Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  Eleanor of Aquitaine

  The Mother Queen

  Desmond Seward

  Copyright © 2013, Desmond Seward

  All Rights Reserved

  This edition published in 2013 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  1 Aquitaine and the Troubadours

  2 Queen of France

  3 The Crusader

  4 The Divorce

  5 Duchess of Normandy

  6 Queen of England

  7 The Angevin Empress

  8 The Court at Poitiers

  9 Eleanor’s Sons

  10 Eleanor’s Revolt

  11 The Lost Years

  12 Queen Mother

  13 The Regent

  14 Richard’s Return

  15 Fontevrault

  16 The Death of Richard

  17 King John

  18 The Grandmother of Europe

  19 The Murder of Arthur

  20 The End of the Angevin Empire

  For Elisabeth Pollington

  Foreword

  ‘With him along is come the mother queen,

  An Até, stirring him to blood and strife.’

  Shakespeare, King John

  When Eleanor of Aquitaine died in 1204 her long career had been the most colourful and the stormiest of any English queen consort before or since. No other English king has possessed so formidable or so lavishly gifted a wife as Henry II. In her day the greatest heiress in Europe, she became in turn queen of France and queen of England, and among her sons were Richard the Lion-heart and king John. It is not a vulgar exaggeration to call her the sex symbol of her age, for she was as beautiful as she was regal, and universally admired. Splendid in person, in rank and fortune, and in adventure, when young she was the idealized and adored lady for whom troubadours wrote their songs — and whom disapproving chroniclers compared to Messalina.

  At the same time Eleanor’s story is a family saga. She was very much the royal matriarch who, if not exactly a Livia, ruthlessly dominated her children and turned them against their father. It seems more than likely that her extreme possessiveness helped to bring out their evil qualities, and it may well have been largely responsible for Richard’s homosexuality. She feuded bitterly with at least one daughter-in-law and contributed towards the destruction of her own grandson.

  The first ‘modern’ historian to give Eleanor her due as a politician was bishop Stubbs at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘This great lady who deserves to be treated with more honour and respect than she has generally met with’, he writes of her. The bishop considers that ‘she was a very able woman of great tact and experience, and still greater ambition; a most important adviser whilst she continued to support her husband, a most dangerous enemy when in opposition’.

  Undoubtedly the key to Eleanor is her thirst for power. She was not prepared to be a mere transmitter of her inheritance to a husband, son or son-in-law, like every other woman in that masculine age. A great independent ruler in her own right, she lost her power when she married Louis VII of France, and later forfeited even her influence over him because of his dependence on monkish advisers and because she failed to bear him an heir. She retrieved neither power nor influence by her second marriage, despite marrying a man more than a decade younger than herself; when she intrigued against Henry she was imprisoned for fifteen years. She at last regained some power as unofficial regent for her son Richard when he was a prisoner in Germany, and then — when a very old woman — even more as the ally of her son John. She had connived at John’s succession, bypassing her young grandson Arthur (who was eventually murdered), because John guaranteed her power. As Shakespeare’s principal authority for English history, Holinshed, explained in the sixteenth century, ‘Surely, queen Eleanor, the king’s mother, was sore against Arthur … for that she saw, if he were king, how his mother Constance would look to bear the most rule within the realm of England’.

  Shakespeare paints a truly appalling portrait of Eleanor in King John. Describing John’s arrival in France to fight the French king, he says:

  With him along is come the mother queen,

  An Até, stirring him to blood and strife.

  Até was a Greek goddess of discord, of criminal folly. Shakespeare stresses John’s dependence on his aged mother’s strength and cunning, and shows her scheming against Arthur, so ‘That yon green boy shall have no sun to ripe’, only too pleased to see him in John’s murderous hands. She is called ‘a canker’d grandam’ and ‘a monstrous injurer of heaven and earth’, and has ‘a sin-conceiving womb’. Indeed Shakespeare’s ‘Queen Elinor’, though only a minor character in the play, is one of his most terrifying women, no less evil than Lady Macbeth.

