Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  In August 1165, Gerald of Wales was still a student in Paris. The weather, he would recall years later in one of his chronicles, had been suffocating, and he had taken to studying his books in the evening when it grew cool. Shortly after midnight on Sunday the twenty-second, he suddenly heard a commotion that sent him running to the window. It sounded as though every bell in Paris were ringing, and at first he thought that there must be a very bad fire somewhere in the Île. When he leaned from his window, he saw the square below blazing with bonfires and Parisians racing about with torches, shouting and waving their arms. Calling down to a woman he knew, he asked what was going on.

  “By the grace of heaven,” she cried, “there is born in Paris tonight a king who shall be a hammer to the King of the English.”

  Louis Capet’s prayers had been answered. At the age of forty-five, after twenty-eight years on the throne, he had given the Franks an heir. Small wonder that the boy would be called Philip Augustus and hailed by the Franks as Dieu-Donné, “the God-given.”

  The reaction of the Plantagenets to this depressing piece of news has not been recorded. Later it would be recalled, however, that two comets had been reported in the month of August, one in the west of England and another in the north. A comet, as everyone knew, appeared only at the death of a king or betokened the ruin of a nation. Hindsight notwithstanding, it did not take a wizard to understand that 1165 was a spectacularly poor year for the Plantagenets.

  For the second time, Henry’s expedition against the Welsh had ended in complete failure, and by September he was back in England with nothing to show for his months of planning and enormous expenditures, except a few hostages, whom he ordered savagely mutilated. In Angers, Eleanor was having troubles of her own because, despite the bishop of Poitiers’s insinuations of sexual escapades, she had the difficult task of maintaining order in a region poised for rebellion. While Henry had been preoccupied in England with the Becket imbroglio, the border region where Brittany adjoined Anjou, Maine, Poitou, and Normandy had grown restless, and the border barons of Brittany and Maine had formed a league to resist his authority; in fact, during the previous summer, the constable of Normandy had been forced to muster an army against the confederates. As Eleanor must have known when she arrived to take up the regency, she had been assigned a tinderbox. She might ignore Thomas Becket, even dismiss him as a bit player on the great stage of kings and queens, but she soon discovered that his defiance of Henry and his widely publicized asylum on the Continent were having serious effects. Becket demonstrated to all with a mind for taking the law into their own hands that Henry Plantagenet was neither irresistible nor invulnerable. He could not only be defied but defied successfully. While Henry was fighting the Welsh, Eleanor found her orders treated with contempt. And it was not only in Brittany and Maine that discontented subjects opposed Henry’s rule, but also in Aquitaine, where, she learned from her uncle that Earl Patrick, Henry’s military governor there, was faring no better. After thirteen years of Plantagenet rule, Eleanor’s vassals had had enough. “The Poitevins,” reported Gervase of Canterbury, “withdrew from their allegiance to the king of the English because of his pruning of their liberties.” If fact, some Poitevin nobles had appealed in desperation to the papacy, requesting that Eleanor’s marriage be dissolved on the grounds of consanguinity, and they had laid before the papal legates a genealogical table to prove their case. Forboding reports of conspiracies came to Eleanor’s ears, stories that the counts of Angoulême and La Marche had formed a confederation to break away from Henry and offer their allegiance to Louis Capet.

  Unlike her previous tour of duty at Angers, this stay did not offer the leisure to create a court or invite troubadours. In October, Eleanor gave birth to another daughter, whom she named Joanna, but on the whole, there was little cause for rejoicing, and she must have waited anxiously for Henry’s return. Even though the Welsh campaign had ended in late August, the king seemed in no hurry to leave England. He failed to return that year, not even to see her new baby or celebrate Christmas, the one time of the year they always spent together. Moreover, there seemed to be no good explanation for his absence. For a man who never stood still. who arrived at a place and then immediately ached to leave, Henry was behaving with strange lethargy. From September 1165 to the following March, except for brief trips to Winchester and Clarendon, Henry spent most of his time at Woodstock, near Oxford. In early March of 1166, he prepared to cross the Channel, but then at the last moment changed his mind and returned to Woodstock. Not until March 16 did he leave Southampton. Whatever suspicions Eleanor may have had, whatever tales of a new mistress may have found their way to Angers during those months, she seemed determined to ignore them. Or perhaps the rumors only heightened her desire to prove herself still desirable to Henry, because within weeks of his return to Normandy, she became pregnant. At this point she must have been nearing menopause, and one way of denying her age and maintaining at least the illusion of youth would have been maternity. On the other hand, this pregnancy, which would be her last, may simply have been an accident. She could hardly have failed to see that Henry had lost all interest in her—he wanted young women—but she struggled to keep him. Once back on the Continent, he reverted to his old habits, that is, he never stopped moving. According to the pipe rolls, he immediately set out for Maine to ravage the castles of those border barons who had been rebelling against Eleanor’s orders. He spent Easter with her at Angers, but after that she could not have seen much of him. From Angers he went to Le Mans, in June he was detained at Chinon for several weeks due to illness, but by July 12 he was campaigning in Brittany, where he spent most of the summer, summoning eight-year-old Geoffrey from England and betrothing him to the heiress of Brittany, five-year-old Constance. If he behaved like a man on the run, it was from necessity, because every time he turned his back, his vassals eagerly took advantage. Even Louis Capet, puffed up with confidence since the birth of Dieu-Donné, had turned remarkably bold.

