The Winter Crown (62 page)

‘Where is Henry bound?’

‘Hamelin said to Canterbury,’ Isabel replied. ‘To pray at Archbishop Thomas’s tomb and to atone for whatever part his words played in his murder.’

‘Atone?’ Alienor gave a mocking laugh. ‘Is that what he says?’

Isabel looked troubled. ‘Perhaps he is truly penitent.’

‘About having to perform the atonement, certainly,’ Alienor replied, curling her lip. ‘But if he is going to kneel at Becket’s tomb, it is not from remorse. Fear of the consequences if he does not, certainly. He would never have knelt at his feet in life and begged forgiveness. He considers him a greater nuisance now he is dead. No,’ she said cynically, ‘Henry will pray at Becket’s tomb and make the greatest show of remorse and piety anyone has ever seen, but just because he knows the only way to maintain control is to create a spectacle that will upstage Becket and become the talk of Christendom. It will settle the country down, and in the places it does not, then his Brabançons will wreak havoc.’

Isabel stared at her with shock.

‘Do not look at me like that,’ Alienor said wearily. ‘I have every reason to say these things. You always see the best in people, and that helps you to live your life, but I cannot turn a blind eye to what is really under my nose. I trust you as much as I trust anyone, but whatever you do for me, and no matter how much you desire to help me, Hamelin and your children matter to you more, and Hamelin is Henry’s brother. You will come to the edge with me, but you will not leap – and I do not blame you…’

Isabel bit her lip. ‘I do always see the best in people,’ she admitted after a moment. ‘I cannot do otherwise.’ Her eyes were liquid with tears. ‘I will help you all I can. I might not leap, but I will hold a rope down to you, I promise, and I shall never let go.’

They reached Sarum towards the end of day, their wain creaking up the hill to the white-painted castle standing on the hill. Sarum in winter with bitter winds driving across the Downs, and sleet hammering on every shutter, was a wild, desolate place, grey, cold and dark as despair. Even today in fine weather a hard breeze was blowing over the ancient raised mound and snapping the banners on the tower walls. For how long, she wondered, would Henry incarcerate her here? Until she died of cold and neglect? Until she became a faded voice swirling in the wind?

Alienor stepped from the wain and looked at the sky. Storm clouds were massing again, and yet there was a silver brightness behind them and swords of radiance shafting out to dazzle the palace buildings and the cathedral enclave beyond.

The darkest prisons were those of the mind. She could either fall into a well of black despair, or hold on to the light and keep hope alive. If she could find freedom within herself, then Henry would be unable to touch her; and even in losing everything, she would still have won.

Her greatest challenge was about to begin.

The Winter Crown
is the second novel in my trilogy about Alienor of Aquitaine, one of the most famous and iconic queens of the Middle Ages. As I said in my author’s note to the first in the sequence,
The Summer Queen
, what we think we know is not always the whole story and dependent on what filters are applied.

Two comments I frequently come across with reference to Alienor are that she was one of the most powerful women of the Middle Ages and that she was ahead of her time. Those statements say a lot about how we have chosen to portray her image with reference to our own culture, and I don’t entirely agree with them, although I would say that she had a strong constitution and an indomitable will. My take is that Alienor was a woman of her time, striving to deal with controlling husbands who knew their place in society and that a woman’s place, by natural law, was subordinate to theirs, especially in the case of Henry II, who preferred not to share power with anyone.

In the earlier years of the marriage, Henry did entrust Alienor with the regency of England while he was about his continental concerns, but at the same time seeded her household with men of his choosing, including her steward and chancellor. Rather than having a free hand, Alienor was expected to work closely with regnal deputies such as Henry’s powerful justiciar, Richard de Lucy. As Henry’s reign progressed, men like de Lucy were to take over the main role and the Queen’s position and influence became further diminished. If anything, Alienor had less say than her predecessors and her mother-in-law the Empress Matilda, whose hand can be seen governing Normandy throughout the 1150s and early 1160s and whose advice Henry frequently sought.

