned for June 1193. ‘Look to yourself; the devil is loosed,’ Philippe told John when he heard of this new pact; and John fled to France in fear of his brother’s imminent return.
In practice, it took Richard several months more to free himself of his bonds. It was not until 20 December 1193 that Heinrich received a down payment on the king’s ransom collected by Eleanor and her advisers that was substantial enough to persuade him to set a date for Richard’s release. With the approach of the appointed day – 17 January 1194 – the emperor found himself lobbied frantically by Philippe and John with a counterbid: they would pay £1,000 a month into imperial coffers for as long as Richard remained in his custody, or a hundred thousand silver marks if Heinrich kept him captive until the following autumn (giving them a full campaigning season to further their plans), or 150,000 marks either to hand him over into their control or at least keep him prisoner for another year. ‘Behold, how they loved him!’ Roger of Howden remarked with withering sarcasm.
While the emperor contemplated this new offer, the ceremony planned for 17 January was cancelled and a new gathering of German princes summoned instead for 2 February to consult on the increasingly convoluted question of Richard’s fate. To that meeting, too, came Eleanor, ‘desirous’, said a chronicler in Salzburg, ‘of freeing the son she especially loved’. At almost seventy, she faced yet again the rigours of long-distance travel as she moved eastward across the Low Countries with Walter of Coutances and Guillaume de Longchamp in her train, and with the chests containing the gold and silver of Richard’s ransom piled high on heavily guarded baggage carts. She reached Cologne by 6 January, and ten days later was reunited with her captive son when she reached Speyer in time to discover the unwelcome news that his formal liberation on 17 January would not, after all, take place. Another journey lay ahead, taking her fifty miles north along the Rhine to Mainz, where the imperial court and the increasingly fretful English delegation assembled at the beginning of February.
The negotiations were ‘anxious and difficult’, Walter of Coutances reported. But the German princes were determined that Heinrich should honour his existing agreement with Richard rather than commit himself to a duplicitous alliance with the dangerously subtle Philippe of France, and Eleanor herself clinched the deal by persuading Richard to surrender the kingdom of England to the emperor in order to receive it back from his hands as an imperial fief. This was a finely calibrated gesture of pragmatic politics – a ritual acknowledgement of the emperor’s authority that would oil the wheels of Richard’s liberation, but make negligible difference to the reality of his powers once he was free (and efforts were made, in fact, to prevent news of the bargain even reaching England). At last, on 4 February 1194, the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne escorted the king to be delivered from captivity, Roger of Howden noted, ‘into the hands of his mother Eleanor’.
Before their reunion in Germany, mother and son had not seen one another for three years. It had been four years in all since they had been in each other’s company for more than a few days. ‘On the king being set at liberty, all who were present shed tears of joy,’ Roger of Howden reported; but it was the power of Eleanor’s position during Richard’s long absence as crusader and captive rather than any display of maternal sentiment that was celebrated during his triumphal journey back to England. She was by his side as he rode first to Cologne, then to Louvain and Brussels. She took ship with him at Antwerp, and with him she landed at Sandwich on 13 March. Together the king and his mother travelled north to give thanks for his safe return at the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, before riding at the head of a glorious cavalcade into London.
Eleanor accompanied Richard to Nottingham too, where the king flexed the military muscles that had stiffened in the confines of his prison by leading an assault on the garrison holding the town’s castle in the name of his brother John. It took only two days before the soldiers accepted the reality that their sovereign was back, and surrendered. When Richard then convened a great council to overhaul the administration of his kingdom, the chroniclers named Eleanor first among the great lords who sat with him in the council chamber. And when the king processed into Winchester Cathedral on 17 April to consecrate his return with a ceremony of crown-wearing, richly robed and walking under a silken canopy borne above his head by four earls holding their lances aloft, Eleanor sat in state opposite his throne, surrounded by a constellation of her ladies.