  By October, Henry was back in Normandy, at Caen, where he began considering how best to deal with the rebels in Aquitaine, who, he had heard, were covertly intriguing with Louis. Apparently settling on a velvet-glove approach, he summoned the troublesome barons of Poitou to a conference at Chinon on November 20 and also announced that he would hold Christmas court at Eleanor’s newly rebuilt palace in Poitiers, an honor that the Poitevins failed to appreciate. For some unknown reason, he decided against taking Eleanor to Poitiers, resolving instead to visit the south with Prince Henry so that he might present the queen’s vassals with their future overlord. Surprisingly, Eleanor journeyed to England in the autumn. Certainly there were no pressing reasons for her presence there, and in her advanced state of pregnancy one would think that she might have preferred to travel south rather than to that foggy island on the rim of the world. Crossing the Channel with Matilda in October or November, she arranged for young Henry’s trip to the Continent, receiving from the sheriff of Devonshire £100 for the prince’s traveling expenses. In December, she traveled in Oxfordshire, and shortly before Christmas she retired to Beaumont Palace in Oxford, where Richard had been born. There, on Christmas Eve 1166, she gave birth to another son, whom she named John in honor of the saint of his natal day. It was a lonely, bitter, humiliating Christmas, spent in the company of a ten-year-old girl and a newborn infant, lonely because she longed to be in Poitiers, bitter because by now she had most likely discovered the existence of Rosamond Clifford. What she had learned by the day John was born filled her with raging hatred against her husband, and when she looked at the tiny, dark-haired infant, so different from her other golden children, she felt no joy. For the rest of her life, the sight of John would be sufficient to bring back memories of a man she despised, of that bitter Christmas she had spent in Oxford choked with shame and rage. Sometime during that Christmas season she resolved to return permanently to Aquitaine; she would no longer be a wife to Henry Plantagenet. From the devil he had come and to the devil he could go.<
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  The Court of Love

  Henry Plantagenet was in love. This time it was no comely damsel found in a Norman village where he had spent one night nor a sporting prostitute from the dockside taverns along the Thames nor a baron’s daughter whose father sought to make his fortune by pimping for his overlord. Nor was it a queen whose lands and fame had aroused in him a greedy lust. This time it was a real love, perhaps the only one that Henry would ever feel for a woman.

  Her crisped locks like threads of golde

  Appeared to each man’s sight;

  Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearles,

  Did cast a heavenlye light.

  The blood within her crystal cheekes

  Did such a colour drive;

  As though the lillye and the rose

  For mastership did strive.

  Rosamond Clifford is believed to have been the daughter of Walter de Clifford, a Norman knight living at Bredelais on the Welsh border. During Henry’s campaign in Wales during the summer of 1165, de Clifford had been among those to join the king’s forces. Afterward, Henry must have visited his castle, perhaps by invitation, but more likely on one of those unscheduled stops along the road that never ceased to irritate his traveling companions. In later centuries, it would be claimed that Rosamond was the mother of Henry’s illegitimate sons, Geoffrey and William, an impossibility, since both of them were born in the 1150s and she was still a girl in 1166, when Henry first encountered her. There was something about Fair Rosamond and her idyll with the king that provided irresistible raw material for the weavers of fables and fairy-tales. That she was radiantly beautiful there is no doubt, and one can further guess that she must have had a pretty, compliant type of femininity that appealed to the king: “A sweeter creature in this world/ Could never prince embrace.” Unlike Henry’s other affairs, this was both serious and relatively stable, because it endured until Rosamond’s death in 1176 or 1177. In the densely forested park at Woodstock, Henry built, or so the balladeers claim, “a bower the like was never seene,” a secret love nest so cunningly concealed that it could only be approached through a maze. To shelter nature’s work of art, his Rose of the World, from the rude eyes of men—and from his jealous queen—Henry contrived a labyrinth so intricate that “none but with a clue of thread could enter in or out.” While he was away from England, however, the queen threaded the maze by following a silken string fallen from a marvelous needlework chest that the king had given Rosamond for her embroidery. Once inside the house, “the furious queene” offered her rival the choice between drinking a bowl of poison or death by dagger. In most versions of the fable, Rosamond, as brave as she was fair, chooses the poison.

