Eleanor Of Aquitaine (34 page)

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When, in the
Inferno
, Dante and Virgil reach the eighth circle of Hell, they come upon one of the
figures in the tragedy of the young king.

"I saw," recounts the poet, "and cannot shake off the sight, a headless body moving in procession as others moved with mournful steps. This body held its severed head by the hair, as one would bear a lantern. The eyes were turned upon us and a voice moaned, 'Alas.'… When the body came to the end of the bridge, it held the head at arm's length so its words could reach us. 'Behold the horror of my punishment, you, who living, visit the dead. Is aught else so dreadful? Report this in the upper air. I am Bertran de Born, who gave evil counsel to the young king. I set the son against his father. Achitophel was not more false when he roused Absalom against his father David. Because I have sundered those bound by ties of blood, I carry my head dissevered from my body. Behold the retribution.'"

In Dante's time Bertran had been in Malebolge for a century. But so long as he lived in this world, Henry dealt with him more mercifully. The biographer of the troubadours relates that the king restored to him his castle of Hautefort, and this he was moved to do as requital for a matchless elegy which the poet composed on the heir of the Plantagenets.
³⁹
This lament remains as one of the classics of that brilliant, short-lived school of troubadour poetry. None of it can be brought whole into any other language, for either its substance, its lyric mood, its strophic pattern, or its multiple rhymes escapes in the process. In this "plaint"
(planh)
Bertran mourns a loss that leaves him to finish his days without solace, choked with pain and grief. He laments the beauty of the young king, his graciousness and liberality, the ordered magnificence of his household where cheer and hospitality reigned and good company and entertainment were ever found. Death in taking his dear lord has slain the noblest cavalier that ever lived.

THE UNTIMELY DEATH of the young king altered all the complicated dynastic schemes set in being at Montmirail in 1169, when the queen's resolution to leave Henry's palaces and install her second son as Count of Poitou had forced Henry to assign to his other sons their respective inheritances. For nearly twenty years the king had struggled and connived to offset the untoward consequences of the treaty which had balked his enterprise and twice driven him to defend his empire and his life.

In spite of the young king's intransigence, the deepest paternal affection in Henry was spent upon his heir. The prince had not belied his destiny He had shone with kingly aspect, a royal distinction of person and bearing, an irresistible charm. His weakness and inconstancy had not seemed incurable vices so long as the king could keep control of his powers. With the young man's untimely death everything was changed. Richard, already invested with the dukedom of Aquitaine and the county of Poitou, suddenly became also, against every expectation, the presumptive Duke of Normandy, Count of Maine and Anjou, and heir of England. As chief of the Plantagenet princes, Richard would obviously present sterner resistance to management than the young king had offered. He was no puppet warrior of the lists, but seasoned in the field; and he was freer from interference in his own estates, not only because of their outlying situation and their special temper, but because of his tenure from the queen. The "hammer" rather than the "shield" grasped the heritage of the Conqueror; the queen's heir and favorite son touched the crown.

Henry's first concern in the changed situation was to retract the disastrous provisions of Montmirail and set up a new balance among his sons that should curb them all and relieve him from the insecure position into which their rivalries had forced him. Without regard for the habits and expectations those settlements at Montmirail had bred in the princes and their vassals, he undertook to revoke the entire Plantagenet empire and redistribute the prospective inheritances, with sharper definitions of his own claims to supervise the whole. His first care was to diminish the lion's share that seemed destined to fall to Richard; and at his expense, to make a provision for lack-land John, now a youth of seventeen pushing his way to a place in the sun. Geoffrey, as consort of its heiress, still held Brittany, but seemed doomed to be a residual legatee of any convenient loppings elsewhere that would satisfy his greed.

The king summoned his three sons to Angers to receive their portions.
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As a preliminary measure, in anticipation of possible vehement resistance on their part, he took key fortresses into custody and manned them with garrisons of his own. To prepare the eaglets for acceptance of his dispositions, he constrained them to make peace with each other and with him as their liege lord. He then called upon Richard to cede Poitou and Aquitaine, not to Geoffrey, as second son, but to John, who, it now appeared, had crossed the Channel expressly that he might do homage to the heir of England for these lands.

