Lionheart E-Book

Douglas Boyd

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

When people think of Richard the Lionheart they recall the scene at the end of every Robin Hood epic when he returns from the Crusades to punish his treacherous brother John and the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. In reality Richard detested England and the English, was deeply troubled by his own sexuality and was noted for greed, not generosity, and for murder rather than mercy. In youth Richard showed no interest in girls; instead, a taste for cruelty and a rapacity for gold that would literally be the death of him. To save his own skin, he repeatedly abandoned his supporters to an evil fate, and his indifference to women saw the part of queen at his coronation played by his formidable mother, Queen Eleanor. His brief reign bankrupted England twice, destabilised the powerful empire his parents had put together and set the scene for his brother's ruinous rule. So how has Richard come to be known as the noble Christian warrior associated with such bravery and patriotism? Lionheart reveals the scandalous truth about England's hero king – a truth that is far different from the legend that has endured for eight centuries.

Leseprobe

To the memory ofEhud Netzer,1936–2010

Archaeologist extraordinaireand friend sorely missed

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to four archaeologists and maritime historians who have been extraordinarily generous with their help in tracing the movements of a long-dead English king and gave permission for my use of their copyrighted material published in academic papers and books: Professor John H. Pryor of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney, NSW; and Professor Emeritus Sarah Arenson and Dr Ruthy Gertwagen of the University of Haifa. The late Professor Emeritus Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dvorah Netzer not only shared much knowledge with me, but also extended warm welcome and hospitality on my visits to Israel.

Professor Friedrich Heer of the University of Vienna used Jacob Burckhardt’s light to illuminate some dark periods of history for me; my Gascon friends Nathalie and Eric Roulet opened my eyes and ears to Occitan as a living language; Eric Chaplain of Princi Neguer publishing house in Pau lent precious source material in that and other languages; fellow-author and horsewoman Ann Hyland gave valuable equestrian advice; Jennifer Weller, a wonderful artist, took time out to draw maps and seals; Tuvia Amit helped with details of Arsuf/Apollonia; La Société des Amis du Vieux Chinon authorised me to photograph the unique fresco in the Chapelle Ste-Radegonde; my former comrades-in-arms John Anderson and Colin Priston researched the massacre at York and Hodierna Nutrix, the mystery woman in King Richard’s life; the staffs of La Bibliothèque Nationale de France and its online resource Gallica, of the British Library and of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bordeaux made available much source material; that doyen of literary translators, Miguel Castro Mata threw new light on the crusader fleets’ stopovers in Portugal; and my partner Atarah Ben-Tovim was an enthusiastic companion following Richard I’s travels on both sides of the Channel, in Sicily and the Levant.

Lastly, although chronologically first, I acknowledge my debt to two great teachers, Latinist William McCulloch and George Trotman, an inspiring teacher of French and Spanish, both sometime of Simon Langton School for Boys, Canterbury. Together, they unleashed my passion for linguistics, without which this book, drawn from sources in eight medieval and modern languages, would not have been written.

At The History Press, my thanks go to commissioning editor Mark Beynon, project editor Rebecca Newton, proofreader Emma Wiggin, designer Jemma Cox and cover designer Martin Latham.

With so much expert support, it goes without saying that any errors are mine.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART 1: THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE

1 To Eleanor, a Son

2 Duke to King, Duchess to Queen

3 Court Whores and Confusion

4 The 15-Year-Old Duke

PART 2: A LIFE OF VIOLENCE

5 Rebellion and Betrayal

6 Death of a Prince

7 Heir to the Empire

8 The Hell of Hattin

9 The Call of Destiny

10 The Enemy Within

PART 3: THE CRUSADER KING

11 Death by the Sword, Death by Sickness, Death by Starvation

12 Of Cogs and Cargo

13 Sea-Sickness and Siege

14 A Bride for Richard

15 If it be God’s Will …

16 Exit Philip Augustus

17 Blood on the Sand, Blood in the Mud

PART 4: RIDING TO A FALL

18 The Cost of an Insult

19 Richard and Robin Hood? Maybe

20 Good King Richard

21 Death in Agony

22 Of a Siege, Sex and Saddles

On the Trail of the Lionheart – Places to Visit

Plates

Also by Douglas Boyd

Copyright

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, despite all the tools of enquiry at their disposal, western journalists creating ‘history as it happens’ overwhelmingly endorse hand-outs from the Pentagon and Downing Street, so that British and American wars are presented as democratic actions undertaken for humanitarian reasons and fought with due respect for human life and protection of non-combatants, even when the government hand-outs are known by many of those journalists to be patently false, and incontrovertible evidence of war crimes exists. Anyone believing differently need only watch John Pilger’s 2010 documentary The War You Don’t See, which includes shattering admissions of this practice by well-known journalists and elected politicians, government officials and service personnel admitting their morally and legally unacceptable actions in the Iraq War of 2003–11.

History as a record of the past can also be misleading. Living two and a half millennia ago, Herodotus was later dubbed by Cicero ‘the father of history’ because he was the first person to attempt recording the past methodically. His investigation into the origins of the Greco–Persian wars gave us the word we use today: istoria, meaning ‘learning by enquiry’. That is the business of historians, of the present or the past.

The first Roman historian to write in Latin was Cato the Elder in the second century BCE. To him, the point of recording the past was to prove the superiority of the Roman race and way of life, and his successors continued to present the Romans always as the good guys and all Rome’s wars as just. So, almost from the beginning, history was perverted from Herodotus’ open-minded spirit of enquiry by what we today call ‘spin’, varying from the ethnically biased Roman accounts to the nineteenth-century view of German historian Leopold von Ranke that history should demonstrate a divine plan, with the hand of God manifest in the deeds of men, even when this meant snipping the pieces of time’s jigsaw to fit. Ranke’s contemporary, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, disagreed, holding that all events should be recorded, whether or not they seem to fit any divine or other plan. However, the teaching of history in Britain’s universities followed the Protestant school of Ranke, thanks largely to the great classical scholar Bishop William Stubbs of Oxford. This Christian spin on the teaching and study of history at British universities – and therefore British schools – lasted into the second half of the twentieth century.