  Yet the Elinor of King John is only a caricature of one side of a fascinatingly complex personality. When she was young, men worshipped her, and not merely because of her beauty or rank; when she was old, her children venerated her. She could be generous on a truly regal scale. Emerging at Henry II’s death from her long confinement as the all-powerful queen mother, she immediately issued an order for the release of prisoners throughout England because, in her words, ‘by her own experience prisons were hateful to men and to be released from them was a most delightful refreshment to the spirit’. She also patronized and cultivated the great abbey of Fontevrault, helping to make it a refuge for battered noblewomen fleeing from brutal husbands.

  Nonetheless Eleanor has always been overshadowed by her menfolk. Perhaps it is not altogether surprising, with a husband who murdered archbishop Thomas Becket, a son who was the hero of the crusades, and another son who granted Magna Carta. Moreover any heiress would have been dwarfed by so vast an inheritance as Eleanor’s duchy; it was the foundation of the Anglo-French empire of the Plantagenets and the origin of the Hundred Years War. The greatest beauty of her age has dwindled into Henry II’s rich old wife — remembered for murdering Fair Rosamund, a crime she never committed — or Shakespeare’s Elinor and the virago oft popular films and television serials. Her loveliness and glamour, her patronage of poets, her throwing-off of the constraints with which convention shackled women in the twelfth century, are all forgotten, as are her very real gifts as a politician and a ruler.

  Usually it is all but impossible to write a flesh and blood biography of any figure from the high Middle Ages, expecially a woman, because of the lack of sources. But Eleanor so impressed her contemporaries that there is an abundance of material. This book is an attempt to do justice to a magnificent woman and a magnificent life.

  1 Aquitaine and the Troubadours

  ‘Aquitaine, abounding in riches of every kind.’

  Ralph of Diceto

  ‘Her passions are made of nothing but the finest parts of pure love.’

  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

  Eleanor of Aquitaine was born in 1122, either at Bordeaux or at the nearby castle of Belin. She was the daughter of the future William X of Aquitaine and his wife Aénor of Châtellerault, and grand-daughter of the duke of Aquitaine then reigning, William IX.

  In the twelfth century, France was a geographical expression rather than a country, divided between several peoples who spoke different languages. As yet the Capetian dynasty had little real power. The king was a titular monarch who ruled scarcely more than the neighbourhood around Paris — the Ile de France (so-called because it was almost surrounded by rivers) — together with the Orleannais and Bourges. He enjoyed considerable prestige and moral authority, but he was still no more than the first among many great nobles;
although they were his vassals, they nevertheless ruled vast territories as independent princes. The duchy of Aquitaine was the largest of these fiefs. It had passed by inheritance to the counts of Poitiers, and the count-dukes ruled almost the whole of south-western France from the river Loire to the Pyrenees.

  Aquitaine proper — roughly the ancien régime provinces of Guienne and Gascony — had all the ingredients of a separate nation, and was no less of a country than Brittany. Geographically it was unified by the winding river Garonne and its tributaries, and by such natural frontiers as the Atlantic, the Pyrenees and part of the Massif Central. It possessed racial unity, its people being basically Latinized Basques who had little in common with the Northern French, and its own distinct temperament, which was — and still is — an explosive compound of vivacity and pride. Moreover, it was not merely self-supporting but enviably rich. ‘Aquitaine, abounding in riches of every kind’, Ralph of Diceto called it, and another chronicler speaks of ‘opulent Aquitaine’. From its capital, Bordeaux, wine merchants sailed to England, Germany and Scotland, and from Bayonne men went out to hunt the whale. It was a country of many landscapes, the heaths and sandy wastes of Gascony and the mountains contrasting with flat, lush plains and impenetrable woodland. There were yellow-walled and red-roofed towns, Romanesque cathedrals and rich abbeys. There were also many lordly castles, which were much more comfortable than the chilly keeps of the north, for in the south the tradition of the Gallo-Roman villa had never quite died out.

