Richard the Lion Heart
9781465680013
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“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.” 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, where in the winter of 1156 he had received the homage of the barons and kept the Christmas festival with her at Bordeaux. King and queen returned to England in the spring. 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,” and received, together with the homage of Malcolm of Scotland, a formal restitution of Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland, 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. 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. Whether she dwelt 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.