To Stubbs, King Richard I of England should have been seen as a heroic figure because he led the Third Crusade with the intention of reconquering Jerusalem from the Saracen. In fact, Stubbs’ opinion was that Richard was ‘… a bad ruler; his energy, or rather his restlessness, his love of war and his genius for it, effectively disqualified him from being a peaceful one; his utter want of political common sense from being a prudent one.’ Stubbs’ considered opinion was that Richard was ‘a man of blood, whose crimes were those of one whom long use of warfare had made too familiar with slaughter … and a vicious man’. 1

Sir Steven Runciman, another respected historian of the crusades, summed up the two sides of Richard’s character: ‘He was a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier.’2 Richard spent his entire adult life in warfare and consistently displayed supreme physical courage, but gallant and splendid are not adjectives one would use today.

When writing of the past, it is a responsibility of historians to consult contemporary sources whenever possible, but also to weight them according to their authors’ relationship with the subjects of whom and the issues of which they wrote, and take into account the political and religious pressures on the chroniclers. In my biography of Richard the Lionheart’s mother – that extraordinary woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was the target of calumnies and slanders in her own lifetime and afterwards – it was vital to bear in mind that the contemporary sources in Latin were written by celibate and misogynistic monks. Even St Bernard of Clairvaux, the wise founder of the Cistercian Order, could not bear to look upon his own sister in her nun’s robes. In addition to their aversion to all women as the perceived cause of men’s lust, the chroniclers owed a political loyalty to either Eleanor’s French husband King Louis VII, whom she divorced, or England’s King Henry II, who locked her up for a decade and a half after she raised their sons in rebellion against him. The chroniclers were thus extremely unlikely to be objective about this major player on the European stage, and their comments on her must be assessed with that in mind.

Similarly, when evaluating King Richard I it is necessary to examine closely the enduring legend of this ‘parfit gentil knight’ and noble Christian monarch who selflessly abandoned his kingdom in 1190 to risk all in performing his religious duty to liberate the Holy Land from the Saracen. In fact, the legend originated as a PR campaign orchestrated by Queen Eleanor to blackmail the citizens of the Plantagenet Empire into stumping up the enormous ransom demanded for his release from an imprisonment that was all of his own making and had nothing to do with religion.

The motto of Hitler’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels – that a big lie will succeed where a smaller one may be questioned – was already understood by Eleanor and used by her, for Richard was held prisoner not by the Saracen enemy in the Holy Land, but by the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Henry VI Hohenstaufen. He had not been captured fighting heroically in battle, but while slinking homewards incognito at the end of his pointless crusade which cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides, leaving an undying legacy of hatred in the Muslim world, where malik Rik is still a name with which to frighten disobedient little boys. Although the Church protected the persons and property of crusaders during their absence from their homelands, even the pope did little to protect this English king from Hohenstaufen and his vassal Duke Leopold of Austria, one of many European fellow-crusaders humiliated and alienated by Richard’s arrogance during the abortive Third Crusade.

As Bishop Stubbs knew well, Richard had spent his whole life shedding blood, not tactically and face-to-face with a more or less equally matched enemy, but strategically, by slaughtering defenceless peasant men, women and children, laying waste their fields and cutting down their orchards to bring starvation to the survivors, thus depriving a noble enemy of the support base for his unproductive way of life. It was, to use a modern expression, total war. Because of the enormous suffering thus inflicted on millions of innocent people, the Church pronounced the slaughter of farm animals and the destruction of agricultural implements in war to be a sin. Although professedly devout on occasion, Richard was not deterred by this interdiction.

Edward Gibbon held that history was ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’. No other single life better illustrates that judgement than the life of King Richard I. This, then, is the story, warts and all, of a man born to parents of unsurpassed intelligence, wealth and achievements and whose birthright raised him to world-wide fame, yet who died in agony, ‘naked as he came into this world’.

Douglas Boyd

SouthWest France,2014

NOTES

1. Stubbs, W.,ed., Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis ricardi, Rolls Series (1864), pp. 17, 21, 27.

2. Quoted in S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge: CUP, 1954), Vol 3, p. 75.

Part 1:

The Education of a Prince

1

To Eleanor, a Son

Millions of modern people believe that the relative positions of the constellations at the moment of their birth, as seen with the naked eye from this planet, affect their character and influence the entire course of their lives. It is therefore hardly surprising that astrology was considered a serious science in the twelfth century, several centuries before superstition was gradually replaced by scientific knowledge in the Enlightenment. In what then seemed a proof that astrology was an important and reliable science, during the night of 8 September 1157 two male infants were born in England, 40 miles apart.

The royal palace known as ‘the King’s Houses’, later called Beaumont Palace and eventually demolished, stood near the site of Oxford’s Worcester College. A commemorative plaque on the north side of Beaumont Street records its existence and the fact that two kings of England were born there: Richard I and his younger brother John. The palace had been built by their great-grandfather Henry I outside the north gate of Oxford city because it was a comfortable ride from there to his hunting tower at Woodstock.

In the nova aula or royal apartments of the palace on that night the most famous woman of her time gave birth to her third son by the man she had married as Count Henry of Anjou – and who, thanks in large part to her wealth and political acumen, had since become King Henry II of England. Her name was Eleanor of Aquitaine. In addition to being queen of England, she was also duchess of Normandy and Aquitaine and countess of Anjou and Poitou. Because infant mortality was rife at the time and long after, the newborn prince was speedily christened Richard, and would live to become England’s most enduringly famous king.