The prominence of the queen mother in this reassertion of kingly power was all the more striking for the fact that Richard’s wife, Queen Berengaria, was nowhere to be seen, staying as she was in Poitou after a protracted journey back from Acre via Rome and Marseilles. But that prominence made a significant political point, for Eleanor’s authority by now was far more than that of a consort. Not only was it sanctioned by, but it had come to buttress Richard’s own. Eleanor, after all, had had a consort’s share in the sovereign power of the man from whom Richard had inherited his own sovereignty, and the role she had played in securing the integrity of the realm while Richard was detained, voluntarily and involuntarily, so far away had made her an essential focus of unity – the mother of the kingdom as well as the king.
In that role, she had one task left to accomplish. It had to wait until she and Richard had completed their progress around England and had taken ship once more at Portsmouth on 12 May for the Channel crossing to Normandy. They landed, to scenes of wild excitement, at Barfleur, and rode via Bayeux and Caen to Lisieux, Richard moving steadily toward the war zone where his enemy Philippe of France was attempting to annex eastern Normandy town by town and castle by castle. At Lisieux, however, one of Philippe’s most valued allies came to kneel at Richard’s feet and beg for his grace. The king’s brother John had done all he could to support the French advance into the Vexin; his English lands had already been declared forfeit in consequence, and Richard had set a date for judgement to be passed upon him for his treachery. But now John was pleading for forgiveness, and Richard immediately embraced him, dismissing his twenty-seven-year-old brother’s repeated betrayals as the actions of an ill-advised child.
This unlikely reconciliation was achieved, Roger of Howden said, ‘through the mediation of Queen Eleanor’. And although there was pragmatism at work on both sides – John’s fright at his brother’s return finding common ground with Richard’s determination to dismantle Philippe’s position in Normandy – it seems likely that Eleanor not only engineered her sons’ reunion but ensured its success. Her unyielding commitment to the future of their dynasty, as represented by both of her sons, allowed each to trust the assurances of the other, however implausible they might otherwise have seemed in the light of recent history.
Her work was done. Richard advanced at the head of his army to drive back the French king and his troops from the walls of Verneuil. John set about serving his brother with all the conscientiousness he could muster. And Eleanor rode south to the abbey of Fontevraud, on the frontier between Anjou and her own county of Poitou. From there she could keep in close touch with her sons and their concerns, and with her homeland of Aquitaine, while beginning at last to settle into a luxurious retirement.
England no longer needed her, despite the fact that its king was once again absent, back in his military element on campaign against Philippe and against his own rebellious vassals in Touraine and Aquitaine. His administration in England had been left in the fiercely able hands of Hubert Walter, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard himself was close enough to keep a steady stream of missives and directives hurtling across the Channel. Both the kingdom and its justiciar knew that these royal letters would swiftly be followed by the king’s royal person should urgent need arise. England’s centralised systems of law and administration – which had developed to new heights of sophistication because of Henry II’s constant travels around his continental empire – meant that the kingdom was well suited to government by royal deputy in the temporary absence of the monarch, but its very tractability was what had made it so vulnerable when the king was far away and feared lost for good. A centralised government, when summarily decapitated, could be taken over wholesale – as John had calculated in launching his bid for power in England – by contrast with the piecemeal annexation required to seize control of Normandy, Anjou or Aquitaine. And that circumstance was what had made Eleanor’s role in England so vital and her power so real. Only a royal ruler of unquestioned legitimacy – as Eleanor had been, in embodying the authority of one son against the pretensions of another – could hold together a kingdom that relied for its security on the universal guarantees of royal law.
Now, though, she could rest. She made no move to reclaim the rule of Aquitaine, where Richard emphatically reasserted his control in the summer of 1194. (‘The city and citadel of Angoulême we took in a single evening’, he told Hubert Walter, before adding, with a casual exaggeration born of supreme confidence, that ‘in all we captured three hundred knights and forty thousand soldiers’.) Eleanor had no doubt that his commitment to the duchy was the equal of her own; and she was happy instead to install herself at Fontevraud, a residence replete with material and spiritual comforts, strategically located at the heart of her son’s French territories.
