King of the North Wind, page 22
Thomas’s reputation as a worker of miracles grew to the point that, after the prior of Canterbury petitioned the pope, Alexander III canonised him on Ash Wednesday 1173. In death, he was St Thomas Becket.
Circumstances would overtake Henry and he did not go to the Latin Kingdom as a penitent. Instead, with the pope’s permission, he built glorious structures in England to commemorate a Norman who had become a very English saint – at Waltham, Witham and Amesbury. It was from this point that Henry began to send roughly 2,000 silver marks annually to the Holy Land, which he placed in his ‘Eastern’ account, under the guardianship of the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller.
Thomas’s cult status blossomed almost as his blood congealed on the cool slabs of the cathedral floor. Henry quickly appropriated Thomas in death for his Plantagenet dynasty. Before Thomas died, Henry had been to Canterbury only twice. After his death, he went so often that it was described as ‘customary’, visiting every time he returned to England. The cult of Thomas spread all over Europe, and became indelibly associated with Henry FitzEmpress, to the glory of his house. The archbishop who had defied him while living, served him well in death.
In 1174, the choir of Canterbury Cathedral burned down. Now the opportunity presented itself to rebuild something worthy of their saint. The project was given to William the Englishman, and he rebuilt Canterbury in the English Gothic style. William was paid ninepence per day for his service, as well as an annual stipend of £5.85
It was finished in 1220. Thomas’s bones were exhumed and wrapped in silk and moved to his grand new marble tomb. Some 33,000 pilgrims attended festivities that lasted two weeks, while wine flowed through the streets of Canterbury; it was all presided over by Henry’s grandson, Henry III.
Thomas’s body brought enormous wealth to Canterbury. In the early years after his death, earnings from pilgrims accounted for 28 per cent of the cathedral’s income.86
Canterbury’s riches continued to grow. In 1221 income from pilgrims reached two-thirds of the total, and in the sixteenth century, the Venetian ambassador was taken aback by the wealth of Canterbury, brought by its famous saint: ‘The shrine is entirely covered with plates of pure gold. But the gold is scarcely visible beneath a profusion of gems, including sapphires, diamonds, rubies and emeralds … exquisite designs have been carved all over it and immense gems worked intricately into the patterns.’87 It was remarkable for a cathedral to have a whole saint – most only had a body part, or a relic identified with Christ. Canterbury exploited it to the full.
Henry’s descendant, the eighth Henry, as he broke the wealth and power of the monasteries, ordered Thomas’s bones to be burned in 1540. The monks may have hidden their saint’s bones, and given over different ones to the king’s men. This was not unusual practice during the Reformation; due notice was always given that the king’s men were on their way, and many clerics attempted to save their precious relics. The remains of Thomas Becket may still be buried within Canterbury today, secreted away from the agents of Henry VIII, their location long forgotten.
Henry VIII, although he may not have purloined the bones of the man, did however take the fabulous ruby given to Thomas’s shrine by Louis in 1179. It was known as the regale and he wore it on his index finger.
Act IV
Rebellion
Tell me … where were you [Eleanor] when your eaglets, flying from the nest, dared to raise their talons against the King of the North Wind?1
Richard le Poitevin
I
Between 1178 and 1179, Henry commissioned the refurbishment of his living quarters at Winchester Palace. Despite his plain dress and disregard for the trappings of power – although never power itself – comfort was important to Henry. He spent a great deal of money on making his castles, hunting lodges and palaces – among them Clarendon, Woodstock, Westminster, Windsor, Nottingham, Chinon, Angers – luxurious.2
As part of this grand scheme, Henry commissioned a wall painting for his private quarters. It was an allegory of his self-described greatest misfortune. It was not about the murder of Thomas Becket. By the early 1170s, through a series of brilliant acts of public penance, Henry had gained absolution. He had even harnessed the booming Becket miracle industry into the service of his nascent dynasty. Through Henry’s efforts, the Angevins became linked inexorably to the cult of the newly canonised St Thomas, to the glory of their house.