On the same September night when he was born at Oxford, a woman previously unknown to history with the fashionable northern French name of Hodierna or Audierne1 also gave birth to a son, in St Albans. Hodierna’s son was given the name Alexander and grew up to be among the foremost philosopher-scientists of his time, Alexander of Neckham.2

Noblewomen did not normally breast-feed their children; it was their custom to bind the breasts tightly after a birth so that they would not acquire the natural curves of peasant mothers. In 1157 it would certainly have been considered inappropriate for the queen of England to suckle her child, even had Eleanor not insisted on accompanying her husband on his ceaseless travels to impose his authority and his new laws throughout the Plantagenet Empire on both sides of the Channel. Possible candidates for the honour of nursing Eleanor’s newborn son included many women who had recently given birth, but Hodierna was chosen, probably on the advice of an astrologer to whom it seemed particularly auspicious that he should be raised on the milk of a woman who had delivered a child on the same night the new prince was born.

Shortly after the birth, Eleanor left her newborn son with her servants in the comfort and safety of the palace and resumed her itinerant lifestyle that lasted until the court settled briefly at Lincoln for Christmas. Only then could her ladies’ servants unpack from travelling chests and leather sacks the finery in which their mistresses dressed for the festival. After this, Henry began a twelve-month tour of the kingdom that took in 3,000 miles of travel along roads that had not been repaired since the Romans left eight centuries before – a trip on which Eleanor accompanied him for much of the time.

The queen’s itinerant lifestyle precluding prolonged childcare, Hodierna was installed in the King’s Houses, bringing her own son with her and breast-feeding both him and Eleanor’s newborn, with Prince Richard having the privilege of the right breast, thought to produce richer milk. Living in the royal apartments, Hodierna’s relationship with the other members of the household reflected her importance in that age of infant mortality. To be appointed wet-nurse to a prince was both a very high honour and a heavy responsibility: should the royal infant die a cot death, for example, she would be accused of over-lying him. Should he die of some childhood infection outside her control, there too she would be held to account.

It was customary for infants to be breast-fed until two years old or possibly older, to avoid any possibility of tuberculosis from imbibing cow’s milk – a connection that was known even in this time of little understanding of infection. Thereafter, her duties for the young Prince Richard included all his toilet needs, dressing him and preparing all his food, even masticating meat and placing it in his mouth until he was able to chew for himself. Throughout his early years she would stay close to him, picking him up when he fell, comforting him and caring for him when and if he contracted childhood ailments. She was, in short, the source of all that complex of affection and caring that today is labelled ‘maternal’.3 Throughout his life, Richard would visit and care for Hodierna as the woman for whom he felt most affection, in much the same way that many middle-class Englishmen in the twentieth century felt affection for the nannies who brought them up until they were sent away to boarding school. Thirty-three years after his birth at Oxford Richard allotted the annual rent of £7 10s from a house at Rowdon, between Chippenham and Bath, ‘to Hodierna nutrix’, meaning, Hodierna the wet-nurse.

Hodierna and her charges lived in the most privileged stratum of Anglo-Norman society, in which 200 families related in easily traceable degree owned half the country. Beneath them toiled the native Anglo-Saxons, few of whom rose to greatness in the cruel occupation that was a slow genocide, with native males being displaced or killed and their more desirable females taken as concubines and wives by their new overlords. Traces of the racial/class divide of this time still exist in the bastard Germanic-Romance language that became modern English. For the live animals herded, tended, milked and slaughtered by the natives, we still use their Anglo-Saxon names like sheep, calf, cow and swine. For the meat on the table, which only the French-speaking overlords were allowed to eat, we use the French equivalents: mutton, veal, beef and pork. Not surprisingly, Prince Richard was to grow up regarding the English as a race of serfs who spoke a barbarous tongue he never learned and who existed only to serve their masters – in his case, once he came to power, as a source of finance.

Eleanor was a remote mother, appearing at intervals and then departing for months at a time on her travels in England and on the continent. But such was her commanding presence and so tantalising her arrivals and departures that Richard was never able to outgrow his bond with her. To these two women, then, Hodierna who mothered him and Queen Eleanor who supervised his education and upbringing in the tradition of her native Aquitaine – of which she was determined he would one day be duke, if not king of England too – Richard remained close all his life. They and his sisters were, in fact, the only women in his life.

Geraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Wales, archdeacon of Brecon, a contemporary of Richard, wrote a treatise entitled De Principis Instructione – On the Education of a Prince – to illustrate the inculcation of the virtues a monarch should have. Richard’s upbringing was far from that ideal.

In the fifteen years of her marriage to Louis VII of France, Eleanor had produced only two daughters. Her failure to give him a son and heir had been the key to the annulment that freed her to marry Henry of Anjou. In the five years so far spent with Henry she had done her queenly duty in providing him with a daughter, Princess Matilda, and three sons, one of whom had died. After Richard, Eleanor was to bear the princes Geoffrey and John and the princesses Eleanor and Joanna. For a royal couple to beget so many offspring was unusual, for it could lead to a repeat of the situation after the death of William the Norman, whose ten children fought over the realm he had acquired by defeating the last Saxon ruler, King Harold Godwinson, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Since neither Henry nor Eleanor was stupid, it seems that their purpose in begetting so many offspring was to marry them off to unite the rulers of the whole of Western Europe in a web of common family relationships dominated by … Henry and Eleanor.4

A great-grandson of the Conqueror, Henry was an even more frequently absent parent than the queen. There is no record that he bore any affection for his children. In January 1163 he returned to England after an absence of four and a half years, briefly crossing paths with Eleanor and Richard, who departed in the other direction some weeks later. All the evidence points to Henry having regarded his daughters as political tools to be used in marriage alliances with other royal European families. As for his four surviving sons, he refused the easy way out, which was to make one into a churchman, to reduce the internecine rivalry by that son’s consequent ineligibility to exercise royal power. He did, however, appoint his bastard son Geoffrey to be bishop of Lincoln and later archbishop of York.

Richard and the three other legitimate sons were tormented by Henry throughout their childhood, adolescence and adult lives. He would first promise something to one of them and then give it to another, only to take it away when it pleased him to do so and give it to a third. It was a technique he used with allies, vassals and enemies too, having learned it from his mother the Empress Matilda.5 Life, she taught her son, was like venery: always show the bait to the hawk, but take it away again before the bird can bite in order to keep it hungry and anxious to please.6 In the protracted bloody civil war against her cousin Stephen of Blois for the throne of England, Matilda’s policy had alienated so many allies that she had narrowly escaped back to France with her life. While the life-is-like-venery approach could thus not be said to have worked for her, Henry used this manipulative technique throughout his life, outwitting enemies and allies alike, but succeeded in making enemies of his own sons.

