Captive Queen

Glanville looked uncomfortable. Clearly, he was debating with himself how much he dared say to her. “I am probably exceeding my orders,” he said, “but the King made known his belief that his sons had been led astray by troublemakers. He named the King of France … and yourself.”

Of course. Someone had to take the blame and be punished. Henry needed his sons: they were his heirs, although she suspected that he had conceded them even less than before as the price of making peace. It was politic, indeed necessary, to restore good relations with them as soon as possible. But for that to happen, there had to be a scapegoat, someone at whom people could point a finger and think: she was the evil genius behind their rebellion. They were not to blame.

She could never, in her worst nightmares, have envisaged that Henry could be so vengeful.

——

The King had triumphed, and for a time the talk in the marketplace and inns of Sarum was all of that. Good King Henry, the people called him, forgetting their horror at the murder of Becket and how they had vilified him then. All that mattered to them now was that he had been victorious against his enemies, as kings should be. Some could remember the trials of the weak Stephen’s reign, and knew how to appreciate a strong ruler like this one. For weeks the taverns resonated with the sound of ballads bawled tunelessly in honor of the King’s real—and imagined—exploits.

Clearly, Queen Eleanor, the one who was shut up in the castle and had not been freed—heads nodded significantly over that—was much to blame. She had caused the war, beyond any doubt, and that devil, Louis of France. She was an unnatural woman, betraying her lord like that. But no one was really surprised. There had been other rumors over the years, scandalous ones at that, and probably all true, given what they knew now. The people fell to whispering …

Yet as time passed, in its normal seasonal cycle for the good folk of Sarum, but dismally slowly for Eleanor, incarcerated in her tower, the mood of the people changed. By varied and circuitous routes, other rumors had reached them, rumors that offended their peasant sensibilities and their ingrained sense of right and wrong.

“The King is living openly with his leman!”

“He flaunts his paramour for all to see!”

“They call her the Rose of the World. My eye! Rose of Unchastity would be a better way of putting it!”

Henry was again the object of rank disapproval and derision, and the women were even more censorious than the men. “Since the world copies a bad king, he sets a bad example,” they complained. “Why, our husbands might think to follow it!” And tongues clucked in outrage.

Eleanor did not hear any of this, although Amaria could have told her a thing or two. She refrained, of course, not because she had been specifically instructed to keep quiet about such matters, but because she felt sorry for her mistress, whose emotions were very fragile where the King was concerned. The poor lady had troubles enough, and Amaria was not about to add to them.

But Eleanor was not to be kept in ignorance for long. Unexpectedly, she had a visitor, the ascetic Hugh of Avalon, Henry’s good friend and mentor. Eleanor had always liked and respected Hugh, that saintly man, that good and fearless man, who never shrank from speaking his mind, and whose unbounded charity was famous. Of a noble Burgundian family, and a monk of the Grande Chartreuse, Mother House of the austere Carthusian Order, he had just arrived in England at the King’s urgent request to head Henry’s new monastic foundation at Witham in Somerset.

Kneeling to receive Prior Hugh’s blessing, Eleanor wondered what had brought him here. She did not think it was merely to offer her some spiritual consolation, although she would be glad of that for, try as she might, she could not warm to the chaplain whom Henry had appointed. She feared, though, that Hugh of Avalon might be the bringer of bad tidings—another blow from Henry—and she was right.

“My daughter,” the prior said, in his deep, commanding voice, “I have come on a somewhat delicate but necessary mission.”

Oh no, Eleanor thought, but she observed the courtesies and invited her visitor to sit down.

“This is very sad and regrettable, this estrangement between you and the King, my lady,” Hugh began, regarding her with great warmth and humanity.

“It is no mere estrangement. I am his prisoner. He cannot forgive me for taking my sons’ part against him.”

“Of that, in charity, I will forbear to speak,” Hugh told her, seeing her distress, and knowing that anything he could say would only add to it. “But I must open my mind to you plainly, and tell you that I have always held the union between you and King Henry to be adulterous and invalid.”

“Adulterous?” echoed Eleanor, her mind rejecting the wider implications of what he was saying, and thrusting to one side the memory of Geoffrey in her bed, and the secret, shameful barrier to her marriage with Henry that her trysts with his father had created. What would the holy prior say if he knew about that? But she could never speak of it, and Henry knew it. Nor, she realized, could he, because he had married her knowing of the impediment. To admit that would be to declare their children bastards.

She had feared for a moment that Hugh of Avalon had somehow found out about her affair with Geoffrey. But he could not have, she told herself. Even Henry would not be so rash or vicious as to endanger his sons’ rights. But it had been a nasty moment, and she waited in trepidation to hear what the prior had to say.

“The annulment of your first marriage was, in my opinion, on questionable grounds,” Hugh told her. “You had married King Louis in good faith. A dispensation could without difficulty have been procured, and penances undergone for the lack of it. Yet you chose to leave your husband and take another, to whom you were even more closely related in blood. Because of that, no good could have come from that second union—which time, indeed, has proved. And therefore, the King wishes to end it by entering a plea of consanguinity.”

Eleanor listened to all this in shock. End their marriage? But of course, it was the logical thing to do, the coup de grace, for it was finished already, all but dead from several mortal blows, a mere memory from the past. Yet she had never anticipated that Henry would actually try to divorce her. And why now? The time to have done it would have been when he learned of her fateful disobedience.

She shook her head disbelievingly. “And where do I stand in this?”

The prior took her hand and held it as he did his best to make the unpalatable palatable. “The King will claim that both of you entered into the union in ignorance of any impediments; that being so, your children will continue to be regarded as legitimate, and the succession will not be endangered.”

Eleanor was doing some quick thinking. If Henry was arguing that theirs was no marriage, then he had no claim to her lands—or on her person! Freedom was beckoning …

“If I was never married to the King, then I am not his subject, and cannot be accused of committing treason against him,” she said. “If I give my consent to this divorce, then he will have no grounds for keeping me here, and must free me. Wait, good prior! Let me speak.” She held up her hand to still his objection. “I am sovereign Duchess of Aquitaine. Once I agree to this, my domains must be restored to me, and I must be freed to go back and rule them as an independent prince; and on my death, they will pass to my sons. It will mean the empire being broken up now, but in time all our domains will be reunited.”

“Ah,” enunciated the prior, and in that one syllable managed to make it very plain that things would not be as simple as that. “The King also wishes to object that you have committed adultery, by your own admission.”

“If I am not his wife, how can I have committed adultery?” Eleanor was quick to object.

“It is a technicality, my lady. At the time you rebelled against the King and committed adultery, you believed you were his wife. Anyone who deliberately takes an action that threatens the King’s safety and the weal of his realm is either his enemy or commits treason. By your adultery, you could have impugned the succession.”

“At my age?” she cried.

“Well, maybe not,” Prior Hugh conceded with a faint smile. He did not relish this unpleasant mission. “But the Pope will take a dim view of your conduct, of that there can be no doubt. He may be of the opinion that the King is right to keep you as his prisoner.”

Eleanor was furious. “Henry wants it both ways! He doesn’t want me as a wife anymore, but he’s prepared to play any trick to keep my lands, to which, when our marriage is ended, he can have no lawful claim.”

“He proposes that Duke Richard can continue to rule Aquitaine in your stead, as your heir, as he is doing now. I believe that was what you wanted anyway.”

Richard! Eleanor was overjoyed to hear any news of him, let alone such good news, but the injustice of Henry’s purpose rankled bitterly.