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Like a Falcon From a Cage
While battle swirled around the walls of Acre, Europe was again shaking off its slumbers. Aid was on the way the eastern colony.
This Crusade was to be a concerted effort headed by the Emperor Frederick, supported by mighty kings and princes.
But there were to be definitely no women. A Papal Bull gave a comprehensive ban on feminine participation.
One who obeyed - at least according to the letter of the law - was the pope's old friend, Eleanor, Queen of England.
Yet even though she did not herself go to the Holy Land, the turbulent Third Crusade saw Queen Eleanor make her finest contribution to the winning of the East.
Remaining at home, she saved a kingdom brought nearly to ruin by the circumstances of the Crusade. And at the same time she guided the fortunes of the army far across the sea in Outremer.
Never was there a more delicate act of balancing personal and dynastic interests than that undertaken by this woman, who had reached an age when, even today, most people are seeking the quieter pleasures of honourable retirement.
Nobody illustrates the life of the women who stayed home from the Crusades on a grander scale than did Eleanor, self proclaimed Queen of England, wife of Henry Plantagenet, mother of Richard the Lionheart, of John Earl of Montaigne, Geoffrey Archbishop of York, Joanna Queen of Sicily, and Marie Countess of Champagne.
Everything in her life was accentuated and writ in the largest and boldest type. Other women ruled households and demesnes in the absence of their men: she set an empire to rights.
Eleanor had spent sixteen years of imprisonment, suffered by order of her husband, Henry II. At the moment of her husband's death, Eleanor sprang from her tower gaol like a falcon from a cage. The Queen's saviour was her beloved son, Richard the Lionhearted, the exemplar of the Crusading spirit.
Richard was the second of her four sons, and her closest confidant. He had spent his adolescence under her tutelage attempting to wrest the crown of the Angevin empire from his father's fist. When she was imprisoned, Richard carried on: Eleanor plotted from behind her stone walls to bring about the downfall of her hated husband, Richard's father. Undoubtedly, her spider's web was drawn about Henry and helped cause his death soon after the proclamation of the Third Crusade in 1189. Henry was at that time busy reaching peace with his eternal foe, Richard's ally and sometimes bosom companion, Philip of France. Amongst other items of the treaty was an agreement by Henry to surrender Philip's sister Alys to the care of Richard. Alys had been betrothed to Richard since childhood: Henry had taken her as his lover and refused to surrender her, until now. Further, the French land promised to Richard as Alys's dowry was to be surrendered after Richard's return from Jerusalem.1
The unfortunate Alys was therefore destined to remain a pawn in the games of kings and queens: she was still the excuse for hostilities between Philip and Richard after the end of the Crusade.
At the conclusion of the negotiations of 1189, Henry asked for a list of his followers who had joined with Richard in the late rebellion. He found at the head of the document the name of his youngest and most loved son, John.
"Surprised at this beyond measure, he came to Chinon, touched with grief at heart, cursed the day on which he was born, and pronounced upon his sons the curse of God and of himself...and after confessing his sins, and being absolved by the bishop and clergy, he departed this life in the thirty-fifth year of his reign..."2
The triumph of Eleanor. No doubt she celebrated with all the gusto available to a woman born in 1122. While Richard wasted no time in seizing his father's lands and taxing those who had been loyal to Henry to the uttermost farthing, Eleanor "...moved her royal court from city to city, and from castle to castle, just as she thought proper."3.
Although the Papal Bull forbade women from going on the Third Crusade, nothing daunted, Eleanor set out on the early stages of the journey, despite the pope's ban, her advanced age, and the debilitating effects of gaol.
Eleanor had been used to a life of freedom and luxury equivalent to that of a modern jet setter. But she had also spent half a lifetime in various prisons, while her husband flaunted his power and his mistresses. Eleanor had much time to make up. Nevertheless, with the tenderness and sense of justice that characterised her whole life, she spared more than a moment's thought for others who had been in like case.
"...sending messengers throughout all the counties of England, ordered that all captives should be liberated from prison and confinement, for the good of the soul of Henry, her lord; inasmuch as, in her own person, she had learnt by experience that confinement is distasteful to mankind, and that it is a most delightful refreshment to the spirits to be liberated therefrom. She, moreover, gave directions, in obedience to the orders of her son, the duke, that all who had been taken in custody for forestal offences should be acquitted therefor and released, and that all persons who had been outlawed for forestal offences should return in peace..."4
Eventually, the freeing of prisoners expanded into a general amnesty for prisoners on remand under the common law.
Meanwhile, in France, Richard, tears in his eyes, buried the father against whom he had fought a lifetime of civil war. Henry's tomb was made at Fontevrault. In one of the greatest ironies of a dynasty built on ironies, Richard would lie near his father at the end of his own life - next to his mother, Eleanor. Perhaps thirty years of strife had blended the family into some intense bond of simultaneous love and hate that reached beyond mortal understanding.
The obsequies complete, Richard in company with his court including his unintentionally
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