With the debacle of Becket’s death behind him, in 1173 Henry was struck by a disaster that wounded him far more gravely. His three elder legitimate sons – Henri, Richard and Geoffrey – apparently galvanised by Eleanor, banded with Louis and Henry’s other enemies to perpetrate a series of violent and, to Henry, astonishing and unforeseen attacks on his lands.
The mural at Winchester, now lost, showed an eagle with his four sons, or ‘eaglets’. Three were tearing their parent apart, while the fourth sat on his neck, waiting for the perfect moment to peck out his eyes. Gerald of Wales, albeit writing years after the event, probably in the late 1190s, recorded Henry’s own supposed explanation: ‘The four eaglets’, the king told him, ‘are my four sons who cease not to persecute me even unto death. The youngest of them [John], whom I embrace with so much affection, will sometime in the end insult me more grievously and more dangerously than any of the others.’3
Henry commissioned the mural at least four years after the rebellion had ended. Its events had made the king wary enough of his immediate family that he felt compelled to have a large and visible reminder in the most intimate quarters of one of his favourite houses. The two years during which his family viciously rose against him had left their scars on Henry. While publicly forgiving his sons, and continuing to love them, he clearly felt in need of an emotional armour. This painting was there to help him, reminding him not to trust his sons again. It would be Henry’s tragedy that he failed to heed his own warning.
II
In 1168, after sixteen years of marriage, Henry and Eleanor separated amicably; Eleanor left for more or less permanent residence in Poitou, taking her favourite son Richard with her.
William of Newburgh, typically, ascribed a sexual motive to the separation. He claimed that Henry had tired of Eleanor after she reached the menopause: as he was no longer interested in sleeping with her, he let her go. It was William, however, who had claimed, rather fantastically, that Louis had only taken Eleanor on crusade because he was ‘jealous’ and that her beauty ‘enslaved’ him. It was far more likely that Louis’ purpose was to get his queen pregnant with a much-needed son. The same William also wrote that it was Eleanor who sought divorce from Louis because she had found Henry so sexually attractive. But Henry and Eleanor’s marriage was more political bargain than love match.
Assuming that Henry and Eleanor did reach an accommodation in Paris in the summer of 1151, Henry was fulfilling his part now. Eleanor had borne him at least eight children, five boys and three girls, seven of whom were still living. Now, having produced her last child and being about forty-four years old, she was finally at liberty to pursue autonomy in her own lands.
The new arrangement suited Henry; by 1168, his territories were vast, encompassing not only England, Aquitaine, Anjou, Normandy and Maine, but also Brittany. Aquitaine was the most difficult province in Henry’s empire to govern, its magnates frequently rebelling against ducal authority: ‘The men of Poitou were always in revolt against their lords’, wrote the author of the History of William Marshal.4 Although Normandy and England, and to some extent Anjou, had a strong, centralised form of government, Henry had tried and failed to implement similar measures in Aquitaine, where many of its lords paid, at best, lip service to authority.
Henry’s approach had been heavy-handed. He deployed none of the subtlety of Eleanor’s ancestors, preferring instead to wage harsh campaigns often fought by his feared Brabanter mercenaries. Preoccupied with other regions in his vast empire, Henry now allowed Eleanor to take the burden of ruling Aquitaine from him. As the province’s duchess, she would perhaps fare better in subduing rebellion, providing strong government, and increasing revenue for Henry’s coffers from the lucrative trade in Aquitaine’s ports.5
Eleanor was hardly a political novice. She had intrigued in Louis’ government in the early years of her marriage, promoting the union of her younger sister, Petronilla, to Louis’ cousin and advisor – the married and much older Raoul de Vermandois – in a bid to increase her influence.
She was Henry’s regent in England at the beginning of 1157, and again in 1159 while Henry tried to conquer Toulouse in her name. She was regent in Anjou and Maine in 1165 while Henry campaigned in Wales.6
But Eleanor had not actively governed her duchy for ten years. She had barely visited since Henry became king of England, except for her progress around Aquitaine in 1156–7. In the first two years of their marriage, Eleanor took the lead, with Henry confirming her acts; but then her role was swiftly diminished. At their Christmas court at Bordeaux in 1156, Eleanor’s barons had sworn allegiance to Henry, and not to her. Henry, duke of Aquitaine in right of his wife, and having established his own right to rule in Eleanor’s lands, could now remove his queen.
