Queens Consort (21 page)

That Henry had trusted Eleanor right up to the moment she betrayed him decisively by making for Paris is demonstrated by the fact that when he disbanded her court at Poitiers in May 1174, some of the most important young women in the Angevin realm had been staying there in her charge. Marguerite, the next queen of England; her sister Alys, Richard’s betrothed; Geoffrey’s fiancée, Constance of Brittany; John’s prospective bride, Alice of Maurienne; Henry’s illegitimate sister Emma of Anjou and Joanna, his daughter with Eleanor, had all been in her entourage. They all, along with Eleanor, sailed with Henry to England from Barfleur in July. Marguerite, Alys of France and Constance were sent to the castle at Devizes (probably along with Alice of Maurienne, who died shortly afterwards), while Emma was swiftly disposed of in marriage to a Welsh prince. Eleanor, who spent the first period of her captivity in an unknown castle, possibly Rouen, Chinon or Falaise, was isolated, and was to remain so for the next fourteen years.

The extent of her exclusion from court and political life is reflected in the sparse record evidence for this period. In Aquitaine, where she had been active until the rebellion, Eleanor is mentioned only twice. The English Pipe Rolls indicate that she lived at Winchester and Sarum,
making brief visits to a limited number of other houses in the charge of Ranulf Glanville, a former Yorkshire sheriff and Ralph FitzStephen, a chamberlain in Henry’s household. She was permitted two chamberlains of her own after 1180, but the only other named member of her staff is her maid, Amaria. An 1176 entry in the Pipe Rolls notes a payment of £28 13s 7d for two scarlet capes, two furs and a bedcover for ‘the use of the Queen and her servant’, suggesting that though Eleanor’s living conditions were reasonable, they were not consummate with her status, as her clothes were no finer than a servant girl’s and apparently she and Amaria had to share the same bed. As far as the English were concerned, Eleanor no longer existed. It was left to one of her Poitevin poets, Richard, to mourn her imprisonment in the style to which her reputation has become accustomed:

Daughter of Aquitaine, fair, fruitful vine! Tell me, eagle with two heads, tell me, where were you when your eaglets, flying from their nest, dared to raise their talons against the King of the North Wind? … Your harp has changed into the voice of mourning, your flute sounds the note of affliction and your songs are turned into sounds of lamentation. Reared with abundance of all delights, you had a taste for luxury and refinement and enjoyed a royal liberty. You lived richly in your own inheritance, you took pleasure in the pastimes of your women, you delighted in the melodies of flute and drum … You abounded in riches of every kind.… Eagle of the broken alliance, you cry out unanswered because it is the King of the North Wind who holds you in captivity. But cry out and cease not to cry, do not weary, raise your voice like a trumpet so that it may reach the ears of your sons. For the day is approaching when they shall deliver you and then you shall come again to dwell in your native land.

Eleanor was to spend the remainder of her days as Queen of England under house arrest, but the end of her reign by no means marked the end of her power. In widowhood, she continued to dominate the fortunes of the English crown until her death, in her eightieth year, and beyond. Her political influence cast its shadow across the fifteenth century, and the legend of her life ultimately outlasted even that.

CHAPTER 6

BERENGARIA OF NAVARRE

‘A most praiseworthy widow’

O
n 3 September 1189, a new king was crowned at Westminster. Eleanor of Aquitaine’s betrayal of Henry marked the beginning of a long series of cruel disappointments which marred the last period of his reign. A decade after Montlouis, the Young King and Geoffrey had rebelled against their brother Richard’s rule in Aquitaine, but the uprising collapsed when the Young King died suddenly in June 1183. Three years later, Geoffrey, too, was dead: his heir, Arthur of Brittany, was born after his father’s demise. All Henry II’s strategies for the future seemed to be unravelling at once, a position he himself exacerbated by making Princess Alys, Richard’s betrothed, his mistress. Alys’s wily brother Philip Augustus, now King of France, took advantage of Henry’s endless stalling over the marriage and marched into Angevin territories on the pretext of reclaiming Alys’s dowry of Berry and the Vexin. Richard, who had long feared that Henry intended to designate his younger brother John as heir, threw in his lot with the French King, and for a time the two enjoyed a passioante friendship which was the wonder of the chroniclers. Richard and Henry were still at war when the King died a bitter and possibly unshriven death on 5 July 1189, shortly after witnessing the French armies burning his beloved birthplace of Le Mans to the ground.