It was transparent that Richard was being invited to assume the role of that gilded vagrant, that impecunious grandee, the young king; and it was very plain that whoever was highest placed in the Plantagenet hegemony was destined to find himself least endowed with independence and wherewithal. Nothing could have been more inacceptable to the Count of Poitou than to exchange the opulent southern provinces in which he had been bred, with their salubrious climate, lively culture, vast pleasure grounds, and matchless high places remote from the scrutiny of London and Rouen, for the counties of the young king north of the Loire. As for England, Richard viewed that island as a living space for merchants and yokels, a mine for revenue, but scarcely as a residence for the scion of Poitevin seigneurs. Pressed to make the exchange, he employed the Angevin tactics of delay. Having secured a time in which to make up his mind, he took French leave of Angers. Mounting his horse at sundown, he absconded to Poitou. From a safe distance he informed Henry that under no circumstances would he yield a furrow of his lands to anyone.

No such profound alterations in the disposition of the Plantagenet empire could ignore the Countess of Poitou. Though she had been for a long time quiescent, she was still queen of feudal chess. The proposals to endow John with Poitou and Aquitaine brought Eleanor from the long obscurity of her confinement to take her place again in the councils of the dynasty. The eaglets were summoned to her presence in Windsor. Even the jealous princes realized the suicidal madness of their strife, for they laid down their arms and gathered in London to storm it out in argument. In 1179, under pressure from Henry, Eleanor had "ceded" her provinces to Richard, and this forced cession, in which the Count of Poitou had concurred, had estranged her from her favorite son; now the Count of Poitou became her ally in resisting Henry's new disposals.

At the time of the Windsor court the queen was sixty two, but she did not there appear as a superannuated dowager recalling a superseded scheme of things. The untoward Poitevin stood squarely in the way of Henry's plans for a new order. She refused her consent to the endowment of John, who emerged at Windsor as the king's new darling. The walls of her prison had certainly not shut out of her ears the rumors of Henry's purpose to reserve the Princess Alais for himself, or to wed her to John. In her resistance, the queen was championed by her elder sons, and the lectitude of her feudal decisions earned for her the support of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and other magnates who shared the councils. No one could doubt that Philip Augustus would abet his vassal, the Countess of Poitou, in dispositions so well calculated to thwart the Angevin. The most that Henry could do was to force Richard to restore the provinces to the queen herself, and this he did by threatening to lead Eleanor with an army with banners into her own territories.

Since Henry could by no subtilty get ultimate control of the lands below the Loire, the Windsor conclave was not a triumph for the king. However, he sent Geoffrey, who was unlikely to connive with Richard, as
custos
to Normandy. The Count of Poitou, the "third nestling" of the queen, returned to Poitiers, with his wings merely somewhat clipped. His dismissal was safe for the moment, for Henry had already taken the chief fortresses in custody and set a watch upon his heir.

Geoffrey had not obtained his morsel at Windsor. He had reached for Henry's own patrimony of Anjou, as widening the frontiers of Brittany, for which province he was nominally vassal of Philip of France; and naturally Philip had supported his aspirations. The issue drew the two young men together. Geoffrey, as
custos
of Normandy, was presently in Paris living like a blood brother with his overlord in the palace on the Seine, privy to the counsels of the prime enemy of his house. But before conspiracy could reach its object, Geoffrey, by sheer fortuity, was removed from the scene, carried off, as some report, by a fever, or, according to others, killed by a fall from his horse in the melee of a tournament. Philip in a frenzied display of grief was scarcely restrained from leaping into the tomb of his bosom friend, who was buried with circumstance in Notre Dame
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The Countess Mane of Champagne, who, since the days of the queen's court in Poitiers, cherished an affectionate interest in her Angevin half brothers, was present at his requiem and signalized her grief by establishing a mass for the repose of his soul.

Of all that fruitful progeny of the Poitevin, which had so filled the Capets with disinay, only two remained: Richard, the queen's champion, and John, whom Henry had fashioned with indulgent foresight as the instrument of his new dispensation.

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If the death of the young king had profoundly disturbed the Plantagenets, it had brought to dust and ashes the Capet's long-term plan to compensate for the lost provinces of Poitou and Aquitaine through the marriage alliance of Marguerite with the heir of the prosperous Angevins. With an unseemly haste, Philip Augustus sought to square the fortunes of his house with the new Plantagenet regime, for the tragedy in the Limousin had undeniably left the Capets in an anomalous position with reference to it. Unhappily for them, both the French and the Angevin dowers of the widowed Marguerite were securely in Henry's hands: the first of these, that strategic frontier between the Epte and the Andelle, known as the Norman Vexin; the second, the revenues from certain Norman and Angevin cities bestowed upon her by the King of England as her marriage portion.