For the next five years she remained quietly at the abbey, a revered presence in her own rich apartments within the convent community. She raised no protest when Richard decided, in the autumn of 1196, to secure the south-eastern frontier of his lands through an alliance with Ramon VI, count of Toulouse, son of that count of Toulouse whose treaty with her husband had helped to spark her ill-fated rebellion in 1173. Perhaps she was prepared now to accept her son’s abdication of her own dynastic claim to Toulouse because she identified more closely with his political judgement than she had done with Henry’s; perhaps any objections were overcome by the fact that the alliance was sealed by Ramon’s marriage to her daughter Joanna, the widowed queen of Sicily, through whose offspring Eleanor’s claim might at last be made good, even if not quite in the way she had hoped. Nor did she demur when Richard named as count of Poitou his twenty-year-old nephew Otto, son of his sister Matilda and Heinrich of Saxony, a trusted lieutenant to keep a watchful eye on his treasured maternal inheritance (albeit that this delegation of authority was quickly superseded by Otto’s election as king of Germany in 1198). All the evidence suggests that Eleanor was adopting a role akin to that played by her mother-in-law Matilda during her last years at Rouen – an astute observer of international affairs, retired now from the political front line, turning her thoughts increasingly to the needs of her soul while still offering the benefits of her accumulated wisdom to a son whose exceptional abilities she had done so much to foster.
Unlike the empress, however, Eleanor was to be wrenched from the peace of her retreat by sudden and violent tragedy. In March 1199, Richard was in Aquitaine to suppress yet another revolt led by the count of Angoulême and the viscount of Limoges. Towards the end of the month he brought his troops to besiege the viscount’s castle of Châlus-Chabrol, less than twenty miles southwest of Limoges. The small fortress held a garrison of only forty, of whom just two were trained and armed knights, and Richard was in relaxed mood as he waited for the castle’s inevitable fall. On the evening of 26 March, he rode out after supper to inspect the day’s progress, protected only by a helmet and shield against the shots of a solitary crossbowman on the ramparts, a bravely ludicrous figure wielding a cooking pan to ward off missiles from below. Richard appreciated the defiant courage of this lone enemy, and cheered good-humouredly as the man loosed his next bolt, but he was too careless of the reality of the threat. He miscalculated the arrow’s speed and trajectory by a fraction of a second, and felt the iron barb tear into the flesh of his left shoulder.
The king returned calmly to his tent, giving no public hint of his injury, and tried to wrench out the arrow himself. The wooden shaft broke off in his hand; a surgeon removed the rest, but at an impossible cost. The butchered wound quickly showed signs of infection. As the gangrene spread, Richard knew that death would follow surely and swiftly. By the time the fortress of Châlus fell a few days later, the victory had become an irrelevance. A messenger arrived at Fontevraud, desperate and dishevelled; and Eleanor rode south to watch her son die.
She was at his side when he took his last breath as dusk fell on 6 April. She was seventy-five, and had expected her favourite child to attend her burial, not she his. Richard’s heart was taken to Rouen, to be interred next to his brother Henri, but his body had less far to go: his cortège retraced his mother’s steps back to Fontevraud, where his corpse was laid to rest at his father’s feet. But Eleanor would not be there for long to keep vigil over his tomb. Her one remaining son needed her, as his brother had before him.
For all the effort Richard had expended on the present security of his empire, he had exerted himself remarkably little to safeguard the future of his own bloodline. He had one illegitimate son, Philippe of Cognac, but no legitimate offspring to inherit his throne. Not only had his wife, Berengaria, never set foot in the kingdom of which she was queen, but she had spent only a few months of their eight-year marriage with her king; it had been four years since Richard had made time to see her. At forty-one, Richard had been in good health, despite the extra weight his stocky frame was carrying, and perhaps, after the trials of crusade and imprisonment, this superlative soldier had come to believe that he was invulnerable, that the future was his to command. Instead, it now seemed that the future belonged to John, the brother who had served him faithfully since their reconciliation at Lisieux, but who had coveted his throne since before their father’s death.