One of Richard’s first acts on learning of his father’s death had been to dispatch William Marshal to England to release his mother, and Eleanor, now aged sixty-eight, was with her beloved son as he was anointed. She had made several public outings since 1183, prompting some historians to consider that Henry may have responded to the Young King’s deathbed request for his mother to be set free, but effectively she remained a prisoner. She was permitted a progress through her dower lands in an attempt to forestall Philip Augustus’s claim to them on behalf of his sister Marguerite, the widowed Young Queen, and was produced for several
strategic appearances before returning to England in 1186, but her freedom was illusory: ‘She was paraded abroad when it suited Henry and confined when it did not.’
¹
As Richard’s regent in England until his coronation, Eleanor was finally able to exercise the powers which had so long lain dormant. Matthew Paris noted that Eleanor’s activities in this period made her ‘exceedingly respected and beloved’. Her capabilities were particularly useful as Richard did not plan to spend any longer in his new kingdom than he had to. Since the battle of Hattin in 1187, m which the Muslim ruler Saladin had inflicted unbearable slaughter on the knights Templar and Hospitaller in the Holy Land, Richard had had only one object in mind: Jerusalem.

Before Richard’s crusading plan could be put into action, there remained one last detail to be taken care of. Marriage was essential for two reasons: first to cement an alliance that would provide vital protection of the Angevin territories in the south during his absence, and secondly to attempt to secure the succession. If he were to die without a son, the competing heirs would be his nephew Arthur of Brittany and his brother John. When Richard arrived in France in December 1189, he renewed his longstanding pledge to poor, patient Princess Alys, but after a council held in Normandy in March 1190, which included the archbishop of Canterbury, John and Eleanor, he persuaded Philip Augustus to ‘reconsider’ the match. This diplomatic delaying tactic was designed merely to hold off Philip’s anger for as long as possible — Richard had no intention of marrying the disgraced Alys, but he needed French support for the crusade and therefore thought it unwise to mention to his jilted fiancée’s brother that he was already engaged to another woman.

Various dates are given for the betrothal of Richard of England to Berengaria of Navarre. Like his mother, Richard has in many ways become the victim of his own legend, and there is a tendency to romanticise the first meeting of the Spanish princess and the most romantic of kings. The high chivalric version has him falling in love with her during a tournament in Pamplona when he was still Count of Poitiers, possibly as early as 1177, even though at the time she was about seven and he was twenty. The marriage may have been mooted in 1185, but a more generally accepted date for the confirmation of the betrothal is 1188. In any event, Richard continued to play his double game with Philip until literally hours before Berengaria arrived for their wedding.

On 7 August 1190, Richard embarked at Genoa, rested for five days at Portofmo, and continued down the coast of Italy, meeting Philip Augustus at Messina on Sicily on 24 September. Meanwhile, Eleanor set off from
Bordeaux across the Pyrenees to fetch the bride. Her destination, Navarre, was a small but geographically important kingdom on the Spanish side of the mountains, a nexus for pilgrim and trade routes as it controlled the two main passes of Sonpont and Roncesvalles.

Navarre might not have been large, but it was no provincial backwater. The population was Occitan-French, Basque, Jewish and Muslim as well as Navarrese, a blend reflected in (relatively) tolerant attitudes towards non-Christians and a sophisticated legal code. Like Richard, Berengaria was of mixed ancestry, and she already had family connections with the Angevin dynasty. Her cousin Alfonso VIII of Castile was married to Richard’s sister Leon or and her aunt Margarita had married William the Bad, the Norman King of Sicily, in 1150, serving as regent for several years after his death on behalf of her son William the Good, the recently deceased husband of Richard’s sister Joanna. Unlike Richard’s, Berengaria’s parents appear to have been happily married. They had five children in twenty-five years together, and after Berengaria’s mother, Queen Sancha-Beata, died in 1179, her father, King Sancho El Sabio (the Wise), spent the remaining twenty years of his life without remarrying, a pattern that would be followed by both Berengaria and her sister Blanca.