Henry may have wished to use Eleanor’s talents more in the northern reaches of his empire, where she was frequently regent; or her disappearance from her duchy may have been because she was almost constantly pregnant and unable to participate fully in the Angevin Empire’s most recalcitrant province. Whatever the reason, between 1157 and 1167, Eleanor is absent from the charter records. ‘Not a single act mentions her, either alone or jointly with Henry.’7
But by the mid-1160s, it was becoming increasingly evident that Henry needed Eleanor back in Aquitaine. Eleanor’s uncle, Raoul de Faye, warned her that the nobility of Aquitaine were planning a revolt against Henry’s rule, ‘because of his pruning of their liberties’.8 Some Poitevin clerics, in an attempt to rid themselves of Henry, even called the marriage into question, citing consanguinity.9 Henry’s response was to hold his Christmas court of 1166 at Poitiers with Henri, but without Eleanor.
Some historians have seen Eleanor’s failure to join Henry at this Christmas court in her duchy as an indication that relations between them were now cool. But Eleanor was in England, heavily pregnant, and it would have been dangerous for her to risk travel across the Channel in winter. She gave birth on or around Christmas Day. The name given to the baby was John, probably chosen because his birth fell around the time of the feast of St John the Evangelist, on 27 December.10 He would be her last child.
Eleanor spent the following Christmas 1167 in Argentan with Henry, and then left for Poitou at the beginning of January. She would remain in her homeland for the next five years. She brought the nine-year-old Richard with her, and possibly her second daughter Eleanor, leaving two-year-old Joanna and one-year-old John in the care of the nuns of Fontevraud Abbey, fifty miles north of her capital, and the recipient of much of her and Henry’s patronage. It was in her ancestral lands that she would prepare Richard, her favourite son, to be duke. It is possibly because Henry had designated Aquitaine to Richard from a very young age that she allowed herself to think of him as her favourite; this was the child in whom she would invest the most. He would need her help and guidance if he was to rule well in her duchy.
For Eleanor, Aquitaine may have pulled her in as much as the situation in England pushed her out. Henry had increasingly delegated power to his justiciar Richard de Lucy, particularly after the death in 1168 of de Lucy’s co-justiciar, Robert earl of Leicester. Such was Henry’s confidence in de Lucy that he was known as the most powerful man in England; Eleanor was sidelined. She knew that Henry was thinking of how to divide his lands after his death. Anxious to secure her son Richard’s succession to Aquitaine, she determined to keep her duchy autonomous, and not a part of a conglomerate Angevin Empire.
For this, Eleanor would need to be resident there with power.
Power in Aquitaine was Eleanor’s raison d’être. She placed the duchy above everything and everyone – the king included. Henry failed to understand this, failed to maintain her loyalty, and catastrophically underestimated her will to succeed.
III
Eleanor’s revolt can be traced to Henry’s departure from Aquitaine in the spring of 1168. It was gradual, to be sure, and was nurtured on seeds sown earlier still.
Eleanor, while in power in Aquitaine, continued to enjoy Henry’s confidence. He consulted with her on young Henri’s controversial coronation by Roger de Pont l’Évêque, archbishop of York, in June 1170, a stinging rebuke to Thomas Becket, who was denied the right to crown a king of England. The crowning was exclusively within the purview of the archbishop of Canterbury. But the decision was made ‘by the counsel of the queen and all her entourage, for such was her duty’.11 Young Henri’s coronation would formally free up his mother from the duty of serving as regent in England, a physical impossibility when she moved south; from 1170 it was Henri who acted as his father’s regent, while his mother was busy governing Aquitaine.
Henry crossed to England in violent storms, and Eleanor, at his request, went to Normandy to act as temporary regent there. She was joined by her daughter-in-law Margaret, whom Henry deliberately excluded from the ceremony, using the young French princess as a pawn in his power-play with Becket and Louis.