  In contemporary accounts, however, there is no hint of foul play in the death of Rosamond Clifford and certainly no evidence to support the story of Eleanor balancing a dagger and a cup of poison. The first association of Eleanor with Rosamond’s death occurs in an anonymous fourteenth-century chronicle, The French Chronicle of London, but the jealous queen is not Eleanor of Aquitaine but Eleanor of Provence, the wife of Henry III. In this Grand Guignol account, the queen first strips Rosamond of her gown and roasts her naked between two fires, then finishes her off by placing two horrible toads on the fair lady’s breasts while at the same time bleeding her to death in a bath. As the blood oozes and the toads suck, Eleanor cackles with pleasure. Except for this particular chronicle, no writer before the sixteenth century assigns Eleanor the role of murderess. Which is not to imply that her contemporaries ignored Henry and his new mistress. Gerald of Wales does not hesitate to state that the king, “who had long been a secret adulterer, now flaunted his paramour for all to see, not that Rose of the World as some vain and foolish people called her, but that Rose of Unchastity.” For all her subsequent fame, Rosamond must be one of the most neglected concubines in history, because during the dozen years of their liaison Henry spent only a total of three and a half years in England. During those twelve years, she lived at Woodstock and then in retirement at the nearby nunnery of Godstow, where she died of natural causes and was buried by sympathetic nuns who had, apparently, found her a romantic figure.

  A chronicler tells how Bishop Hugh of Lincoln was making his rounds in the Oxford countryside in 1191 and, entering the church at Godstow to pray, saw before the altar a tomb covered with silken clothes and surrounded by a considerable number of expensive candles. Making inquiries about this obviously well-tended shrine, “he was told that this was the tomb of Rosamond, who had formerly been the mistress of Henry, King of England, and that for love of her, he had shown many favors to that church.” To this the horrified bishop made a predictably indignant reply. “Take her away from here, for she was a harlot; and bury her outside of the church with the rest, that the Christian religion may not grow into contempt and that other women, warned by her example, may abstain from illicit and adulterous intercourse.” Rosamond was then interred in the nuns’ chapter house, where, according to Ralph of Higden, her tomb was inscribed with a coarse punning couplet:Hic jacet in tumba rosa mundi, non rosa munda; Non redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet.

  Here lies the rose of the world, not a clean rose; She no longer smells rosy, so hold your nose.

  Long before Henry met Rosamond, the ancient manor of Woodstock had been a favorite royal palace. At the time of the Norman Conquest, a Saxon manor stood on the site, and later Henry’s grandfather had built a hunting lodge in the middle of the great forest and surrounded it with a deer park that he then encircled with a stone wall seven miles long. Henry I had had a passion for rare animals, and behind his great wall he collected a menagerie of lions, leopards, lynxes, and even camels. His grandson used Woodstock as a meeting place for sessions of the Great Council, but mainly it was a hunting lodge. One can imagine that such an extraordinary place delighted the Plantagenet children, and perhaps Eleanor too had a special affection for Woodstock with its exotic animals and its treetops arching in vast shadowy caverns.

  During those months in 1166 and 1167 when Eleanor struggled with the Breton and Poitevin insurgents at Angers, insistent tales must have drifted across the Channel to be repeated by the courtiers as the choice gossip of the moment. Judging from Gerald of Wales’s remarks, “vain and foolish people” may already have dubbed the new mistress Rose of the World and described her as a fairy princess who had enchanted a king. Eleanor’s extreme reaction to Rosamond Clifford is a continuing mystery to which there are few clues; nothing in her background easily accounts for it. From the outset, Henry’s whoring had been an established part of her marriage, and by that time she would have taken it for granted that none of her household maids were safe with him and that his vassals locked up their wives and daughters when the king entered their neighborhoods. Neither should it be forgotten that Eleanor was a sophisticated woman who came from a region where adultery was not only tolerated but distilled into the wine of troubadour poetry and quaffed regularly to the tune of lute and drum. Her own grandmother, the viscountess of Châtellerault, had been one of the most notorious adulteresses of her generation, whose extramarital escapades had provided young Eleanor with romantic bedtime stories. At any event, no highborn lady of the twelfth century complained very strenuously about her lord’s philandering, no matter how much she may have fumed in private. Lust, a man’s nature, was accepted and ignored. For fifteen years Eleanor had looked the other way, indeed in the case of Henry’s natural son, Geoffrey, she had done more than that, accepting him as a member of the family.

  There is no proof at all that she suffered inordinate pangs of sexual jealousy. Granted, it could be true that she suddenly turned into a possessive termagant as she grew older and less desirable to Henry, but on the other hand, long practice had taught her to hide her inward feelings. And, if she had weathered his all-consuming passion for Thomas Becket, she certainly might have overlooked a provincial girl from the Welsh marches. There had been many, many women, too many to count, and luckily the affairs had always blown over quickly. Perhaps
that was the trouble: Henry’s feelings for Rosamond were special, like none he had felt before for any woman, Eleanor included, and somehow she became aware of this.