Warriors of God by James Reston Jr

Author:James Reston, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307430120
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

HOME FIRES SMOLDERING

SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE THESE PRODIGIOUS events in Acre, the indomitable, the incomparable, the irrepressible Eleanor of Aquitaine left her favorite son, Richard, in Sicily and made her way north toward Rome. Among the dignitaries in her retinue was the Archbishop of Rouen, whose crusading vow had been annulled in Messina to free him for more important political work. By depositing Berengaria in the King’s cortège with firm instructions that she and Richard were to be married after the Lental season, wherever they might find themselves—Eleanor could scarcely have imagined Cyprus as the nuptial site—she must have felt content that she had solved at least one fundamental problem of the future.

The perpetuation of the Plantagenet dynasty from Scotland to the Pyrenees was scarcely the only dilemma pressing on the Plantagenets, however. With the King preoccupied with his Crusade, far away in Palestine, it fell to Eleanor—or, more aptly, she seized the chance—to quell the home fires and hold the vast realm together until Richard returned. Eleanor would now become more than a queen. She became a kind of supermonarch.

Her immediate challenge was to hold in check the pretenders to Richard’s throne, most especially her youngest and least favorite son, John. Two years before, when the new King was coronated, Richard had been extraordinarily generous toward his younger brother, even though he harbored an older brother’s disdain for John’s wimpy and erratic ways. He brought John back to England with him just so the prince could take part in the pomp of the coronation ceremony. At Westminster Abbey, John, holding one of the gold royal swords, led the King-in-waiting decorously to the altar. After the ceremony Richard confirmed John’s fief as the county of Mortaigne in Normandy, the county of Nottingham, and the castle of Marlborough. In addition, the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Derby, and Lancaster became his, along with the earldom of Gloucester. Within a few weeks the new King put his brother in command of an expedition to suppress a rebellion in Wales. When this was successfully accomplished, Richard added the county of Devon to John’s domain as a reward. Only a few years before, John had been ridiculed as Jean sans Terre, John Lackland. Now the whole of West England fell under John’s rule.

For all his generosity, Richard had not proclaimed his younger brother as the successor to the throne, and this rankled, particularly since there was a good chance Richard would be killed in the Holy Land. Indeed, it tormented the suspicious and perpetually outshone John, who suspected that his luminous brother might impulsively name the son of their late brother, Geoffrey, as heir. As a further annoyance to John, Richard had placed the reins of the nation in the hands of a chancellor, one William Longchamp, naming the stout and diminutive Norman as chief justiciar and making him Bishop of Ely. Once he was Bishop of Ely, Longchamp persuaded the Pope to make him papal legate for all England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, so

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