I strongly suspect that Henry was ambivalent about having a wealthy, cultured wife who was as mentally sharp as he was and had nine years’ more experience in the world. The dynamic with his mother was different; whatever happened he could trust her and know she was always on his side. I believe he never felt quite the same about Alienor.

For the first fourteen years of her marriage to Henry, Alienor seems to have been either pregnant or recovering from pregnancy and childbirth. Between 1155 and 1158, she bore four children in rapid succession. Henry Junior (Harry) was born in February 1155, Matilda in the summer of 1156, Richard in September 1157 and Geoffrey in September 1158. Some historians suggest that she suffered a miscarriage either between Geoffrey and little Alienor’s birth in 1161, or between 1162 and Joanna’s birth in 1165. Whether she did or not, the constant pregnancies were a physical strain on her body. One of the major roles of a queen was to bear the heirs, preferably male, and Alienor would have viewed that aspect as an important part of her duty and one only she could do. To be fecund as a medieval queen consort was to succeed.

It was a medieval belief that pregnant women lost their ability to think rationally while in a gravid state. There was also the fear that their wombs were liable to go wandering around their bodies (the origin of the word hysteria). It was viewed as a serious medical complaint, for which one of the remedies was to burn an eagle feather under the afflicted woman’s nose, the stench of which was supposed to send the womb hastening back to its proper position.

Henry did not confine himself to sharing Alienor’s bed. Before he married Alienor he already had one bastard son in Jeoffrey FitzRoy. The boy was rumoured to be the son of a common whore called Hikenai, but my belief is that such a name is the product of the rumour mill and jaundiced clergy. Hikenai may be a pun on the term for a riding horse. In both
The Summer Queen
and
The Winter Crown
I have called the Hikenai character Aelburgh.

We have no detailed record of Jeoffrey’s early life, so I felt that it was not beyond the realms of probability that he spent some of that time with his grandmother in Normandy, but I admit that it’s speculation that fits the plot. Some of his childhood may have been spent in Wiltshire because he was mocked for speaking French with the accent of Marlborough later in life.

Henry had at least four (and possibly six) bastard children with different mothers, but other than Jeoffrey, they are not within the scope of
The Winter Crown
. Henry is not known to have had any children with his long-term paramour Rosamund de Clifford. It would seem from what is known of his several mistresses that Henry preferred very young women – in their mid-teens rather than more mature. I would guess this was because they were unwritten pages and easy to manipulate – unlike his wife.

Researching the characters of Isabel de Warenne and her husbands was interesting. Isabel’s first spouse, William, was something of a tragic character: the youngest son of King Stephen and a potential heir to the throne. William and Isabel were married when they were both very young; he was still a boy. He gave up his right to the throne during the peace settlement of 1153, but there must always have been an uneasy relationship between him and Henry II, who was his second cousin. William died during the retreat from Toulouse. Isabel, now a young and desirable widow, was then earmarked as a potential husband for Henry’s youngest brother, also called William (at times I wondered rather desperately who wasn’t called William in the twelfth century!).

Unfortunately for William FitzEmpress, Thomas Becket was determined to teach Henry II a lesson following the latter’s disgraceful deed of forcing Mary de Boulogne from a nunnery and into marriage with Matthew of Alsace. The legend goes that the young man was so distraught, he went home to his mother in Normandy, pined away and died. I suspect a strong dose of political and artistic licence here. For a start no Angevin ever pined away! The likelihood is that William died of a wasting disease or other natural causes, but the anti-Becket faction found it expedient to put the blame on the recalcitrant Archbishop. Indeed, one of his murderers, Richard Brito, is reputed to have said that he delivered his blow on Becket’s body for his former lord whose household knight Brito had been. I suspect that Brito had been promised land from the de Warenne estates and was unhappy to find himself with nothing.

Henry still had his way by marrying his illegitimate half-brother Hamelin, Vicomte of Touraine, to Isabel, thus securing her vast estates to the Angevin line. I have imagined the relationship between Hamelin and Isabel to be a good one, partly to mitigate the vitriol in Henry and Alienor’s marriage as it degenerated, and partly because they do seem to have made excellent partners during their forty-year marriage. Isabel bore Hamelin three daughters and a son and between them the couple would go on to build the great keep at Conisbrough, which has all the creature comforts that an earl and his lady might desire, as well as being a formidable fortress and statement of power.

