Eleanor Of Aquitaine by Amy Kelly

Author:Amy Kelly
Format: epub

20*

War Was in His Heart

Do you not know that it is our inheritance from remote times that no one of us loves another, but that always, brother against brother, and son against father, we try our utmost to injure one another?

Geoffrey of Brittany

IN THE MEANTIME, Geoffrey had been dispatched to report the new "accord" to the barons of Aquitaine and to disperse the forces they had mustered on the marches near Mirebeau awaiting the expected arrival of the young king to lead them. But the seigneurs of the Limousin were not prepared to dissolve their movement for liberation from the Count of Poitou on the report of an "accord" between the brothers Plantagenet. They had already given too many hostages to the fortunes of war, and they strongly suspected the oaths of fealty exchanged in Maine and Anjou. Whatever Geoffrey's intentions may have been when he quitted Angers, on the marches of Poitou he betrayed his mission. Instead of fulfilling the mandate of the king, he joined the rebels with a horde of mercenaries already rallied in Brittany, ravaged everything he could reach in Poitou, and pushed on as fast as he could to the Limousin to make juncture with the enemies of his house.2 These he found abundantly among the victims of Richard's tyranny; among vassals from Maine and Anjou, resurgent from the last rebellion; among French barons streaming from Burgundy and the Ile de France. Frugal Dieu-Donne, more interested in injury to the elder king than in assistance to any of his sons, sent down his "infernal legions," a rabble of recently disbanded routiers, who knew how to support themselves without his pay by rapine in the land. From the four quarters the mutineers gathered to the banners, as they supposed, of the young king.

Richard, well apprised of the inpouring of insurgents from every direction, set forth from the borders of Poitou with a force of mercenaries in furious pursuit of Geoffrey and the barons, who had gathered under the leadership of Count Aymar of Limoges near Mirebeau. He drove them before him to the Limousin and, but for the foundering of his horses and the exhaustion of his men, he would have captured those seigneurs upon whom the uprising chiefly depended.

When it was learned in Angers that Geoffrey had betrayed his mission, the young king was sent after him to call off the insurrection. Some instinct of clairvoyance led him before setting out to send the young queen "for safety" to Paris, and to recall Guillaume le from exile. He then went southward to find the rebels organizing their positions in Limoges under Count Aymar and Geoffrey of Brittany. As soon as the young king arrived, one castle after another was opened to him.

The chroniclers who record the ensuing events in most detail charge the young king with treason and perfidy. But might it have been indecision rather than wanton falseness that marked his now incredible behavior? There are evidences that, even in the midst of fatal vacillations, compunction stirred in the devious windings of his mind.

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