Sancho El Sabio’s reign was dominated by the power struggle between Navarre and the neighbouring kingdoms of Aragon, Castile and Leon. On at least two occasions Henry II had met the kings of Navarre, Aragon and Castile to arbitrate in these conflicts. King Sancho was allied with the King of Aragon against Richard’s enemy, Raymond of Toulouse, so a Navarrese connection could provide vital support for the English king in southern Gascony, while Sancho would benefit from protection against his enemy the King of Castile. In April 1185, Richard had agreed to help the ruler of Aragon to persuade Sancho to return two castles, which suggested he already had some influence in Navarre, and it is notable that in that year Berengaria was given the
tenencia
, or fief, of Monreal near the favoured royal city of Tudela. Neither of her two sisters are known to have received a similar gift, and it is likely that the King of Navarre was thus enhancing his daughter’s status with a view to her betrothal to Richard. In 1188, the troublesome troubadour Bertran de Born was gloating over Richard’s rejection of Alys for Berengaria, and though neither the date nor place of Berengaria’s birth are known for certain, it is estimated that she would have been about eighteen when her betrothal was confirmed.

Berengaria met her famous mother-in-law in Pamplona, where Sancho held a banquet at the Olite Palace before the two women set off to cross the Alps, descending into Lombardy, where Eleanor witnessed a charter
at Lodi near Milan, and on to Pisa. Here they paused to wait for news from Richard, and since there was no ship available to take them directly to Sicily, Richard decided that they should continue along the coast to Naples, where they embarked in February, accompanied by the Count of Flanders, who was travelling to join the waking crusaders at Messina. It was an arduous journey for these intrepid women to undertake, particularly in the case of the sixty-six-year-old Eleanor, but beyond this sparse itinerary, no record remains of the time they spent together. An Alpine crossing was particularly gruelling in winter, and Berengaria and Eleanor had no choice but to live in intimacy as they were carried in litters up the precarious passes, pausing to sleep in monasteries, or as their horses plodded through the dense, freezing mists of the Lombardy plain, but they do not seem to have developed a warm relationship. In charters given from Fontevrault in the years after Richard’s death, Eleanor refers to her daughter-in-law as ‘Queen Berengaria’ without adding the affectionate
‘dilectissima’
or
‘carissima’
appended to the names of her daughters.

Three chronicle accounts emphasise Berengaria’s ‘wisdom’, though so little is known of her early life that it is impossible to ascertain her education, and we can do no more than suppose it was similar to that of other girls of her class. Berengaria is sometimes described as a Basque, but again there is no evidence that she spoke the Basque language. Her mother tongue was possibly Castilian or, more likely, Romance (Aragonese-Navarrese), which had become the official language of the Navarrese chancellery in 1180. The language she was most likely to have had in common with Eleanor was Occitan, which was also spoken in Navarre. Mothers-in-law are often intimidating creatures, and Eleanor, the most famous woman in Europe, must at first have been a terrifying companion for a girl who had barely ventured outside her father’s domains. Perhaps there were awkward silences.

As Berengaria and Eleanor moved slowly south, the tension between Richard and Philip Augustus became acute. The two kings had arrived in Sicily a day apart, in late September, and Philip immediately began seeking to weasel Richard’s disagreements with the island’s ruler, Tancred, to his own advantage. Tancred, the bastard nephew of William the Good, had succeeded in claiming the throne in defiance of the rights of Constance of Hauteville, the new bride of the German Emperor. His position was precarious, and he was deeply suspicious of the motives of the crusaders. Joanna, William’s widow, was imprisoned in Palermo, and though Richard was swiftly able to secure her release, Tancred prevaricated about her dowry, claiming that the terms of William’s will were void and trying to
palm her off with a meagre cash payment. When riots broke out between the citizens of Messina and the crusaders, whose presence was imposing great strain on the city’s resources, Richard saw an opportunity to demonstrate to Tancred that he meant business. He took Messina ‘in less time than a priest could say matins’,
²
set up a mobile fortress and established a strict set of rules to control the behaviour of his soldiers. Unsurprisingly, Tancred now showed himself amenable to negotiation. Philip Augustus, by this time desperate to force Richard to marry Alys, tried to persuade Tancred that Richard planned to betray him.