Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  The unhappy pair reached Tusculum on 9 October 1149. Here the papal court was in residence, having fled from Rome (which was threatened by imperial troops in one of the perennial conflicts between pope and emperor). Eugenius III gave them a warm welcome, as we know from the history of John of Salisbury, then a papal secretary, who was present. Louis took the opportunity to confess his misgivings about the validity of his marriage. The pope told him to ignore them, to forget the very word consanguinity; if necessary, a dispensation could be provided by the Church. John noted that despite his scruples the king loved Eleanor with an almost childish love. He also observed that one of Louis’s confidants — presumably Thierry Galeran — was constantly trying to poison his mind against the queen. Eugenius tried hard to reconcile the couple. He forced them to sleep together, personally conducting them to a guest room furnished with splendid silk hangings but with only one bed. This austere pontiff — originally a Cistercian monk — was obviously moved by their predicament. When they left, Eugenius could not keep back his tears as he blessed both them and France.

  Eleanor and Louis travelled on to Rome. Here they were taken on a tour of the Eternal City by cardinals whom Eugenius had sent with them for the purpose. They rode on over the Alps, through the Jura, and at last reached Paris in November 1149. They had been away for two years and six months. The regent Suger, who met them at Auxerre, handed back to his master a realm that was as peaceful as it was prosperous.

  The royal marriage had not been healed by Eugenius. Suger, who still possessed more influence over Louis than anyone, did his best to save it. He considered the extension of Capetian rule throughout France to be the will of God and dreaded a divorce that would lose the monarchy Aquitaine. In the summer of 1150 Eleanor bore her second child — not an heir, but another daughter (Alice, who would one day be countess of Blois), whose birth did nothing to reconcile her parents. Then, in January 1151, abbot Suger died.

  According to an English chronicler, after Louis and Eleanor returned to France they began to quarrel over everything. It was now that she took such offence at his habits and began to grumble again about being married to a monk. Unquestionably Louis was more devout then ever. He made yet another pilgrimage of expiation to Vitry-le-Brulé, planting Cypress trees that he had brought back from the Holy Land (whose descendents still grow there today). He continued to take advice from men who were enemies of the queen, including Thierry Galeran.

  For the time being, however, the king was too busy with a feudal dispute to worry about his marriage. He found himself at war with one of the most formidable of French vassals — Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou. The quarrel was over Geoffrey’s treatment of Rigaud Berlai, the lord of Montreuil-Bellay near Saumur. Rigaud was the count’s most turbulent vassal, who constantly ravaged his lands. Unfortunately he was also Louis’s seneschal in Poitou. When the king left France on crusade the count began a siege of Montreuil-Bellay that was to last for three years. As soon as Louis returned, Rigaud appealed to him for help, but only when Geoffrey finally stormed and burned Montreuil-Bellay, shackling Rigaud like a common felon, did the king intervene. He beseiged Arques in Normandy — where the count’s son was duke — and sacked Séez. He was soon made to realize that he was facing dangerous and resourceful opponents. Bernard of Clairvaux stepped in and Geoffrey and Louis agreed to let him arbitrate. Accordingly the count and his son, Henry FitzEm-press, rode to Paris bringing the miserable Rigaud with them, still in chains.

  They reached Paris in August 1151. Henry paid homage for his new duchy of Normandy and Louis received it, recognizing him as duke; but there was an unedifying wrangle over Rigaud. Bernard had had the count excommunicated for attacking Rigaud while the king was away on crusade and breaking ‘the truce of God’. He graciously offered to absolve Geoffrey if he would release Rigaud at once. To the saint’s angry astonishment the count refused, saying that he hoped God would not forgive him if imprisoning Rigaud had been a sin. Bernard prophesied an early and evil end for a man who could utter such blasphemy. Eventually Geoffrey became more reasonable and after his son had agreed to hand over most of the Vexin (on the Norman border) the two sides agreed on a peace settlement.

  Eleanor seems to have been very impressed by these two visitors. Geoffrey was a fine-looking man (his other nickname besides Plantagenet was ‘the Handsome’) and territorially he was almost as powerful as Louis. He had married the lady Matilda, widow of the emperor Henry V and daughter and heiress of Henry I of England: her cousin Stephen of Blois had usurped the throne, but her supporters were many and there was a good chance that her son by Geoffrey would one day become king. Gerald of Wales claims that Geoffrey made adulterous advances to queen Eleanor; but most chroniclers agree with William of Newburgh that she was more attracted by Geoffrey’s son, Henry. In the stern words of her Victorian biographer, Miss Strickland, ‘Eleanor acted with her usual disgusting levity in the advances she made to this youth’. But William of Newburgh says simply that the queen desired a marriage with the young duke on the grounds of compatibility, which is quite possible. The fact that Henry was eleven years her junior is irrelevant: his father was eleven years younger than his mother Matilda. And by now Louis was growing more and more difficult; Eleanor must daily have anticipated the end of her marriage. Indeed, in the light of what followed, it is more than likely that she reached some sort of secret understanding with Henry.

  Nevertheless it is almost certain that during the whole of her marriage she was faithful to Louis. Her reputation may well have suffered from speculation about so beautiful a woman — speculation superficially confirmed by her clothes and by her jokes.

  The catalyst that ended her marriage was St Bernard. Sure enough, his curse struck Geoffrey down within a matter of days. The journey back to Anjou was a hot one and on the way the count went for a swim in a little stream that ran into the Loire; the same night he was stricken by a fever and three days later, on 7 September, he died. Everyone must have remembered the saint’s prophecy. Now that Suger was dead, Bernard’s influence on king Louis was irresistible.