John’s inheritance, however, was far from certain. Enemies within and without the Angevin lands could not believe their good fortune as news of Richard’s death spread, and they had a rival candidate immediately to hand, in the twelve-year-old form of Arthur of Brittany, son of John’s long-dead elder brother Geoffrey. This posed a nice challenge to the nascent principles determining the succession to England’s throne: did a younger brother have a greater or lesser claim to the crown than the son of a dead older brother? Even if agreement could have been reached on this elusive theoretical point in English law, the precedents at work in Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine would not necessarily support the same conclusion. And, in any event, the practical fact of the matter was that the successful claimant would be identified by the political support he could muster, not simply by the technical merits of his case.
No one knew that better than Eleanor, and there was no question in her mind that the throne belonged to her son rather than her grandson. Arthur’s very name emphasised his Breton identity rather than his Angevin heritage. He had been brought up in Brittany under the care of his mother, the duchy’s heiress, until the tensions between the Breton regime and Arthur’s royal uncle Richard had resulted in 1196 in the boy making a lengthy stay at the court of Philippe of France. There could be little doubt now of how the cards would fall. Philippe launched another invasion of eastern Normandy as soon as he heard of Richard’s death; the rebellious lords of Anjou, Maine and Touraine, led by Guillaume des Roches, declared that Arthur was their king; and the count of Angoulême and the viscount of Limoges persisted in the revolt that had claimed Richard’s life. Eleanor, meanwhile, made it clear that Arthur, or his advisers on his behalf, had forfeited any claim on a grandmother’s loyalty.
John arrived at the great fortress of Chinon three days after his brother’s burial, where he took possession of the treasury of Anjou, and then rode on ten miles to the west along the banks of the Vienne to take counsel with his mother at Fontevraud. From there he turned his horse northward to Normandy, narrowly escaping capture en route by the French king, who swept into Le Mans with Arthur and the rebel lord Guillaume des Roches only hours after John had left. At Rouen – where there was little sympathy for Philippe or Arthur, enemies to the east and west of the duchy – John was invested with a circlet of golden roses as duke of Normandy on 25 April. After a brief detour to sack Le Mans in punishment for the city’s support for his rival, he made for the Norman coast, and by 27 May he had reached Westminster, where he sat in state in the soaring space of the abbey for his coronation as king of England.
It made sense for John to focus his immediate attention on Normandy and England. There he was a known quantity – one viewed with a certain ambivalence, perhaps, after his repeated displays of extravagant duplicity during the years of Richard’s long absence, but then again those five years of treachery were now balanced by five more of redemption in his brother’s service. In England, certainly, Arthur of Brittany’s claims to be Richard’s heir had little purchase, and the solemn ceremony at Westminster, which was well attended by the great English lords, gave sacred sanction to John’s rights.
Aquitaine, however, was a very different matter. Richard, English-born though he might have been, had become a native Aquitainian duke: enthroned at Poitiers and Limoges at the age of fourteen, he spent years of his life and much of his political energy in the duchy. He made enemies as well as friends there – his death on campaign at Châlus in the heart of Aquitaine was no geographical aberration in his military career – but the fact of his power could not be ignored. John, on the other hand, had last set foot in the duchy fifteen years earlier when he and his brother Geoffrey had plundered Poitou in the attempt to snatch it from Richard’s grasp. No less than Arthur of Brittany or Philippe of France, John was an outsider in Aquitaine, and the risk he ran was that he would fast become an irrelevance there.
Not so his mother. Where Richard had depended on Eleanor to embody the authority of the crown in England, John needed her to inhabit the role into which she had been born – that of the ancestral ruler of her own duchy. She had expected to see out her days in the peace of Fontevraud; instead, within three weeks of Richard’s death she found herself at the head of an army, accompanying Mercadier – a mercenary captain who had been the king’s loyal military lieutenant for a decade and a half, and had been at his side at Châlus – on a campaign to devastate Anjou, beyond the northern border of Aquitaine, in retribution for the support its lords had offered to Arthur. Mercadier led the troops, but Eleanor’s presence at his side demonstrated that their ravages were predicated on claims of political legitimacy rather than indiscriminate looting.