Richard’s mother was by her own birthright countess of Poitou, which by tradition also made her duchess of the thirteen counties that made up the immense duchy of Aquitaine. Since her only brother’s death she had been raised for this task, and had been, in the words of her first modern biographer Amy Kelly, accustomed to travel with the peripatetic household of her father Duke William X:

… from the foothills of the Pyrenees to the River Loire on those long chevauchées made necessary by the ducal business of overlooking intriguing vassals and presumptuous clergy, and carrying law and justice to the remoter corners of creation. She knew … the scarped heights where the baronial strongholds loomed above their clustering hamlets [of mud and straw huts]. She knew the red-roofed towns and the traffic of each one; here a lazar house, there a hostel thronging with pilgrims returning from Saint James [of Compostela] or the shrines of the pious Limousin. Melle she knew, where there was a ducal mint, and Blaye where, in the glow of forges, armourers repaired their travelling gear and Maillezais where her aunt, the Abbess Agnes, never failed to halt the ducal progress for a largess.7

In her childhood, at the end of each day’s long ride this privileged heiress of a duke was deferred to by the assembled castellans, bishops, abbots, merchants, troubadours and hangers-on who constituted the ducal court going about its programme of feudal business. This headstrong, intelligent and beautiful girl born to the corridors of power grew up to be the only queen ever to sit on the thrones of both France and England. Becoming duchess when she was just 15 years old, after her father died on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, she married Prince Louis Capet two weeks before he succeeded his father as king of France and took the title Louis VII, making his bride the teenage queen of France.

Eleanor defied the papal interdiction on women travelling with the Second Crusade ‘except for decent washerwomen’8 and accompanied Louis and the French army on the long march overland to the Holy Land, fighting the influence over her husband of the crusade’s bishops and his own chaplain. By divorcing Louis VII after the crusade to marry Henry of Anjou, she changed the balance of power in Western Europe.

The divorce had been arranged by negotiation between Louis’ bishops and her vassal, Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux. The more worldly of Louis Capet’s churchmen, like Archbishop Suger of St Denis, who had also served the late King Louis VI as chancellor, were reluctant to see the taxes of her immense dowry of Aquitaine and Poitou lost to the royal purse. They also considered it dangerous that one-third of France would revert to her personal control in the absence of a husband. Against that, the more pious of Louis’ prelates, like Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted from the Sermon on the Mount, when Christ said that an eye that sinned should be plucked out and thrown away, for it was better to lose a hand or eye than for the whole body to be cast into hellfire. These bishops agonised over the state of the king’s soul and wanted him separated as swiftly as possible from ‘the whore of Aquitaine’, suspected of gross misconduct including an affair with her uncle Raymond of Toulouse during her stay in the Holy Land while on the pointless Second Crusade with Louis. They saw a divorce as the only way to save Louis’ soul from further sin by removing from his bed – not that they often slept together – the obstreperous consort who had briefly weaned him away from the influence of the Church, for high office in which he had been raised until called to supreme temporal office by the accidental death of his older brother.

In March 1152 the archbishop of Sens, who had presided over the condemnation of the teacher Peter Abelard, castrated in punishment for his scandalously illicit sexual relationship with his adolescent pupil Heloïse, convened the most important churchmen and lay nobles of Louis’ territory at the castle of Beaugency, between Orleans and Blois. Louis, with charity rare among royalty, refused to accuse his queen of anything that might be prejudicial to her and decreed that the marriage be dissolved on the grounds of consanguinity alone. Being a woman, Eleanor was not allowed to speak. Her advocate, Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux, who had negotiated her marriage to Louis fifteen years earlier, stipulated the return of her dowry lands in the same condition as at the time of the marriage, in consideration of which she would remain a faithful vassal of King Louis. After arrangements were agreed for an audit to ensure that this condition was observed, Eleanor was free – at the price of a recent unwanted pregnancy forced on her by the pope and the loss of her two daughters by Louis, who remained the property of their father.

Twelfth-century France showing Eleanor’s territorial inheritance

Eleanor departed from Beaugency in a cortège of her vassals, the richest woman in the world by far but a potential prey for any noble with the nerve and force to kidnap and forcibly marry her. This nearly happened twice in the next few days during the journey home to her own lands. Near Blois, 16-year-old Geoffrey Plantagenet attempted an ambush that failed.9 On the Loire crossing at Tours another ambush by Thibault of Blois, son of the count of Champagne, likewise failed when Eleanor’s route was changed at the last minute.

Once safely installed in her own quarters in the Tour Maubergeonne of the comital palace at Poitiers, 30-year-old Eleanor lost no time in repudiating all the charters appertaining to her lands that she had been obliged to sign with Louis. Taking stock of her situation, she had no illusions. Her position was the same as it had been fifteen years earlier after inheriting title to the duchy of Aquitaine on her father’s death. So rich an heiress, while unmarried and therefore unprotected by a father or husband, was constantly at risk of having her territory invaded, and being obliged to wed the invader. Although just released from a marriage that had bored her for years, she had therefore swiftly to remarry a powerful noble, whose territories added to hers would make the couple a force to be reckoned with. Her choice was dictated not by love, but realpolitik. It fell on a neighbour whom she had met at the Capetian court when he and his father came to do homage to King Louis.

On 6 April Geoffrey Plantagenet’s older brother, the 19-year-old Count Henry of Anjou, whose county abutted on the northern border of Poitou, announced to his assembled vassals that he was going to marry the 30-year-old ex-wife of his overlord Louis Capet. He had previously sought the hand of one of Louis VII’s daughters, but abandoned that suit for Eleanor’s far richer dowry.10 Feudal custom demanded that two vassals of Louis must request his approval to their match, but this was something that neither Henry nor Eleanor had any intention of doing. They also chose to ignore the even closer ties of consanguinity between themselves than those which had justified Eleanor’s canonical repudiation by Louis Capet. In addition, Henry ignored a new slander being circulated to blacken the name of the woman who had rejected the king of France: that she had slept with Henry’s own womanising father, Geoffrey the Fair.