  To the north of Aquitaine was the county of Poitou. Besides its capital of Poitiers, it contained other almost equally fine towns, and La Rochelle was nearly as prosperous a port as Bordeaux. The countryside was an attractive mixture of oak bocage, flat farmland — the plat pays — and deep pine forest. The Poitevins spoke a dialect of northern French, which to some extent separated them from the Aquitainians.

  For the people of Aquitaine, including its rulers and Eleanor herself, spoke a tongue very different from that of Northern France. All the southern French used a number of dialects nowadays known collectively as Provencal, or langue d’oc, as opposed to the langue d’oïl of the north. One of these dialects, the Lemosin, became a written literary language. It was the remarkable achievement of Provencal to create the first vernacular lyric poetry of any merit — with the exception of Irish — in Western Europe since classical times. ‘Twelfth century Provencal, softer than sleep’, Helen Waddell says of it. She adds that ‘Provencal poetry demands no other intellectual background than that of its century, a May morning, the far-off singing of birds, a hawthorn tree in blossom, a crusade for the holy sepulchre. It is the Middle Ages in the medium of a dream’.

  The poems of the troubadours were written as songs with lute accompaniment. They might tell of war, politics or rivals, or they could be satirical — as in the form known as the sirventès — but usually they were about ladies. A new and widespread devotion to the Virgin Mary had induced something of a reverence for women in general. The troubadours developed a cult of platonic love (amor de lonh, love from afar) and sang of an impossible passion for some unattainable noblewoman, invariably married and a great lady, declaiming how lovely she was and how despite her scorn they would continue to adore her. Women of rank — young or even not so young — were surrounded by retinues of sighing troubadours, mostly impoverished petty nobles. In theory, at any rate, physical love played a very small part; a troubadour was expected to think himself well rewarded for ten years of devotion by the gift of a single rose, though he would drop heavy hints for largesse.

  This idealization of women, however artificial or exaggerated, brought about a considerable improvement in their status. Whereas in the barbarous north ladies were all too often little more than mere child-bearers, kept in strict seclusion and beaten by their husbands as a matter of course, in the south they enjoyed genuine liberty and mixed freely with the other sex. They were even educated and taught to read, if not to write. The personality of Eleanor — or Aliénor, as she called herself — clearly owed much to the unusually civilized atmosphere of Aquitaine.

  The earliest troubadour known by name is Eleanor’s grandfather, the fascinating William IX, Guilhem lo trobador, who ruled Aquitaine and Poitou from 1086 to 1127. He was the outstanding figure of her early childhood, the first truly big man in her life, and a hero who must have made an enormous impression upon her, even though he died when she was only five. He was a man of extraordinary complexity, alternately idealistic and cynical, ruthless but impractical. He was no statesman and, though aggressive and pugnacious, a notably incompetent general. He failed in one scheme after another. He claimed Toulouse as his wife’s inheritance, invading it while its count was away on a crusade, but the invasion ended in disaster and humiliation. In 1101 he himself took an army to the Holy Land; it was cut to pieces near Heraclea and he escaped with difficulty — he may even have spent some time as a prisoner of the Saracens. In 1114 he made another attempt on Toulouse, occupying the county for several years, but he was eventually driven out. In 1119 he went on an expedition to Aragon, helping its king to defeat a multitude of Moors but receiving little reward. He was always in trouble with the Church, and once threatened a bishop with his sword. His private life made a scandalous contrast with his ideals as a troubadour. His most lurid affair was with the dauntingly named Dangerosa of Châtellerault, whom he carried off from her husband, seduced, and then kept in the Maubergeon tower of his palace at Poitiers (from whence she became known as La Maubergeonne); and his son rose up in arms at such an insult to his mother. William IX died excommunicated in 1127. For all his talents and his energy, none of his ambitious plans had succeeded. Nevertheless contemporaries undoubtedly respected him as a mighty prince and a brave knight. He successfully cowed and kept in subjection some of the most turbulent vassals in France and he was able to bequeath an undiminished inheritance. Furthermore, even a hostile critic of his own time had to admit that the duke was one of the most courteous people in the world.

