In Regum serie scribatur Dux Aquitanorum et Vasconum Ricardus, qui ad probitatis opera nunquam exstitit tardus, cujus adolescentia magna floret industria. (Geoffrey of Vigeois, A.D. 1185).
CHAPTER I
THE BOY DUKE
1157-1179
Bonum est viro cum portaverit jugum adolescentia sua.
1157
“The eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third nesting”—thus ran one of the predictions in the so-called “prophecy of Merlin,” which in the latter half of the twelfth century was generally regarded as shadowing forth the destiny of Henry Fitz-Empress and his family. “The queen,” said those who interpreted the prophecy after the event, “is called the eagle of the broken covenant because she spread out her wings over two realms, France and England, but was separated from the one by divorce and from the other by long imprisonment. And whereas her first-born son, William, died in infancy, and the second, Henry, in rebellion against his father, Richard, the son of her third nesting, strove in all things to bring glory to his mother’s name.”[1]
There was nothing to mar the rejoicing of either Eleanor or Henry in September 1157. The young king had overcome the difficulties which had beset him at the opening of his reign. Public order and the regular administration of public justice had been restored throughout his realm. He had obtained the French king’s recognition of his rights over Normandy and the Angevin lands, and also over Eleanor’s duchy of Aquitaine,[2] where in the winter of 1156 he had received the homage of the barons and kept the Christmas festival with her at Bordeaux.[3] King and queen 1157 returned to England in the spring.[4] Soon afterwards the last remnant of opposition to the rule of the Angevin king in England had been disarmed in the persons of Earl Hugh of Norfolk and Count William of Boulogne; Henry had “subdued all the Welsh to his will,”[5] and received, together with the homage of Malcolm of Scotland, a formal restitution of Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland,[6] which had been in the possession of the Scots since 1136. From these successes Henry had either just returned, or was on his way back to rejoin his queen at Oxford, when their third son was born there—no doubt in Beaumont palace—on September 8.[7] A woman of S. Alban’s was chosen for the boy’s nurse and fostered him together with her own son, born on the same night and afterwards known as Alexander Neckam,[8] author of a treatise on natural science or what passed for science in his time. Her name was Hodierna; in later days she had from the royal domains in Chippenham an annuity of seven pounds, doubtless granted to her by her royal nursling, whom she seems to have survived by some twenty years.[9] Whether she dwelt 1157 at the court while he was under her charge, or whether, like his ancestor Geoffrey Martel, he was sent to dwell with his foster-mother, there is nothing to show. Before he was two years old his destiny was planned by the king; Richard was to be heir to the dominions of his mother.
“Aquitaine,” says an English writer of the time, “abounding in riches of many kinds, excels other parts of the western world in such wise that it is reckoned by historians as one of the happiest and most fertile among the provinces of Gaul. Although its fields respond abundantly to culture, its vines to propagation, and its woodlands to the chase, yet nevertheless it takes its name not from any of these advantages, but from its waters (aquæ), haply esteeming as alone worthy of account among its delights that which its health-giving water brings forth either to be returned to the sea, or uplifted in the air. If, indeed, we track the Garonne from its fount along its rapid course to the sea, and if we also follow the line of the Pyrenean mountains, all the country that lies between derives its name from the beneficent waters that flow through it. Furthermore, in those parts smoothness of tongue is so general that it promises impunity to everybody, and any one who knows not the manner of that people cannot know whether they are more constant in deed than in word. When they set themselves to tame the pride of their enemies, they do it in earnest; and when the labours of battle are over and they settle down to rest in peace, they give themselves up wholly to pleasure.”[10]
