Eleanor Of Aquitaine (15 page)

His election had fallen upon Thomas Becket, a rising young Londoner in his middle thirties who had been in his court for a dozen years and shown himself, under important employments, of subtle understanding, steadfast purpose, incorruptible integrity. He was tall and personable, this burgher's son, well-knit, dark haired, pallid, with wide clear brow, candid eyes, a courtly bearing, ingratiating manner, deliberate speech. Though intelligent and well-schooled, he had not the born scholar's zest for learning, but rather the courtier's interest in men and activity.
¹³
A boyhood in a prosperous and upright burgher's house with a pious mother's teaching, a period with the canons of Merton in Surrey, were followed by two years in the schools of Paris in the days of Abélard's return to Saint Genevieve — years which brought him to acquaintanceship with the great teachers of his time and with the stirring issues of the intellectual revolt against Clairvaux. Journeys as a young man with Thibault to Rome, and other missions on the affairs of Canterbury, had given him contact with men influential in court and
curia
. His early adoption into the archbishop's household associated him with the rising generation of statesmen and ecclesiastics in England and abroad. Thomas' rise in Thibault's court had been rapid and brilliant and had occasioned some envy among his companions there. As Archdeacon of Canterbury the young man already held rich benefices; and, as with many wealthy clerks, his bent was toward the world and not the cloister. He would be acceptable to the king for his practical sagacity and his forthrightness; to the See of Canterbury for that substratum in his character of rectitude and tenacity.

The chancellor was thus assigned to Henry by that authority from which, according to prevailing theories, kings themselves derived their sanction, to be not merely the Angevin's civil servant, but his privy counselor and guide in the tangled affairs awaiting him in England. Thomas as chancellor was given a mandate by Canterbury to conciliate the king, to direct his judgments, curb his youthful violence, and steer him in the paths of peace and justice. Becket was Henry's senior by fifteen years, old enough to admonish, young enough to companion the young sovereign Henry, burning to bring the island to order and be off to those capital affairs he had to conclude abroad, welcomed the man of good fame, sobriety, and experience, commended to him so warmly by Archbishop Thibault. In the circumstances, he knew himself fortunate to find at hand the very man designed by nature and prepared by nurture for his needs.

In all the early enterprises of the Plantagenets, Becket was the king's intimate, and Henry found his zeal and energy drive hard upon his own in all the royal interests. In pleasure and in toil the king and his chancellor kept company.
¹⁴
Together they followed hounds and hawks, vied in chess and tilt, dined at the same board. When Henry went on
chevauchée
, Thomas traveled with him.

*

    To recognize his house
    Is not an arduous task, the beaten path
     Is plain to all without the need of guide
    The house is known to all, unknown to vice
    Alone it sheds its beams on poor as well
    As rich Its door stands open for the wretched
    And the blest alike, and here each stranger
     Finds a father to fill his heart with
joy.

John of Salisbury,
Entheticus
, translated by J B Pike

The chancellor's establishment in London became the talk of European courts. It buzzed with the activities of half a hundred clerks attendant upon official business. His household, as offering a forum of experience and an exemplar of courtly custom, became, rather than the king's residence, the school of young nobles, the rendezvous of ambitious men. The highest courtiers envied him for the favors he enjoyed.
¹⁶
His tables, hospitably furnished for guests and pensioners of every rank, were adorned with the most precious vessels and spread with sumptuous foods and costly wines. But though elegance and affluence distinguished the chancellery of the king, profligacy and insobriety were shut from the gates of Thomas' house in London.

The queen appears to have been not insensitive to the fact that the rise of the chancellor involved some decline of her own ascendancy in the royal counsels. The deflection of business to Thomas' house and Henry's sojourns abroad produced a change in the feudal custom she had known, calculated to dimmish the status of queens and to cut her off from that large intercourse with persons of consequence which had been her prime means of keeping herself abreast in the racing currents of her time. To the chancellery, rather than to the king's outlying residence, went those equipages that signalized the grandees of Christendom, lay and clerical, for whose approach outriders cleared the streets of London. There, and not to Bermondsey, went emissaries from far places with the secrets of Pope and king, the gossip of court and fief, market, school, shrine, and cloister. There men sought the king's patronage and found it dispensed by the king's chancellor.

In Henry's absences the queen and the royal children were left under the guardianship of Thibault of Canterbury and John of Salisbury. It is possible that the See of Canterbury, in view of her lamentable career among the Franks and the canonical flaw in her marriage to the king of the English, had not regretted the separation of the palace and the chancellery and the confinement of the queen in Henry's absences to a merely accessory role in Bermondsey. There, in spite of her sumptuous household, her personal corodies, and her regal trappings, she who had been accustomed in Paris and Antioch, Angers and Rouen, to be at the heart of enterprise, in the thick of rumor and discussion, found herself at times sequestered, companioned by women, visited not by the authors of significant events, but by sycophants and triflers who found no vocation in the chancellery. Henry himself complained that Becket's house emptied his own. Peter of Blois comments upon the relative shabbmess of Henry's provision for his own household, upon the, "half baked bread, sour wine, stale fish and meat," with which guests and pensioners were regaled at the royal board
¹⁷
He had doubtless dined at Becket's better furnished table.
¹⁸
Eleanor at this stage of her career, when the future seemed so full of promise, can have felt no inclination for a semi-seclusion with the infant princes and the king's female relatives while the homage of the court was received in the house of the chancellor, and the royal gifts, upon which the feudal prestige so much depended, were dispensed by his hand.