Negotiations on Eleanor’s behalf were again conducted by Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux. On 18 May 1152 in the grandeur of Poitiers Cathedral, which lies a short walk from the comital palace, the knot was tied with due ceremony11 amid excitement and apprehension among their vassals, for the refusal of the two spouses to seek Louis’ approval constituted grounds for his military intervention, should he be able to assemble a sufficiently powerful army to come and punish them.

Eleanor and Henry’s combined lands

Through his mother Empress Matilda – so called by virtue of her first marriage to the German Holy Roman Emperor Henry V – Count Henry was also duke of Normandy and overlord of Maine and Touraine. Allying Eleanor’s lands to his made him the most powerful man in France. Together, they controlled more than half the country, which was far more than poor Louis Capet could claim as his own domain. The icing on the cake for Henry was that the acquisition of Eleanor’s dower lands also increased immeasurably his chances of recovering what the Empress Matilda regarded as part of her birthright: the disputed kingdom of England. For that, Henry of Anjou surely owed his new wife a debt of lifelong gratitude. Did Eleanor know that Henry’s gratitude never lasted? She can hardly have guessed then that, two decades later, he would be her implacable enemy, against whom she would raise their adult sons in armed rebellion.

Louis’ advisers counselled him to summon Henry of Anjou to Paris to answer to a charge of treason for marrying without his suzerain’s consent. Although Eleanor was equally guilty, the king refused then or at any other time to make any move against his ex-wife. Since Henry showed no sign of putting in an appearance to be judged, Louis gathered together a host, partly by pardoning vassals like Robert of Dreux, who had joined a coalition of usurping nobles while Louis was absent in the Holy Land on crusade. Others, like Thibault V de Blois, were bribed – in his case by betrothal to Eleanor’s 2-year-old second daughter by Louis. Her other daughter abandoned in Paris, 7-year-old Aelith, had just been married to Count Henry I of Champagne, enlisting him and his vassals to the royal cause by bringing to the House of Champagne the child bride’s tenuous claim to her mother’s duchy of Aquitaine.

Normally, the Church would have supported Louis in his intention to punish Henry and Eleanor, but the French prelates and the pope were too busy playing another political game to get involved in this squabble: Pope Eugenius III had instructed Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury not to crown Eustace of Boulogne as the future successor to his father Stephen of Blois on the throne of England. Henry of Anjou’s recent marriage thus made him the strongest contender for the throne of England after Stephen’s death. On Midsummer Day, a little over one month after the May wedding and in the hope of weakening Henry’s position in the competition for the crown of England, Stephen also sent a contingent to join Louis’ forces invading the Plantagenet possessions. The motives of the other members of Louis’ coalition, like young Geoffrey of Anjou, were simpler: to grab and hold on to whatever part of Henry and Eleanor’s territories they could conquer and occupy. There was indeed so much territory at stake that each could easily have acquired a county or two for himself, if victorious.

NOTES

1. Latin adjective hodierna, meaning ‘of today’.

2. Also spelled Necham and Nequam. The latter being Latin for ‘worthless’ was possibly a play on words, or a comparison with his more famous milk-brother.

3. See, inter alia, F. and J. Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (New York: Hudson and Row, 1987), pp. 176–203.

4. See at greater length D. Boyd, Eleanor, April Queen of Aquitaine (Stroud: The History Press, 2011), pp. 179–82.

5. Originally christened Edith and also known as Maud.

6. Walter Map, ed. M. Rhodes James, De Nugis Curialium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 238.

7. A. Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 6–7 (abridged by the author).

8. Stubbs, W., Roger of Howden Chronica, Vol 2, p. 335.

9. Richard, A., Histoire des Comtes de Poitou (Paris: Picard, 1903), Vol 2, p. 108.

10. Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine, p. 193.

11. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, ed. R. Howlett in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, Rolls Series 82 (London: Longmans, 1884), Vol 1, p. 93.

2

Duke to King, Duchess to Queen

It seemed, briefly, that Henry had been caught unawares because he was heavily involved with preparations to invade England and reclaim the kingdom lost by his mother in the protracted civil war against Stephen of Blois – a time of strife in which, it was said, ‘Christ and his angels slept’ while the country was ravaged by Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries and even the palace of Westminster was turned into a doss-house. In fact, Henry had been preparing for Louis’ move ever since the council of war on 6 April. The speed and savagery with which he now led his forces to lay waste Robert of Dreux’s lands caused the Church to beg for a truce, at the chance of which Louis leaped after falling psychosomatically ill. Ignoring both, Henry rode south with his customary speed to capture the castle of Montsoreau from a castellan who supported his brother Geoffrey. One by one, his other enemies fled the field, leaving Eleanor and her husband the strongest force in France and in a stronger position to invade England the following year.

They spent that autumn en chevauchée – literally riding the length and breadth of her lands together to impress on every vassal, both lay and religious (for an abbot was required like any other baron to lead his contingent of armed men in the field in support of his overlord) that the new duke would ruthlessly crush any attempts at secession during his absence the following year when Henry intended invading England. Just one example was needed to impress all the other vassals. It came when the couple arrived at Limoges for Henry’s coronation as duke and were at first greeted with acclamation by the populace and the abbot and his community. Following feudal custom, Henry demanded accommodation and food for his retinue but the abbot of Limoges refused, pleading that the custom only covered a modest ducal party lodged within the walls, whereas Henry’s retinue, expanded by many of his vassals and vavasours who had come to witness the ceremony, was encamped outside them. It is probable that the dispute had more to do with the numbers involved than where exactly they were sleeping but, when fighting erupted between his soldiery and the resentful townsfolk, Henry ordered that they and the abbot be taught a lesson. The newly built bridge across the River Vienne was torn down, as were the recently rebuilt city walls,1 making Duke Henry’s point that his retinue was no longer ‘without the walls’ which no longer existed, and therefore should be fed.

