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Lionheart

The True Story of England's Crusader King

The History Press

To Eleanor, a Son

Millions of modern people believe that the relative positions of the constellations at the moment of their birth, as seen with the naked eye from this planet, affect their character and influence the entire course of their lives. It is therefore hardly surprising that astrology was considered a serious science in the twelfth century, several centuries before superstition was gradually replaced by scientific knowledge in the Enlightenment. In what then seemed a proof that astrology was an important and reliable science, during the night of 8 September 1157 two male infants were born in England, 40 miles apart.

The royal palace known as 'the King's Houses', later called Beaumont Palace and eventually demolished, stood near the site of Oxford's Worcester College. A commemorative plaque on the north side of Beaumont Street records its existence and the fact that two kings of England were born there: Richard I and his younger brother John. The palace had been built by their great-grandfather Henry I outside the north gate of Oxford city because it was a comfortable ride from there to his hunting tower at Woodstock.

In the nova aula or royal apartments of the palace on that night the most famous woman of her time gave birth to her third son by the man she had married as Count Henry of Anjou – and who, thanks in large part to her wealth and political acumen, had since become King Henry II of England. Her name was Eleanor of Aquitaine. In addition to being queen of England, she was also duchess of Normandy and Aquitaine and countess of Anjou and Poitou. Because infant mortality was rife at the time and long after, the newborn prince was speedily christened Richard, and would live to become England's most enduringly famous king.

On the same September night when he was born at Oxford, a woman previously unknown to history with the fashionable northern French name of Hodierna or Audierne1 also gave birth to a son, in St Albans. Hodierna's son was given the name Alexander and grew up to be among the foremost philosopher-scientists of his time, Alexander of Neckham.

Noblewomen did not normally breast-feed their children; it was their custom to bind the breasts tightly after a birth so that they would not acquire the natural curves of peasant mothers. In 1157 it would certainly have been considered inappropriate for the queen of England to suckle her child, even had Eleanor not insisted on accompanying her husband on his ceaseless travels to impose his authority and his new laws throughout the Plantagenet Empire on both sides of the Channel. Possible candidates for the honour of nursing Eleanor's newborn son included many women who had recently given birth, but Hodierna was chosen, probably on the advice of an astrologer to whom it seemed particularly auspicious that he should be raised on the milk of a woman who had delivered a child on the same night the new prince was born.

Shortly after the birth, Eleanor left her newborn son with her servants in the comfort and safety of the palace and resumed her itinerant lifestyle that lasted until the court settled briefly at Lincoln for Christmas. Only then could her ladies' servants unpack from travelling chests and leather sacks the finery in which their mistresses dressed for the festival. After this, Henry began a twelve-month tour of the kingdom that took in 3,000 miles of travel along roads that had not been repaired since the Romans left eight centuries before – a trip on which Eleanor accompanied him for much of the time.

The queen's itinerant lifestyle precluding prolonged childcare, Hodierna was installed in the King's Houses, bringing her own son with her and breast-feeding both him and Eleanor's newborn, with Prince Richard having the privilege of the right breast, thought to produce richer milk. Living in the royal apartments, Hodierna's relationship with the other members of the household reflected her importance in that age of infant mortality. To be appointed wet-nurse to a prince was both a very high honour and a heavy responsibility: should the royal infant die a cot death, for example, she would be accused of over-lying him. Should he die of some childhood infection outside her control, there too she would be held to account.

It was customary for infants to be breast-fed until two years old or possibly older, to avoid any possibility of tuberculosis from imbibing cow's milk – a connection that was known even in this time of little understanding of infection. Thereafter, her duties for the young Prince Richard included all his toilet needs, dressing him and preparing all his food, even masticating meat and placing it in his mouth until he was able to chew for himself. Throughout his early years she would stay close to him, picking him up when he fell, comforting him and caring for him when and if he contracted childhood ailments. She was, in short, the source of all that complex of affection and caring that today is labelled 'maternal'. Throughout his life, Richard would visit and care for Hodierna as the woman for whom he felt most affection, in much the same way that many middle-class Englishmen in the twentieth century felt affection for the nannies who brought them up until they were sent away to boarding school. Thirty-three years after his birth at Oxford Richard allotted the annual rent of £7 10s from a house at Rowdon, between Chippenham and Bath, 'to Hodierna nutrix', meaning, Hodierna the wet-nurse.