It was not long before Becket received from his king a summary commission to restore the dilapidated palace of Westminster as the proper royal residence in London.
¹⁰
Fitz Stephen relates that the vast work, undertaken suddenly, was accomplished between Easter and Whitsuntide with such a babel of activity that upon the scene men could not hear each other speak.
²⁰
Thereupon this palace, restored and refurbished, became the ampler theater of Plantagenet enterprise.

*

The sweet young queen
Draws the thoughts of all upon her
As sirens lure the witless manners
Upon the reefs

Minnesinger's song, reputedly in praise of Eleanor.

If we may believe the critics of the second half of the century, new influences exerted in this period brought the society of London almost abruptly out of its insular backwardness and its gravity into the full currents of continental gaiety and enlightenment. It seems that there grew up at that time in which the famous Countess of Poitou presided in the courts of the Plantagenets, a notable change in social patterns, to which not only expatriated Normans and Poitevins, but the barons of Britain and the Sabines of London, learned in some measure and in the course of time to respond. Reflective persons on the spot observed those innovations not without disinay. Whereas, said one of these, it is the manifest function of the arts to divert men's thoughts from profane things, these very agencies were now employed to arouse his passions and engage his mortal senses.

Much has been said about Henry's patronage of the arts, but the influences that now especially prevailed can hardly have been conceived by the king himself, however much his tastes inclined to the literature and learning of his day. He liked to surround himself with able and well furnished men and whet his mind upon their talents and their erudition. Like all the Plantagenets, he enjoyed the enrichment art lends to life, and certainly his tastes were not austere. But he was too preoccupied, at least in those early years of his reign, to have elaborated the artistic milieu of which the critics complain. This milieu was not in any case the kind of thing to which his special genius turned. With the king, says Peter of Blois, there is school every day, constant conversation of the best scholars, and discussion of questions
²¹
His instincts were conservative Nor can the innovations of which we hear have grown up in the unexceptionable atmosphere of the chancellor's house.

Within the reach of the Plantagenet influence the courtly literature of Europe underwent a remarkable change which infused it with new significances, profoundly altered its centers of interest, and sent it upon the romantic course that it has followed, in spite of the outcries of scientists, philosophers, and other cynics, to this day. It represents strains of influence the queen was uniquely prepared to bring together. The new romances that displaced the heroic
chansons de geste
for the delight of the court were aristocratic, the work of men trained in the schools, familiar with the classic authors comprised in the trivium and the quadrivium. But the earlier tales of antiquity were now infused with something not indigenous to them. New themes and new materials drew not only from the, "matter of Rome," and that of, "Byzantium," but especially from the courtly tradition of the troubadours of the Limousin and from that, "matter of Britain," which had for two generations been filtering into Poitou,
²²
and which had lately come to the duchess' castles on the marches of Anjou over the easy highway of the Loire. If her clerks at first went back to Virgil and Ovid and Statius to steep their work in elect tradition and to find that otherness of time and place essential to romance, it is not antiquity nor the heroic age of the
chansons de geste
that we find in their fabrications, but that courtly life, present and palpable, of the twelfth century, appropriating to itself all the luxury which crusade and pilgrimage had taught the West to desire; through it was diffused the ideology of that feminized leisure class to which the Angevin wealth and peace were giving rise.

The enthralling story of Tristram, with its triumph of fateful love over feudal loyalties, enchanted this court as it had charmed that of the Countess of Anjou.
²³
"Matter of Britain," gained such a vogue in this period that the fame of Arthur and his knights spread over all the pilgrim routes of Christendom and pagandom, and was heard with wonder and delight in Byzantium, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome. It has been suggested that the scarcely fledged Plantagenet dynasty, in order to offset Capetian and imperial exploitation of Charlemagne as forebear, appropriated Arthur as their genealogical hero — Arthur the renowned paladin who had brought ancient and sovereign Rome to despite. The legendary character appeared, however, a figure dressed cap-a-pie in all the chivalric virtues of the current mode. In this noble guise he presently eclipsed the valiants of the
chansons de geste
and ultimately took his place with Godfrey of Bouillon and Charlemagne as one of the three great worthies of Christendom. Said Geoffrey of Monmouth, "There was neither king nor powerful lord who did not try to school himself according to the modes and manners of the men of Arthur." In the course of time, just as earlier travelers had turned aside to muse on Roland in the passes of Roncevaux, young aristocrats like Giraldus Cambrensis turned aside to note among the ruins of Caerleon on Usk the spot where Arthur received the Roman envoys.
²⁴
The legend became so extravagant and developed such political inconveniences for Henry that he is said to have been obliged to purge it of the notion that Arthur would return one day to reclaim his glory; and to this end he launched a successful archaeological research to discover and expose his hopeless dust along with that of Guinevere.

The queen was to poets, as one of her apologists has said, "what dawn is to birds."
²⁸
They sang for her. It would require a textbook to catalogue the dedications and rededications and other literary salutations addressed to Eleanor herself. Wace had offered his redaction of Geoffrey of Monmouth's
History of the Kings of Britain —
that bubbling spring of Arthurian lore — to her while she was still only Duchess of Normandy; and she is commonly identified as the, "riche dame de riche rei," of Benoît de Sainte-Mure in his romance of
Troie
.

For my presumption shall I be chid

By her whose kindness knows no bounds?

Highborn lady, excellent and valiant,

True, understanding, noble,

Ruled by right and justice,

Queen of beauty and largess,

By whose example many ladies

Are upheld in emulous right-doing;

In whom all learning lodges,

Whose equal in no peer is found,

Rich lady of the wealthy king

No ill, no ire, no sadness