Once crowned duke of Aquitaine, he was deterred from further punitive action in the Limousin by news from England that his mother’s erstwhile supporters in England were now prepared to support his claim to the throne of England. To them he was known as Henry fitz-Empress, meaning ‘son of the Empress’. Others called him by the sobriquet Curtmantle, from his habit of wearing a short cloak, which, although offering less protection from the weather, allowed quicker reactions in the saddle than a long one would have done. It was a sartorial expression of his pragmatic nature and impatience. The chronicler Peter of Blois observed that Henry could ride in one day the distance others would cover in four or five; as Louis’ supporters had found out, his speed of attack was to become legendary.

Instead of waiting for milder weather, Henry now insisted on braving the winter gales by crossing the Channel with a small army of mercenaries transported in a fleet of twenty-six vessels from the little port at Barfleur in the lee of the Cotentin Peninsula on 8 January 1153.2 In a series of marches, counter-marches and skirmishes without any major battle, he and Stephen manoeuvred for advantage, with Henry and his supporters controlling the south-west, the Midlands and much of northern England, while Stephen held the more valuable south and east. The biggest confrontation seemed likely to happen on the River Thames at Wallingford, where the castle had been besieged by Stephen for months, but the barons on both sides were more in favour of a settlement, allowing the bishops to arrange a truce, during which Henry and Stephen met face-to-face.

A few days after Eleanor gave birth to his first son in August 1153, Henry learned that King Stephen’s son Eustace of Boulogne had choked to death during a meal. In the hope of avoiding another protracted civil war, the grieving king of England agreed to name Henry his successor to the detriment of his surviving son, William, and this succession was confirmed by treaty negotiated by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and witnessed by fourteen bishops and eleven earls of the realm. Since Stephen was more than thirty years older than Henry, and thus an old man by the standards of the time, it was virtually certain that the young count of Anjou would soon inherit the crown of England without having to fight for it, although hostilities continued in a desultory fashion until November, when the Church arranged the Treaty of Winchester, in which cathedral the reigning king of England exchanged the kiss of peace with Henry of Anjou, who was formally adopted as his son and heir.

Whilst absent in England, he had left his mother’s iron hand in control of Normandy and Eleanor ruling their southern continental domains from the comital palace at Angers. The two duchesses’ courts could not have been more different. His mother’s in Rouen was austere and pious like her; while approving the match politically, Matilda disliked her daughter-in-law as an immoral opportunist, more given to pleasure than prayer. After years in Louis VII’s comfortless court on the île de la Cité in Paris and the months on the road with Henry, Eleanor was determined to enliven her own court in the spirit of her grandfather Duke William IX, inviting troubadours to compose poetry and risqué songs and jonglars to sing and entertain her in French and Occitan with songs like ‘A la entrada del tens clar’ (‘At the beginning of spring’):

Qui donc la vesés dançar e son gent còrs deportar

ben pogrà dir’ de vertat qu’el mond non aja sa par,

la reina joiosa!

[He who sees her in the dance, / sees her noble body twist and twirl, / must surely say that in all the world / for beauty there’s no equal/of this joyful queen.]

She also exercised her feudal right as matchmaker, pairing young gallants who met her standards of elegance with suitable young ladies of the court, neither party being able to marry without her consent.3 For this she was called, in Occitan, the language of southern France, la reina aurilhosa or the April Queen – a southern synonym for the Queen of the May in northern countries, where spring comes a month later than in Aquitaine.

Though far away across the Channel, Henry was not without news, or rather gossip, of the goings-on. Eleanor’s court attracted troubadours, one of the most famous of whom was Bernat de Ventadorn4, who, although low-born of a sergeant-at-arms and a cook, had the talent that enabled him to mix in high society. When he became a little too familiar with his duchess, he was summoned to join her husband’s itinerant court in England, as pleasure-less as the empress Matilda’s at Rouen. He lamented his exile in verse:

Aissí’m part d’amor e’m recrè.

Mòrt ma per mort li respond

e vau m’en, pos ilh no’m reten,

ciatius en eissilh no sai ont.

[I must leave my love and go away / banished I know not where / for she does not bid me stay / though this cruel exile I cannot bear.]

Giving birth to Henry’s first son, Eleanor expunged the ignominy of being considered the queen who had produced only daughters for Louis Capet. The supply of fashionable names for the nobility was limited, with many a William, Henry and Geoffrey, so the boy was named William after her father and grandfather and all the other Williams in her line. He was also given the courtesy title ‘duke of Aquitaine’. Some indication of Eleanor’s new-found independence is to be found in the charters she signed at this time without mentioning Henry, who was, after all, the titular duke of Aquitaine by right of marriage. Her vassal Archbishop Geoffroy proudly declared in Bordeaux that Aquitaine acknowledged her alone as its suzerain.5

However, while waiting to inherit the English crown, Henry returned to France to demonstrate his power by summoning Eleanor and their infant son to live in the ducal palace at Rouen. In return for a ‘fine’ of 1,000 silver marks,6 Louis VII agreed to cease including the title ‘duke of Aquitaine’ among his many others, which he had the right to do under a technicality of the annulment contract. That canny churchman Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux sniffed the wind of change and proclaimed that the master of Aquitaine was now Henry of Anjou.7 Henry, for his part, acknowledged his obligation as a vassal of King Louis in respect of his continental holdings by leading an army to help him pacify the restless territory of the Vexin, which lay between Normandy and Louis’ domains.

Although the twelfth century lies within the academic field of medievalists, the near-incessant warfare of the time can only be understood as the birth pangs of what we call the Middle Ages. European civilisation was in a state of flux, still emerging from the Dark Ages. Everywhere, might was right in this time of perpetual manoeuvre for advantage, each noble, baron or king, whatever the title he had inherited, having only the authority gained by his last confrontation. Alliances were made to be broken; feudal duty had constantly to be reimposed on his vassals by every overlord using fire and sword. Anyone who doubts that has only to see the thousands of castles that pock the face of France, built by barons but also by every local lordling to keep his enemies at bay.