Hodierna and her charges lived in the most privileged stratum of Anglo-Norman society, in which 200 families related in easily traceable degree owned half the country. Beneath them toiled the native Anglo-Saxons, few of whom rose to greatness in the cruel occupation that was a slow genocide, with native males being displaced or killed and their more desirable females taken as concubines and wives by their new overlords. Traces of the racial/class divide of this time still exist in the bastard Germanic-Romance language that became modern English. For the live animals herded, tended, milked and slaughtered by the natives, we still use their Anglo-Saxon names like sheep, calf, cow and swine. For the meat on the table, which only the French-speaking overlords were allowed to eat, we use the French equivalents: mutton, veal, beef and pork. Not surprisingly, Prince Richard was to grow up regarding the English as a race of serfs who spoke a barbarous tongue he never learned and who existed only to serve their masters – in his case, once he came to power, as a source of finance.

Eleanor was a remote mother, appearing at intervals and then departing for months at a time on her travels in England and on the continent. But such was her commanding presence and so tantalising her arrivals and departures that Richard was never able to outgrow his bond with her. To these two women, then, Hodierna who mothered him and Queen Eleanor who supervised his education and upbringing in the tradition of her native Aquitaine – of which she was determined he would one day be duke, if not king of England too – Richard remained close all his life. They and his sisters were, in fact, the only women in his life.

Geraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Wales, archdeacon of Brecon, a contemporary of Richard, wrote a treatise entitled De Principis Instructione – On the Education of a Prince – to illustrate the inculcation of the virtues a monarch should have. Richard's upbringing was far from that ideal.

In the fifteen years of her marriage to Louis VII of France, Eleanor had produced only two daughters. Her failure to give him a son and heir had been the key to the annulment that freed her to marry Henry of Anjou. In the five years so far spent with Henry she had done her queenly duty in providing him with a daughter, Princess Matilda, and three sons, one of whom had died. After Richard, Eleanor was to bear the princes Geoffrey and John and the princesses Eleanor and Joanna. For a royal couple to beget so many offspring was unusual, for it could lead to a repeat of the situation after the death of William the Norman, whose ten children fought over the realm he had acquired by defeating the last Saxon ruler, King Harold Godwinson, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Since neither Henry nor Eleanor was stupid, it seems that their purpose in begetting so many offspring was to marry them off to unite the rulers of the whole of Western Europe in a web of common family relationships dominated by ... Henry and Eleanor.

A great-grandson of the Conqueror, Henry was an even more frequently absent parent than the queen. There is no record that he bore any affection for his children. In January 1163 he returned to England after an absence of four and a half years, briefly crossing paths with Eleanor and Richard, who departed in the other direction some weeks later. All the evidence points to Henry having regarded his daughters as political tools to be used in marriage alliances with other royal European families. As for his four surviving sons, he refused the easy way out, which was to make one into a churchman, to reduce the internecine rivalry by that son's consequent ineligibility to exercise royal power. He did, however, appoint his bastard son Geoffrey to be bishop of Lincoln and later archbishop of York.

Richard and the three other legitimate sons were tormented by Henry throughout their childhood, adolescence and adult lives. He would first promise something to one of them and then give it to another, only to take it away when it pleased him to do so and give it to a third. It was a technique he used with allies, vassals and enemies too, having learned it from his mother the Empress Matilda. Life, she taught her son, was like venery: always show the bait to the hawk, but take it away again before the bird can bite in order to keep it hungry and anxious to please. In the protracted bloody civil war against her cousin Stephen of Blois for the throne of England, Matilda's policy had alienated so many allies that she had narrowly escaped back to France with her life. While the life-is-like-venery approach could thus not be said to have worked for her, Henry used this manipulative technique throughout his life, outwitting enemies and allies alike, but succeeded in making enemies of his own sons.

Richard's mother was by her own birthright countess of Poitou, which by tradition also made her duchess of the thirteen counties that made up the immense duchy of Aquitaine. Since her only brother's death she had been raised for this task, and had been, in the words of her first modern biographer Amy Kelly, accustomed to travel with the peripatetic household of her father Duke William X:

... from the foothills of the Pyrenees to the River Loire on those long chevauchées made necessary by the ducal business of overlooking intriguing vassals and presumptuous clergy, and carrying law and justice to the remoter corners of creation. She knew ... the scarped heights where the baronial strongholds loomed above their clustering hamlets [of mud and straw huts]. She knew the red-roofed towns and the traffic of each one; here a lazar house, there a hostel thronging with pilgrims returning from Saint James [of Compostela] or the shrines of the pious Limousin. Melle she knew, where there was a ducal mint, and Blaye where, in the glow of forges, armourers repaired their travelling gear and Maillezais where her aunt, the Abbess Agnes, never failed to halt the ducal progress for a largess.

In her childhood, at the end of each day's long ride this privileged heiress of a duke was deferred to by the assembled castellans, bishops, abbots, merchants, troubadours and hangers-on who constituted the ducal court going about its programme of feudal business. This headstrong, intelligent and beautiful girl born to the corridors of power grew up to be the only queen ever to sit on the thrones of both France and England. Becoming duchess when she was just 15 years old, after her father died on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, she married Prince Louis Capet two weeks before he succeeded his father as king of France and took the title Louis VII, making his bride the teenage queen of France.