  Both his age and posterity have been baffled by William IX. First there is his unexpected gift of versifying, in a mixture of Lemosin and Poitevin. He may have been inspired by Arab songs; his father had fought in Spain and brought back Moorish slave girls, and William himself knew Syria as well as Spain. Whatever his inspiration, he was unquestionably a most competent poet, eleven of whose pieces have survived; some are unashamedly licentious, although one, Pos de chantar m’es pres talenz, pays a melancholy farewell to earthly joys:

  Since now I have a mind to sing

  I’ll make a song of that which saddens me,

  That no more in Poitou or Limousin,

  Shall I love’s servant be ….

  But the originality of a great lord turning troubadour was accompanied by less admirable eccentricities. In one of the earliest known examples of heraldry he had his concubine Dangerosa’s likeness painted on his shield, explaining repeatedly that he wanted her over him in battle just as he was over her in bed. He announced his intention of building a special whore house for his convenience, just outside Niort, in the shape of a small nunnery. His frivolity, his satirical wit and his cynicism disturbed contemporaries. ‘Brave and gallant but too much of a jester, behaving like some comedian with joke upon joke’, Orderic Vitalis says of him, and Orderic is supported by William of Malmesbury, who speaks of the duke as a giddy, unsettled kind of man ‘finding pleasure only in one nonsense after another, listening to jests with his mouth wide open in a constant guffaw’. Although never a clown herself, Eleanor took after this grandfather in her sarcastic wit and in the frivolity of her early years.

  There was an uncomfortable legend about William IX that Eleanor seems to have remembered. A holy hermit came to him, protesting in God’s name at the rape of Dangerosa. He was received with the duke’s usual mocking banter. The hermit thereupon laid a curse on William; neither he nor his descendants, whether through the male or the female line, would ever know happiness in their children. When Eleanor was old, bishop Hu
gh of Lincoln (St Hugh) often told this story, saying that he had heard it from her husband, Henry II, and the king must have heard it from Eleanor herself.

  Duke William X, Eleanor’s father, was almost as cultured as William IX, just as colourful and still more pugnacious. He was a patron of poets and there were many troubadours at his court, including foreigners from Aragon, Castile and Navarre, and from Italy, and there was even a Welshman called Bledhri. When this duke died, his Gascon friend Cercamon wrote a lament that mourned his passing and the end of his munificence. However, William X was better known for quarrelling than for verses. A man of huge physique and enormous strength, he was an outsize personality in every way. He was said to eat enough for eight ordinary mortals at each meal. He was unwise enough to involve himself in the Church schism that began in 1130, supporting the anti-pope Anacletus against Innocent II; he menaced prelates and ignored excommunications and interdicts that stopped the bells ringing in entire dioceses. He was completely undaunted by the threats of divine punishment that issued from the redoubtable abbot of Clairvaux, St Bernard, and refused to remove a schismatic bishop. When Bernard deliberately entered his territory and publicly celebrated mass at Parthenay, the duke burst into the church in full armour, to teach the infuriating monk a lesson. However, William had met his match. Bernard advanced on him, holding up the consecrated Host, and spoke to such effect that the duke fell to the ground rigid with fear and foaming at the mouth. But although he had lost his battle with the Church, William in no way abated his quarrelsomeness when dealing with his vassals; only his death prevented the whole of the Limousin from rising in revolt.

  Very little is known of Eleanor’s mother, Aénor. She was the daughter of the viscount of Châtellerault and his wife Dangerosa — William’s IX’s concubine, the Maubergeonne. Aénor had three children: William Aigret (who died when still a boy), Eleanor of Aquitaine and Petronilla (who is sometimes called Aélith). There is a whimsical legend that the name Eleanor — in Provencal, Aliénor — is derived from the Latin pun Alia Aénor’, i.e. ‘Another Aénor’. The duchess Aénor appears to have obtained the appointment of her uncle as bishop of Poitiers, perhaps because he was a supporter of Anacletus, and she was probably excommunicated with her husband as an adherent of the anti-pope. The one other detail to survive is that she died at Talmont, about the year 1130, when Eleanor was only eight years old.