Society was formally divided into three classes, pugnantes, orantes et laborantes – those who fought, those who prayed and the nameless many whose toil supported the totally unproductive knightly class. The Church attempted to moderate the worst excesses of this martial chaos, intervening on behalf of the peasants who bore the brunt of each invasion and raid, but was itself on occasion the cause of strife as it manoeuvred for temporal power under successive popes. If this is confusing for the modern reader, it was all the more so for those who lived through this time.

Shortly after Stephen’s death on 25 October 1154, messengers from Archbishop Theobald arrived to tell Henry that he was now England’s monarch, making Eleanor England’s queen. The devout Louis Capet was so discountenanced by this swift turn-around in the fortunes of his former wife that he departed on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Refusing to ask for safe conduct through her territory, he took a longer route through Catalunya, which also gave him an excuse to visit the Christian courts of northern Spain in search of a new wife.

Within two weeks of hearing the news from Canterbury, Henry assembled an impressive retinue including the most important barons and prelates of Normandy. The Empress Matilda was, diplomatically, not included in the party for fear her presence might alienate the many enemies she had made in England from her son’s cause. Eleanor, seven months pregnant, joined the party at Barfleur, to find herself facing many of the Norman nobility and churchmen who had enjoyed her humiliation on the Second Crusade when she was abducted in disgrace from her uncle’s court at Antioch.8 She would not have been human if she did not savour every minute of their discomfiture in now having to show supreme deference to the queen of England who was no mere consort, but a duchess and countess in her own right, whose possessions far outweighed theirs.

And there they stayed, in enforced proximity in the little Norman port, while November gales blew in from the Atlantic so violently that no ship could put to sea. In the back of everyone’s minds was the tragic loss of the la blanche-nef or White Ship, in the wreck of which Henry I had lost his heir and his bastard sons when it sank just outside the port in 1120, in an accident said by many to be God’s punishment for the sodomy practised by many aboard. By 7 December the patience of Eleanor’s husband was exhausted. Determined to be crowned before Christmas so that the coronation could take place before the austerity of Lent, he set out in defiance of the elements in a clinker-built vessel with high forecastle and raised poop very like the one that had sunk. Even with reefed sails, the ships of his little fleet soon lost contact despite bugle calls and horn lanterns displayed at mastheads during the night. For more than twenty-four hours the human and equine passengers were buffeted by wind and pushed off-course by tides. With no compasses then available and clouds obscuring the stars, it seems a miracle that they all made landfall, although in harbours widely separated, on the south coast of England. The royal party landed near Lyndhurst in the New Forest, where King William Rufus had been assassinated under cover of a hunting accident, allowing Henry’s grandfather to seize the throne a few days later by locking up his elder brother for life.

Henry and Eleanor rode first to Winchester to secure the treasury of the realm, commandeering fresh horses along the way and acquiring a cortège of Anglo-Norman nobility and clergy eager to demonstrate loyalty to their new overlord. Archbishop Theobald awaited them at Westminster with the assembled bishops of the realm, but both the abbey and the palace of Westminster had been vandalised by Stephen’s mercenaries, forcing the royal party to set up home in the palace of Bermondsey, a low island in the unhealthy malarial marshes south of the River Thames. The coronation on the Sunday before Christmas took place in Westminster Abbey – a mixed scene of pomp and squalor.

The Jersey poet Robert Wace described a banquet that may have been the coronation feast, with beef, pork and game consumed in large quantities, flavoured with herbs and imported spices. To finish, there were stewed and candied fruit, jellies, tarts, waffles and wafers – thin pastries served with sweet white wine – the servers then entertaining the assembly with tumbling, music and dance. There may also have been some wit – all in French, of course – from joculatores to raise a belly laugh and perhaps, riskiest of all, a joculatrix to make them laugh, although at such a moment political correctness must have been an uneasy line to tread.

The men were clean-shaven; beards were a sign of unfashionable Englishness. Henry’s short cloaks set a fashion: men had their long cloaks, favoured by Stephen, cut down to show their political sympathies, and wore their hair shoulder-length; women had longer hair. Both sexes wore furs for warmth in the ill-heated living quarters, where braziers of glowing charcoal exuded carbon monoxide fumes. The city of London was, in chronicler Walter Map’s words, a haunt of pimps and whores, though his less squeamish fellow-courtier William fitz Stephen thought it a noble city. Most houses were built of wood with thatched roofs; destructive fires ravaged the city repeatedly. But London was big, even for Eleanor who knew Paris and Constantinople: within its walls Paris covered only 25 acres; girdled by London Wall were 326 acres of homes, shops, taverns, cookhouses and the bustling port itself – all, as Richard would later decide, producing taxes for him to spend as he chose. So cramped were living conditions in this vast metropolis that richer citizens were already moving out to live in the meadows around Clerkenwell and St Clement’s Well where wells had water less likely to be polluted by the ubiquitous, stinking cesspits.

Roughly half of England was held as fiefs by the Anglo-Norman barons, the balance belonging to the Crown and the Church. To see things for himself, Henry immediately set off to tour his new possessions while Eleanor prepared for the birth on 28 February 1155 of her second son, named Henry after his father, who was absent in the North at the time, forcibly impressing upon some recalcitrant barons that he was their new master. At Whitsuntide Eleanor moved her familia or household into the palace of Westminster, renovated, refurbished and furnished at record speed by men working day and night under the workaholic young Thomas Becket, whose rise to become Henry’s chancellor displaced Eleanor from the royal councils. Recommended to the king by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury as the man most likely to bring the state finances into order after nineteen years of misrule, Becket forfeited sleep as a good courtier must, sharing not only the king’s working hours but also his leisure pursuits of horses, hawks and hounds or a game of chess or some learned discourse late into the night. Almost the only waking hours they were separated were during Henry’s womanising, which Becket refused to share.9

At Westminster, Eleanor found herself responsible for raising not only her own young sons but also Henry’s bastard Geoffrey by his Saxon mistress Ykenai until he was old enough to be sent off to be educated for high ecclesiastical office in the schools of Northampton. That old gossip Walter Map spitefully labelled Geoffrey’s mother meretrix – a prostitute10 – but Henry’s paranoia would never have let him take an interest in a mistress’ child of doubtful paternity.