The Franks demanded both the retrocession of the Vexin and the continuation of Marguerite's perquisites in the "honors" of her Angevin dower. On this issue the Franks held that Henry had frequently sworn that, if the young king should predecease him without heirs,
⁶
these dowers should revert unconditionally to the young queen. Philip's second demand was more embarrassing to Henry than the first. He required that his sister Alais, who was still strictly guarded in Winchester and still unwed, should speedily be married to the Count of Poitou. In the matter of Alais, the Franks maintained that Henry had agreed that the Capetian princess should be wedded to the prospective heir of England and thus step into the place of the widowed Marguerite.
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To them the heir of England now meant no other than the Count of Poitou.

The Frankish nuncios harried Henry with these demands wherever he went in Normandy and Anjou in his efforts to reestablish a balance between his jealous and defiant sons. For a time the king put off these emissaries with legal verbiage. For twenty years since Montmirail, he had contrived, in spite of all processes, to keep the coveted Vexin in his hands as the indispensable protection of Rouen. No one had forgotten with what unseasonable haste he had snatched its fortress castles from the custody of the Templars under Louis's very nose, while the latter was absorbed in his own hasty marriage with Adele of Champagne in 1162. To Philip's nuncios Henry went into history to prove that the Vexin had belonged to Normandy by ancient right; and declared that Louis, recognizing this fact, had quitclaimed it forever on the marriage of Marguerite to the young king. For the time he evaded the matter of the Angevin revenues, making decision contingent upon a prior settlement of other matters.

When it came to the affair of Alais, it was plain that Henry had no intention of fortifying the Count of Poitou with a Frankish alliance that would enable him, as the young king had done, to fly for refuge to Paris and foment rebellions there whenever an uncomfortable issue arose at home.

But Henry's evasions in this matter led the Franks to credit the rumor that the king meant to dispossess Richard as his heir in England and renounce the Plantagenet eaglets as the illegitimate brood of a consanguineous marriage. Gervase relates that Richard, in his anxiety to certify himself by this marriage as heir of England, sought the good office of the church to obtain his bride.

When the wearing process of uncertainty had produced some effect, Henry consented to a parley. An immemorial elm spread its branches over a vast circuit on the mooted boundary of the Vexin between Gisors and Trie, providing a familiar landmark for rendezvous.
¹⁰
Here for generations it had been the custom for the French kings and the Norman dukes to negotiate their differences. Under its bare limbs the two kings with their escorts drew up on Saint Nicholas' day, December 6, 1183.

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It had already become apparent that the youth who had put on the crown of the Capets was harried by no such doubts and scruples as had darkened the counsels and balked the enterprise of Louis VII. There was a tougher fiber in Philip Augustus, inherited doubtless from the house of Champagne, a house which had never been famous for its retiring character. A contemporary
¹¹
describes the scion of the Capets as a prince of well-composed figure, elegant in bearing and comely in person, with a lively expression and high color; a hearty eater and drinker, prone to self-indulgence, generous to friends, mean with enemies, a man of practical skills, punctilious in religious observance, foresighted, persistent, swift and keen in judgment, fearful of treacherous designs against his life, easily excited and as easily appeased; a prince severe with barons in any way hostile to his rule and ready to foment discord among them; yet one who never slew captives in dungeons nor harbored more than transient enmities; a ruler who often heeded the advice of common men, made himself a scourge to the presumptuous, was a defender of the church and a sustainer of the poor. The new king's mind was solid, with all that connotes in lack of more sprightly qualities. His education left him literal, dogmatic, precise, without the liveliness, humor, and grace that characterized the least of the Plantagenets.

At sixteen, while his barons were gathering for a council, he was once observed sitting apart from company, gnawing a hazel shoot with an abstracted air. One of his suite remarked that he would give a good horse to know of what the king was thinking. "I was wondering," said Philip, "if it might ever please God to grant that I, or some heir of mine, should restore this kingdom to the state in which Charlemagne had it."
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This was a daydream that opened to his fancy, among other things, the prospect of recovering those portions of the Carolmgian empire that had slipped into the possession of the Angevins. A longheaded plan, simple and unoriginal, unfolded in his mind for realizing his dream to divide the resources of his adversary and to unite his enemies. But at eighteen he was not yet quite a match for Henry under the Gisors elm.

Henry, though nominally defendant in the case, took the initiative in the parley, as had been his wont in dealing with the Capets. He came to Gisors completely documented and produced his own plan for a settlement. His proposals disconcerted the Franks, for their imaginations were in no wise prepared for the extravagant turn Henry gave to the situation.