Here, Eleanor worked with Henry in a double-headed monarchy; she was completely in accord with him, and with the aid of Henry’s justiciar in Normandy, Richard de Hommet, she closed the ports to prevent Becket’s supporters and messengers travelling to England to stop the ceremony.12
Eleanor was with Henry again at the end of the year, at the hunting lodge of Bur-le-Roi for Christmas together, joined by their sons Richard, Geoffrey and John. It was here on Christmas Day that Henry is supposed to have uttered his ill-fated words that led the four knights to commit murder in the cathedral.
Eleanor’s feelings on Becket’s gruesome demise are not known, but she left Henry soon afterwards for her capital. Did she, like so many others, feel disgust for Henry’s perceived part in Becket’s murder? It is possible, although she left no record.
Henry issued no charters in Aquitaine for the next five years; instead, Eleanor acted alone. When the fourteen-year-old Richard, her protégé, was invested as duke in June 1172 at the cathedral church of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand at Poitiers, and given the ring of St Valerie, she associated herself with him – ‘I and Richard my son’ – and not the other way around.13 Even as late as the summer of 1172, she was still acting in tandem with him. The momentous decision to invest Richard as duke was, by necessity, taken jointly with Henry: ‘King Henry Senior transferred to Richard by the will of his mother Eleanor the duchy of Aquitaine.’14
But she had reason to be troubled. Although Henry took only a nominal role in the governance of Aquitaine, he had reduced her income and limited her military authority.15 As such, in the spring of 1171 the abbot of Saint-Martial, lord of La Souterraine, when faced with an insurrection, appealed to Henry for military aid, and not to Eleanor.16 And Eleanor may have been concerned at how harsh Henry was with her rebellious nobility. He had razed the walls of Limoges twice, and had ordered the mutinous lord Robert de Seilhac to be treated so brutally that he died in prison. Eleanor, in sympathy with Seilhac’s widow and in quiet revolt against Henry, witnessed a grant made by her to Fontevraud Abbey.17
These five years, from 1168, marked the slow erosion of Eleanor’s trust in her husband. Although Henry denied her supreme authority over the duchy, Eleanor attempted to act independently where she could. In 1168 and 1171, she held Christmas courts with Richard, and not with Henry. She received the kings of Aragon and Navarre herself, as head of her duchy. And in that same year she changed the wording on her charters from ‘the king’s faithful followers and hers’ to ‘her faithful followers’.18 She was attempting to govern alone, although ultimate power still rested with Henry. Her seneschal was her maternal uncle, Raoul de Faye, trusted by Henry, and one of the few of the Poitevin nobility to rise high in his service. He was the only Poitevin to receive an estate in England – Bramley, in Surrey – which Eleanor had procured for him in 1155.19
By 1173, therefore, Eleanor could reasonably expect that Henry had given her all the authority he would ever allow her to have – considerable, although by this time she had realised that ultimate power would always rest with him. Even after Richard’s investiture, Henry retained the title ‘duke of Aquitaine’ for himself, while Richard was known as the count of Poitou. In the spring of 1173, Eleanor precipitated the greatest and most painful crisis of Henry’s reign. She turned Henri, Richard and Geoffrey against their father to the point where they could betray him to his enemies, seek to deny him his kingship – the very thing that defined him – and obliterate him in battle. Henri particularly, backed by Eleanor, wanted nothing less than his father’s total humiliation and capitulation. How could Henry’s immediate family, the people he should have been able to trust above all others, have come to desire his extinction?
IV
Henry was an exceedingly fond father, particularly towards his eldest surviving legitimate son Henri, and his youngest, John.20 Even Gerald of Wales, a brutal critic who loathed Henry for failing to grant him an English bishopric, said that: ‘On his legitimate children he lavished in their childhood more than a father’s affection.’21
Henry spent much of the 1160s pondering how to divide his vast empire on his death. He did not wish to leave any of his boys – Henri, Richard, Geoffrey and John – without significant territories, castles, or money. In January 1169, after two years of skirmishes with Louis, punctuated by truces, the two kings met at Montmirail in Maine to discuss a long-lasting peace. Henry chose the occasion to make known publicly how he wished to manage the succession.