Before the end of the month she parted company with Mercadier, leaving to him the further prosecution of the military campaign they had begun in Anjou, and began to move south into Aquitaine, charting a path through the great towns of her duchy – from Poitiers south-westward to Niort, then south to St-Jean-d’Angély, westward to the port of La Rochelle, inland again to Saintes, and finally, in the heat of July, south to her city of Bordeaux. As she went she dispensed favours to the great men of Poitou and the Limousin, and privileges to the towns and religious houses she passed along the way. In doing so she marked the duchy yet again as her territory, and sought to bind its people to her side.
That accomplished, she turned north again, travelling two hundred miles to Tours to meet her son’s enemy, Philippe of France. It was to be an extraordinary encounter, and not simply because it brought her face to face with the son of her long-ago husband Louis, a man who had caused her own family so much torment. At Tours, Eleanor knelt before the French king to do homage for her duchy of Aquitaine. Sixty-two years after her father’s death, there could be no conceivable doubt of her right to her inheritance, but she had never before sworn fealty and done homage to her French overlord. This was a ritual from which women were routinely excluded: the political and military service owed by a vassal, it was assumed, could not be performed by a woman in her own person, and the place of an heiress would therefore naturally be taken by her husband or son. Henry and Richard had both previously offered their homage for Aquitaine on Eleanor’s behalf, and young Arthur had already become Philippe’s sworn vassal for Brittany, despite the fact that the duchy was the inheritance of his mother Constance. Why now, at seventy-five, did Eleanor choose to break the mould of feudal ceremony and assert the independence of her rights in Aquitaine?
The gesture was certainly not intended for public effect. We only know that it happened at all thanks to the French chronicler Rigord, since no mention of it survives in English sources. We must assume, therefore, that the meeting took place with the minimum of fanfare, Philippe presumably accepting the fealty of his enemy’s mother as a welcome recognition of the authority he was attempting to extend throughout the French kingdom. For Eleanor, however, this was a move in a complex chess game – a stratagem designed to secure the integrity of her duchy and the inheritance of her son in the face of her grandson’s challenge.
After all, if she alone, swearing an oath of allegiance in person, was the French king’s vassal in possession of Aquitaine, then Philippe would have no right to summon anyone other than Eleanor herself to answer for the rule of the duchy in his court. Having accepted her homage, he could have no straightforward legal basis for intervening in Aquitaine himself, or for promoting alternative claims to its rule, whether from Arthur or John or anyone else. In feudal law, Eleanor now stood as a human shield between the king of France and her homeland. And she immediately set to work to capitalise on her position in order to establish John’s stake in Aquitaine’s future.
In a document sealed probably that summer, Eleanor formally recognised her son John as her successor in Aquitaine. She had accepted his homage, she declared, and now transferred the allegiance of her vassals to him, ‘the king their liege’, as her own ‘right heir’ and their lord. John, meanwhile, sealed a charter of his own which again recorded his homage to his mother, and went on to acknowledge her authority over him as domina – ‘lady’, the same title that Matilda had once enjoyed, implying the exercise of female lordship – ‘of us and of all our lands and possessions’. Mother and son were now explicitly locked into a political relationship of mutual support and interdependence. Neither partner, John’s charter added, was to give away lands or rights without the other’s consent, unless it should be to the Church ‘for the salvation of our souls’. Eleanor had once before exploited the political possibilities of feudal homage, in helping to secure her older son’s release from his German prison by suggesting he swear an oath of fealty to the emperor. If that had been a feint, this was a master stroke – reciprocal recognition between mother and youngest son that simultaneously guaranteed John’s rights in Aquitaine and deprived Philippe of the opportunity to assert himself there.
Her duchy, for the moment, was safe, but John’s position in Anjou and Maine was much less certain, and likely to depend more on might than on right. Here, however, fortune seemed to be smiling on John. In the autumn of 1199 Guillaume des Roches, Arthur’s chief supporter in the region, was persuaded to defect to John’s cause, forcing Philippe to the negotiating table; and in January 1200 the two kings came to uneasy terms, by which Philippe formally recognised John as his brother’s heir in the Angevin dominions, in return for John’s homage and for continued French possession of the parts of eastern Normandy that had already been overrun. As so often before, the treaty was to be concluded with a marriage: this time a union between Philippe’s twelve-year-old heir, Louis, and one of John’s royal nieces, the daughters of his sister Eleanor and her husband Alfonso VIII of Castile.