Whatever may be thought of Dean Ralph’s etymology, there was an element of truth in his description, half jesting though it seems to be, of the country and the character of its people. He gives indeed hardly sufficient prominence to the pugnacious side of the latter; and the boundaries 1157 which he assigns to the former are considerably narrower than those of the duchy of Aquitaine as it stood at the time of Richard’s birth. That duchy comprised, in theory at least, fully one-third of the kingdom of France. As counts of Poitou its dukes bore direct sway over a territory bounded on the north by Britanny, Anjou, and Touraine, on the west by the sea from the bay now known as that of Bourgneuf to the mouth of the Charente, and on the east (roughly) by the course of the river Creuse from a little distance below Argenton to its junction with the Vienne; and also over the dependent district of Saintonge on the north side of the estuary of the Garonne, or Gironde. As counts of Gascony they were overlords of a number of lesser counties and lordships, extending from the mouth of the Garonne to the Pyrenees, and forming a territory nearly twice the size of Poitou. Between Poitou and Gascony lay the counties of Angoulême, La Marche, and Périgord, and, between the two latter, a cluster of minor fiefs which collectively formed the district known as the Limousin, and of which the most important was the viscounty of Limoges. All these had from early times owned the overlordship of the Poitevin counts in their ducal capacity. So, too, had Berry, an extensive district lying to the north of La Marche. The north-eastern portion of Berry, which formed the viscounty of Bourges, had, however, for a long time past been lost to the dukes and reckoned as part of the Royal Domain of France. On the eastern and south-eastern borders of the duchy lay the counties of Auvergne and Toulouse. Toulouse, with its dependencies—the Quercy or county of Cahors, Alby, Foix, Carcassonne, Cerdagne and Roussillon—had always been a separate fief held directly of the Crown; but the right to its ownership had for the last sixty years been in dispute between the Poitevin counts and its actual holders, the house of St. Gilles, who also held the neighbouring county of Rouergue and with it the overlordship of a number of smaller fiefs along the southern coast. Auvergne, originally a part of the Aquitanian duchy, was strongly disposed to reject the authority of the Poitevin dukes; and both Auvergne and Toulouse were more or less openly 1157 supported in this matter by the French king. Nor were the other underfiefs of the duchy, or even the barons of Poitou, by any means models of feudal obedience. For a century or more the dukes had been periodically at strife with the counts of Angoulême, the counts of La Marche, the lords of Lusignan (in Poitou), the viscounts of Limoges, and the neighbours and rivals of these last.[11] It was little more than twenty years since Count William of Angoulême had carried off from Poitiers Eleanor’s stepmother, the Countess Emma, “by the counsel of the chiefs of the Limousin who feared lest the Poitevin yoke should be laid more heavily upon them” owing to her marriage with the duke, she being a daughter and a possible co-heiress of the viscount of Limoges.[12] At Limoges itself, moreover, there seems to have been a perennial rivalry between the bishop, the viscount, the abbot of the great abbey of S. Martial, and the townsfolk.[13]
When Henry II went to Limoges after his marriage in 1152 he seems to have been welcomed as duke by the viscount; but strife arose between his followers and the citizens which so enraged him that he ordered the recently built walls of the town to be razed and the bridge to be destroyed. As the town—locally called “the castle”—was held by the viscount of the abbot, this was an offence to all parties at once; and the abbot retorted by refusing to grant the duke’s claim to a procuration in the city—that 1157 is, outside the walls—saying he was only bound to grant it within the enclosure of the “castle.”[14] Henry, though angry, had his mind fixed on more important matters, and let the insult pass; but on his next visit to Limoges, in 1156 1156, he successfully asserted his ducal rights.[15] In the spring or early summer of 1159 he again went to Aquitaine, 1159 to prosecute by force of arms his claim, as Eleanor’s husband, to the county of Toulouse. The support of the Count of Barcelona and his wife, the Queen of Aragon, was purchased by a promise that Richard should wed their infant daughter and should on his marriage receive the Dukedom of Aquitaine.[16] The Quercy was conquered by Henry and held for him awhile after he had abandoned the siege of Toulouse and returned to Normandy. A treaty made between 1160 Henry and Louis of France in May 1160 contained a provision for a year’s truce between Henry and Raymond of Toulouse, during which Henry was to keep “whatever he at the date of the treaty had of the honour of Toulouse, Cahors, or Quercy.”[17] This was probably not much, as his troops had already been withdrawn from the conquered territory; the greater part of it seems to have fallen back into Raymond’s hands, and we hear nothing more of the relations between him and Henry for nearly thirteen years.