Eleanor defied the papal interdiction on women travelling with the Second Crusade 'except for decent washerwomen' and accompanied Louis and the French army on the long march overland to the Holy Land, fighting the influence over her husband of the crusade's bishops and his own chaplain. By divorcing Louis VII after the crusade to marry Henry of Anjou, she changed the balance of power in Western Europe.

The divorce had been arranged by negotiation between Louis' bishops and her vassal, Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux. The more worldly of Louis Capet's churchmen, like Archbishop Suger of St Denis, who had also served the late King Louis VI as chancellor, were reluctant to see the taxes of her immense dowry of Aquitaine and Poitou lost to the royal purse. They also considered it dangerous that one-third of France would revert to her personal control in the absence of a husband. Against that, the more pious of Louis' prelates, like Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted from the Sermon on the Mount, when Christ said that an eye that sinned should be plucked out and thrown away, for it was better to lose a hand or eye than for the whole body to be cast into hellfire. These bishops agonised over the state of the king's soul and wanted him separated as swiftly as possible from 'the whore of Aquitaine', suspected of gross misconduct including an affair with her uncle Raymond of Toulouse during her stay in the Holy Land while on the pointless Second Crusade with Louis. They saw a divorce as the only way to save Louis' soul from further sin by removing from his bed – not that they often slept together – the obstreperous consort who had briefly weaned him away from the influence of the Church, for high office in which he had been raised until called to supreme temporal office by the accidental death of his older brother.

In March 1152 the archbishop of Sens, who had presided over the condemnation of the teacher Peter Abelard, castrated in punishment for his scandalously illicit sexual relationship with his adolescent pupil Heloïse, convened the most important churchmen and lay nobles of Louis' territory at the castle of Beaugency, between Orleans and Blois. Louis, with charity rare among royalty, refused to accuse his queen of anything that might be prejudicial to her and decreed that the marriage be dissolved on the grounds of consanguinity alone. Being a woman, Eleanor was not allowed to speak. Her advocate, Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux, who had negotiated her marriage to Louis fifteen years earlier, stipulated the return of her dowry lands in the same condition as at the time of the marriage, in consideration of which she would remain a faithful vassal of King Louis. After arrangements were agreed for an audit to ensure that this condition was observed, Eleanor was free – at the price of a recent unwanted pregnancy forced on her by the pope and the loss of her two daughters by Louis, who remained the property of their father.

Eleanor departed from Beaugency in a cortège of her vassals, the richest woman in the world by far but a potential prey for any noble with the nerve and force to kidnap and forcibly marry her. This nearly happened twice in the next few days during the journey home to her own lands. Near Blois, 16-year-old Geoffrey Plantagenet attempted an ambush that failed. On the Loire crossing at Tours another ambush by Thibault of Blois, son of the count of Champagne, likewise failed when Eleanor's route was changed at the last minute.

Once safely installed in her own quarters in the Tour Maubergeonne of the comital palace at Poitiers, 30-year-old Eleanor lost no time in repudiating all the charters appertaining to her lands that she had been obliged to sign with Louis. Taking stock of her situation, she had no illusions. Her position was the same as it had been fifteen years earlier after inheriting title to the duchy of Aquitaine on her father's death. So rich an heiress, while unmarried and therefore unprotected by a father or husband, was constantly at risk of having her territory invaded, and being obliged to wed the invader. Although just released from a marriage that had bored her for years, she had therefore swiftly to remarry a powerful noble, whose territories added to hers would make the couple a force to be reckoned with. Her choice was dictated not by love, but realpolitik. It fell on a neighbour whom she had met at the Capetian court when he and his father came to do homage to King Louis.

On 6 April Geoffrey Plantagenet's older brother, the 19-year-old Count Henry of Anjou, whose county abutted on the northern border of Poitou, announced to his assembled vassals that he was going to marry the 30-year-old ex-wife of his overlord Louis Capet. He had previously sought the hand of one of Louis VII's daughters, but abandoned that suit for Eleanor's far richer dowry. Feudal custom demanded that two vassals of Louis must request his approval to their match, but this was something that neither Henry nor Eleanor had any intention of doing. They also chose to ignore the even closer ties of consanguinity between themselves than those which had justified Eleanor's canonical repudiation by Louis Capet. In addition, Henry ignored a new slander being circulated to blacken the name of the woman who had rejected the king of France: that she had slept with Henry's own womanising father, Geoffrey the Fair.

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Excerpted from Lionheart by Douglas Boyd. Copyright © 2014 Douglas Boyd. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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