Which niece, however, had not yet been decided – and the task of selecting the bride fell to the girls’ apparently indefatigable grandmother. Eleanor had already covered something approaching a thousand miles in her whistlestop political tour around her domains in the summer of 1199. Now, in January 1200, she took to the road once again. In Poitou she was forced to negotiate a passage through the lands of the Lusignans, pacifying their aggression with a grant of the county of La Marche. That political challenge behind her, she then faced the physical test of vertiginous mountain paths as her cavalcade gingerly picked its way over the snow-drifted passes of the Pyrenees and into Navarre. She had been to that kingdom before, a decade earlier, to collect a wife for her beloved older son; but that wife was now a widow, and Eleanor pressed on southward into Castile.
At the elegant Castilian court she was reunited with her daughter Eleanor, who had left her mother behind at Bordeaux more than thirty years earlier to embrace a new life in the country of which she was now queen. This younger Eleanor shared her mother’s shrewd intellect as well as her name, and perhaps their meeting offered consolation to both women after the losses of that year: Richard’s sudden death had been followed in September by that of his sister Joanna of Sicily and Toulouse, who did not survive the birth of her second child at Rouen in September 1199. The elder Eleanor could also find comfort in meeting her Castilian granddaughters for the first time. Thirteen-year-old Urraca and eleven-year-old Blanca were both accomplished girls, but Eleanor, to the surprise of many observers, chose the younger as the future queen of France, seeing in her some combination of temperament and talent that would equip her for the Parisian court over which Eleanor herself had presided at an almost equally early age. Urraca was promptly betrothed instead to Afonso, heir to the Portuguese throne, while Blanca prepared herself for the long journey north with her formidable grandmother.
The steepling route through the mountains was easier in the spring warmth, but for the first time the exertion of her travels began to take a perceptible toll on Eleanor. After spending Easter week in Bordeaux, she rode on with her granddaughter as far as the valley of the Loire, but there she gave Blanca into the care of the archbishop of Bordeaux for the last stage of the route to Normandy. When the little Castilian princess married her French prince, a wedding lavishly celebrated with jousts and feasting, her grandmother was not present to see it. Instead, ‘wearied by old age and the labours of her long journey,’ Roger of Howden reported, ‘Queen Eleanor withdrew to the abbey of Fontevraud and remained there’.
She was seventy-six years old; she was ill and she was tired. But still she could not rest completely. Though John had settled one conflict, he lost no time in precipitating another, this time in her duchy of Aquitaine. In the summer of 1200 John celebrated a second wedding – his own, to Isabelle, the young daughter and heiress of the count of Angoulême. The chroniclers came to believe that John was obsessed with lust for this girl, who was no more than twelve when they married, and there was further scandal to be found in the troublesome detail that John already had a wife, although he had taken care never to obtain a papal dispensation to regularise his first consanguineous marriage to Isabella of Gloucester. But, whatever the gossip, the political fact of the matter was that there was sound strategic sense in an alliance by which John would secure control of the unruly territories of Angoulême that separated Poitiers from Bordeaux.
Or, at least, there would have been, had Isabelle not already been formally betrothed to Hugues de Lusignan, whose lands to the north of the Angoumois had so recently been bolstered by Eleanor’s grant of the county of La Marche to the east. This union between two of the most insubordinate dynasties among his vassals was an alarming prospect for John, to which his own impulsive marriage to the child-bride Isabelle put an effective stop. But the cost of curbing this expansion of Lusignan power was the creation of a profoundly dangerous enemy.