There was little privacy in the modern sense of the word, whether at Westminster or on the road with Henry. It was then thought aberrant to wish to be alone – except in hermits, among whom it was considered a sign of their piety. The court when travelling slept in one great hall, with a solar at one end, so that all could see who was with whom and why. In September Eleanor moved to Winchester, which had been the capital of Saxon England, while Henry took time off to hunt in the nearby New Forest where, as in all the forests, it was forbidden for the hungry Anglo-Saxon inhabitants to seek food or even collect firewood.

By the Christmas court of 1155, held at Winchester, Eleanor was pregnant again and shortly to be abandoned by Henry when he crossed to France to placate Louis Capet and declare a brief war on his brother Geoffrey for daring to claim that an oath sworn by Henry on their father’s deathbed should be honoured, giving him territory of his own to govern. While Eleanor held no writ of regency, that did not stop her travelling the country in great pomp and style, furnishing her temporary lodgings with tapestries and favourite furniture, issuing charters over her own seal and arranging marriages that ensured the spouses owed her loyalty. In June she was back at Winchester for the birth of a daughter, christened Matilda in honour of her formidable grandmother, an event closely followed by the death of Prince William.

She lost little time in grieving, travelling to France to be present when Henry was in her lands. The cartulary of the important abbey of La Sauve, lying east of Bordeaux, records their visit with a glittering retinue that included ‘Thomas of London’11 who constantly had Henry’s ear. So busy was Henry with punishing anyone who flouted his ducal authority, and razing their fortifications when the mood took him, that it was rumoured his speed in operations must be due to his use of widespread treachery. At some point in their separate progresses back to the North, Eleanor must have met up with her husband, for she was pregnant again when she returned to England in February 1157 – this time with the son who would be her favourite.

NOTES

1. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 114.

2. Ibid, p. 113.

3. For a fuller account of Eleanor’s court, see Boyd, Eleanor, pp. 137–9.

4. Also sometimes called Bernard de Ventadour.

5. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 116.

6. A mark was equivalent to one-third of an English pound.

7. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 116.

8. For greater detail see Boyd, Eleanor, p. 136.

9. William fitz Stephen, Life of Becket, ed. J.C. Robertson, Rolls Series No 67 (London: Longmans, 1875), Vol 3, p. 17.

10. Map, De Nugis, pp. 238, 246. His phrase meretrix quedam publica more likely expresses Anglo-Norman contempt for an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman.

11. C. de la Ville, Histoire de l’Abbaye de La Sauve Majeure (Paris: Mequignon junior and Bordeaux: Th. Lafargue, 1877), p. 177.

3

Court Whores and Confusion

This, then, was the turbulent Plantagenet family into which Richard was born at the palace outside Oxford. The name of the dynasty founded by Henry and Eleanor is said to come from Richard’s grandfather Geoffrey the Fair, who wore a sprig of planta genista or bright yellow broom – genêt in French – in his helmet to make him instantly recognisable in fast-moving equestrian combat.

When the royal family was gathered together for a Christmas or Easter court the sibling rivalry and tensions must have made life hellish for the four princes and three princesses, not least because their father had inherited from his Norse ancestors a tendency to go berserk when angry or thwarted. He would then fall down in a fit, foaming at the mouth and rending his clothes in fury to roll among the rotten reeds that covered the flagstones of whichever palace they were in – reeds that, if not freshly laid, were fouled with food scraps and the excrement of dogs and other animals.

Even family members mysteriously came and went, adding to the children’s insecurity. Before Richard’s fifth birthday, his elder brother Henry was sent to continue his education in the London house of Chancellor Thomas Becket. This sending away of noble sons to be brought up in another household was not unusual at the time, but Princess Matilda was also sent away young – to Germany when only 12, having long been betrothed by her father to Duke Henry of Saxony, known as Henry the Lion. There were also additions to the royal family. Henry II’s obsession with alliances would lead him to inveigle Eleanor’s first husband Louis VII of France to hand over two daughters by his second wife: Princess Marguerite was betrothed to Prince Henry and Princess Alais was betrothed at the age of 9 to Richard, who had previously been betrothed after the Christmas court of 1158, when he was only seventeen months old, to Berengaria – a daughter of the count of Barcelona, not to be confused with Berengaria of Navarre, to whom he was later married by Eleanor’s wiles during the Third Crusade. For similar political reasons, Alix of Maurienne was betrothed in infancy to Prince John and Constance of Brittany was betrothed to Prince Geoffrey.

Marriage was a political tool, as when, in October 1160, Richard’s father stole a march on Louis VII. He ordered Eleanor to bring Prince Henry from England to Normandy and thence to do homage to Louis for the duchy of Normandy. With the connivance of certain papal legates, he then had Prince Henry married in Neubourg to Louis’ daughter Princess Marguerite. The groom was aged 7 and the bride a mere 3 years old, so this was in direct breach of the agreement made two years before with Louis: that the marriage would be effected when she reached puberty. The purpose of the marriage was simply to secure Marguerite’s dowry, which included the strategically important castle of Gisors, on the borders of Normandy and Louis’ domains, and two other important castles.1 Work was immediately put in hand to strengthen the fortifications at Gisors, with moats deepened and a new curtain wall running around the castle for 800 metres, protected by eight new towers.

All these young people and still others were treated as Richard’s brothers and sisters by other members of the court. Life became even more complicated when statuses changed, as when Richard’s second betrothed, Princess Alais Capet, caught King Henry’s roving eye while she was still a young teenager and was forced to become one of his mistresses.