On her marriage to Hamelin, Isabel de Warenne became Alienor’s sister-in-law. I strongly suspect that they enjoyed a warm friendship down the years and that their children and families were close. Some of the reasons for those strong suspicions, I am saving for the third novel in the trilogy,
The Autumn Throne
, but suffice to say I have good grounds for believing that Isabel de Warenne and Alienor of Aquitaine were closely acquainted. As a side note, it also made me smile to discover that Isabel de Warenne was William Marshal’s step-cousin, her mother having married William’s uncle Patrick. Needless to say, I am highly delighted to bring William Marshal himself into the narrative. It has been wonderful to visit with him again and to know there’s more of him to come!

My focus in
The Winter Crown
is upon Alienor and her life and times from her viewpoint and concerns. I was aware that I could not write a novel about the reign of Henry II and not deal with the issue of Henry’s poisoned relationship with Thomas Becket. However, while it remained an important element in the story, I deliberately chose not to set it centre stage except in the moments when interactions with Becket became pertinent to Alienor. It is her story, after all.

It has often been said that Alienor was responsible for setting her sons against their father. It’s argued that they were too young and immature to have rebelled as they did. It is also said that she turned against Henry because she found out that he was playing around with Rosamund de Clifford. I believe both arguments are flawed. I do believe that Alienor was disillusioned and angry at Henry’s behaviour towards her in several arenas, including that of controlling her duchy and hogging power to himself. With Rosamund, I think it was just the same old thing, with perhaps an extra nuance of concern because Rosamund was more to Henry than a one-night stand, but hardly grounds for a full-blown rebellion to someone as pragmatic as Alienor.

Quite simply Henry II was a dominant, controlling alpha male – which made for both good and bad medieval kingship. He liked to micro-manage and was reluctant to relinquish power once he had it in his grasp. There was to be no delegation to his sons or his wife. Having failed to take Toulouse, which had been a project dear to Alienor’s heart ever since she had been Queen of France, Henry eventually brought the lands into his own sphere by political manoeuvring. He secured a marriage alliance for his youngest son John, which meant that Toulouse was surrounded by pro-Angevin interests. To survive, Raymond of Toulouse deemed it prudent to swear homage to Henry. Crucially he did not make the oath to Alienor, who, as Duchess of Aquitaine, should have been the recipient. By swearing to Henry, he gave him precedence and perhaps this was the final straw.

When Alienor’s sons rebelled against their father, she had a stark choice to make between her husband, who had belittled her and let her down time after time, year upon year, but to whom she was beholden as a wife and partner, and her sons, who were the future and who might look to her for matriarchal guidance, especially her beloved Richard. (Incidentally, that letter from Rotrou, Archbishop of Rouen, is reproduced verbatim.) I believe that the Young King was ripe for rebellion without any goading from his mother. Henry II was perfectly capable of alienating his sons on his own. Indeed, the Young King spent more time with his father than he did with Alienor in the years leading up to the rebellion. While writing
The Winter Crown
, I came to think that while Henry II was a great king in many ways, he has been allowed to get away with far too much for far too long!

To cover less sweeping brush strokes in the novel, I thought readers might find the following incidental details interesting too.

I have called Henry’s heir Harry to differentiate him from his father. Harry is an early anglicised version of Henry. I have differentiated between Henry II’s legitimate and illegitimate sons by calling them Geoffrey and Jeoffrey. One of the nightmares for an author of historical fiction is the medieval propensity for giving everyone the same name!

Readers of
The Greatest Knight
, my novel about William Marshal’s life, might notice that Marguerite’s position in the narrative has changed slightly, but this is because the course of research never stands still. King Louis made a stipulation that Alienor was not to have the raising of his daughter and it seems likely that, until she was twelve or thirteen, she was actually raised away from the Angevin court and not in Alienor’s household.