Eleanor saw the threat only too clearly, and made strenuous efforts from her sickbed at Fontevraud to counter it. In the early spring of 1201 she achieved an unlikely triumph in securing the compromised allegiance of Aimery, viscount of Thouars, a powerful but disaffected lord in the north-west of Poitou, whom John had deprived of the stewardship of Anjou in favour of the defector des Roches, and whose brother Guy had just married Arthur of Brittany’s mother, Constance. The letter Eleanor wrote to her son in the wake of Aimery’s visit to Fontevraud, advising John on how to handle the viscount’s proffer of renewed loyalty, is full of the acute political insight that hard-won experience had brought to her forceful intelligence. ‘I want to tell you, my very dear son’, she began,
that I summoned our cousin Aimery 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 rend 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.
John was not a stupid man – no son of Eleanor and Henry was likely to be – but he had not inherited his mother’s strategic brain. Despite his mother’s subtle warnings, he treated Hugues de Lusignan with punitive contempt, confiscating La Marche in order to grant the county instead to his new father-in-law, the count of Angoulême. Lusignan appealed to Philippe as John’s overlord, and by the spring of 1202 the renewal of war was inevitable. The French king declared John’s lands forfeit and accepted Arthur’s homage in his place for all his French territories – including Aquitaine, Philippe proclaimed, ‘if God grants that either we or he shall acquire it by any means whatsoever’. It could hardly have been clearer that John’s provocation had dismantled the legal protections Eleanor had so carefully established to shield her homeland from the conflict over the Angevin inheritance.
Yet again Aquitaine and her son stood in need of her help. At seventy-eight, she summoned what reserves of energy she could muster to leave her retreat at Fontevraud once more for the defence of Poitou. She had reached the castle of Mirebeau, fifteen miles north of Poitiers, when the menace that had been implicit in Philippe’s edict took concrete form in the shape of her fifteen-year-old grandson, Arthur, marching with Hugues de Lusignan at the head of a force of French soldiers. Thirty years earlier, Mirebeau had been one of the fortresses over which her eldest son Henri had gone to war with his father; now it was the place where Eleanor faced a future as a hostage as her family tore itself apart once again. As Arthur’s troops advanced, Eleanor was trapped. She did not panic; nor did she surrender. She had suffered the loss of her freedom before: did she fear it more or less, now that she had so little time left? While her grandson’s forces seized control of the town, she disposed what defences she had behind the walls of the stone keep, and covertly despatched a messenger who slipped silently into the twilight, heading north to Le Mans, where John was gathering an army of mercenaries.
John had none of his brother’s military genius, and few decisive military manoeuvres to his name. But this threat to his mother animated him into sudden and brilliantly resolute action. With the help of the unlikely pairing of Aimery de Thouars and Guillaume des Roches – former rivals whose support he would not have had, had it not been for Eleanor – John led his troops on a forced march of eighty miles in less than forty-eight hours to arrive at Mirebeau, unheralded and utterly unexpected, during the night of 31 July. As dawn broke they stormed the town, falling upon Arthur’s soldiers while they slept, and seizing Hugues de Lusignan as he breakfasted on a dish of pigeons. Within hours Arthur and de Lusignan were John’s prisoners, along with all their men, and Eleanor was safe, and free.
It was the last time she would walk on a public stage. After the shock of her narrow escape, age and exhaustion caught up with her at last. She did not press onward from Mirebeau into Poitou, but returned to Fontevraud to rest, and to contemplate the prospect of the brightness of heaven rather than the storm-clouds that were gathering over her son. With the loss of his mother’s active support, John lost too the speed of purpose and the maturity of judgement that he had shown at Mirebeau. Revelling in the glory of his success, he refused to allow des Roches and the viscount of Thouars any part in deciding the fate of the prisoners, many of whom were their countrymen – a mistake that served to confirm John’s habit of undermining and alienating allies whom he should instead have nurtured and exploited. Just two months after Mirebeau, des Roches and Thouars abandoned him; and within weeks they had wrested Angers from his control. John tried to forge a new relationship with the Lusignans in their stead, but it was hardly surprising that his bitterest enemies met his overtures with dissimulation and disloyalty. At the end of 1202 John once more retreated to Normandy. At Mirebeau, he had held the keys to Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Poitou – the heart of his father’s French empire, and the gateway to his mother’s duchy – and he had thrown them away.
Worse was to come. Rumours began to fly concerning the fate of his nephew and rival, Arthur, who had disappeared as a prisoner into John’s forbidding network of Norman fortresses. Whispers told of a drunken John, in a sotted rage, stoving in the boy’s skull before dumping the blood-soaked corpse into the Seine. Support for John was already haemorrhaging because of his paranoiac unreliability, but revulsion at the murder now opened another gushing vein. Meanwhile, the harrying of Normandy’s easternedge by the French turned, in the summer of 1203, into a steady advance. Philippe had never been a warrior in the mode of his lionhearted enemy Richard; the French king was a tense, physically cautious figure, without chivalric glamour or easy camaraderie. But, warrior or no, what he achieved in the next twelve months was radical, even revolutionary, in its effect. On 6 March 1204, Château Gaillard – Richard’s ‘saucy castle’, new-built on a jutting crag overlooking the Seine at Les Andelys – fell to the French after a six-month siege. The loss of this supposedly impregnable stronghold served to open the gates of towns and citadels across Normandy to Philippe, as the duchy’s inhabitants realised that John – who had ignominiously retreated to England in December 1203 – would not or could not protect them. The unthinkable had happened: the Norman dynasty which had so ruthlessly seized the English crown no longer ruled its Norman homeland.
Two hundred miles further south, Eleanor retreated into silence. For the first time in her life, the world that mattered most to her now was the next one. But, beyond the fact that she took the habit of the nuns who had welcomed her to their midst at Fontevraud, we know almost nothing about her last weeks. We cannot tell whether she was aware, in her final days, of the collapse of her husband’s empire in the unsteady hands of her youngest son. All we know is that on 31 March 1204, at the age of eighty, Eleanor of Aquitaine closed her eyes for the last time. She was buried in the abbey which had become a home to her, beside her husband Henry, her son Richard and her daughter Joanna. The calm with which her graceful effigy held in its hands an open book as it lay alongside theirs marked a cool counterpoint to the violent passions which had fractured her family in life.
And that contrast was a fitting memorial to Eleanor. Always a political creature, she had begun as a charismatically unpredictable force of instinct and will – qualities which the trials of her long incarceration had tempered with a sophisticated diplomatic sense and what came to be the surest of political touches. The woman whose rebellion against her own husband had once threatened, it seemed, to overturn the natural order of creation had in time become the mother of the English kingdom, and the watchful guardian of her beloved Aquitaine. Eleanor had stood alone to embody the crown in England when its king was feared lost to a German jail; and she became the first woman to kneel in homage to a feudal overlord, to underpin the security of her duchy after six decades as its duchess.
If John needed any reminder of his mother’s extraordinary talents, it came in the months after she died. Not only was the fall of Normandy confirmed beyond all possible doubt when Philippe rode into Rouen just eleven weeks after her death, but Poitou too began to slip through John’s fingers as its towns and lords, bereft now of the protection of their lady, scrambled to offer their allegiance instead to the French king. And in the south-western stretches of Aquitaine the troops of Alfonso of Castile were on the march to claim Gascony as the supposed inheritance of his wife, Eleanor’s daughter and namesake.
Jean Sans Terre, they called him; by now, it was no expression of sympathy but a damning verdict on John’s catastrophic military losses. Yet this most unlovely king of England did not quite lose all his lands across the sea – and here too we might find an echo of Eleanor’s capabilities. Normandy and Anjou, the homelands of the kings who had ruled England for more than a century, were gone. The historian William of Newburgh believed that Nor mandy had fallen prey to French aggression while King Richard was a prisoner because ‘the courage of that ancient and most valiant people now languished, since they had neither duke, nor head, nor chief ’, and the same could have been said (had William of Newburgh lived to tell the tale) of both Normandy and Anjou under the suspicious and inconstant command of John. But Aquitaine had had a head and a chief – not a duke, but a duchess – for nearly seventy years. And when the dust settled on the debris of John’s empire, it was Eleanor’s land of Aquitaine – battered and bloody, but still standing – that remained to the English crown.