  St Bernard is an enigma. The holiness of the ‘last of the fathers of the church’ is undeniable. His concept of God was revolutionary in its humanity and tenderness, and he inspired thousands to follow him into one of the most austere forms of community life ever devised. He could be surprisingly kind to those who did not share his views, and condemned the persecution of the Jews. On the other hand he often showed a lack of charity, as in his destruction of Abelard. He was ruthless in implementing what he believed to be God’s will, which he interpreted with total assurance. It was almost certainly Bernard who ended Eleanor’s marriage.

  The saint had never lost his suspicions of Eleanor. The contrast between king and queen was obvious to everyone — the dévot Louis surrounded by monks, and the frivolous ‘wanton’ in the midst of her troubadours. Such a woman was a most unsuitable consort for an annointed monarch with a soul to save. Moreover it was essential for the Capetian monarchy that Louis should have a son and heir who could be crowned joint king to ensure a smooth succession when his father died. Like Suger, Bernard believed that it was God’s purpose that the Capetian dynasty should survive and triumph, but unlike Suger, he had no qualms about losing the queen’s dowry. Nor, whatever the pope might have said, had he any reservations about manipulating canon law in order to obtain an annulment. In the Middle Ages, annulments were given so freely that they amounted to a tacit system of divorce. As has been seen, consanguinity was a useful pretext.

  It was inevitable that Louis would lose Aquitaine if he repudiated his wife. He held it only as Eleanor’s consort, and she was extremely popular with its unruly barons, who could be relied on to fight for her against the king of France. He might have accused her of adultery and confiscated her fief, but adultery by a queen was treason and carried the death penalty, and after such an outrage Aquitaine would have been impossible to subdue. Some historians think that the great duchy constituted a potential millsto
ne around Louis’s neck. Professor Fawtier considers that the king had neither the men nor the money to rule it — ‘The attempt to keep order there would have exhausted the Capetian monarchy, backed only as it was by its incompletely pacified little royal domain’ — and that sooner or later Louis would have found himself embroiled in an exhausting war with his wife’s vassals. In support of this view it has to be admitted that he ruled the Ile de France only with difficulty and that he does not seem to have received any significant revenue from Aquitaine. On the other hand Louis and the Aquitainians had lived together peacefully since 1137, and to relinquish the duchy might well have added to the power of some hitherto unforeseen enemy — as indeed turned out to be the case. It would be an abdication that could halt the advance of the Capetian monarchy for ever.

  Finally Louis decided on an annulment, whatever the risks. One can guess at a long and agonized internal debate, although one may suspect with justice that there was strong pressure from St Bernard. Probably what eventually caused the king to make up his mind was the absence of an heir.

  The royal couple’s last enterprise together began after the departure from Paris of count Geoffrey and his son. They set out in September on a long progress through Aquitaine, accompanied by an imposing train of bishops and barons that included the archbishop of Bordeaux as well as the unwelcome Thierry Galeran. Christmas was kept at Limoges, and Candlemas at Saint-Jean d’Angély. It is evident that both Eleanor and Louis were anticipating separation in the near future, as throughout the progress French seneschals and castellans were replaced by Aquitainians. Then they returned to the king’s territory, to Beaugency.

  Here a council of the French clergy had been summoned. It met on 11 March 1152 under the presidency of the archbishop of Sens, primate of France. On 21 March the marriage of king Louis and queen Eleanor was pronounced null and void on the grounds that they were third cousins. It is said that the annulment was heartily approved by St Bernard, but some chroniclers report that pope Eugenius tried to forbid it. Unreliable sources suggest that the queen was accused of adultery but it is almost certain that this is untrue; the proceedings had obviously been carefully arranged beforehand with the agreement of both parties.

  In Les Annales d’Aquitaine the seventeenth-century historian Jean Bouchet claims that queen Eleanor was cast off. He describes how she waited in anguish outside the council chamber and collapsed when she heard the verdict, remaining in a faint for two hours, and how when she revived she defended herself in a passionate speech. This moving account is pure invention. It is quite clear that Eleanor was only too anxious for a separation and made no attempt to dispute the annulment, even though she had to give up her two little daughters.

  Eleanor quickly left Beaugency for Poitiers. But she was once again a fabulous heiress. At Blois, count Thibault — the son of Louis’s old enemy in the Champagne war — was so insistent in his courtship that she had to escape by night, taking a barge down the Loire to Tours. Here she learned that seventeen-year-old Geoffrey of Anjou, a younger brother of duke Henry of Normandy, was lying in ambush for her at the crossing of the little river Creuse at Port-de-Piles, no doubt with the intention of forcing her to marry him. Travelling by a little-used road, however, she at length reached Poitiers and her palace of the Maubergeon.

  Eleanor of Aquitaine: the effigy at Fontevrault. Photo Jean Feuirrie.

  Eleanor and her favourite son, Richard I. Archives Photographiques, Paris.

  5 Duchess of Normandy

  ‘Now she pays it.

  The misery of us, that are born great,

  We are forc’d to woo, because none dare woo us.’

  Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

  ‘… the duchess of Normandy, who was young and of great worth and understood courage and honour and liked songs in praise of her. The songs of Bernart [de Ventadour] pleased her and she took him for her guest and made him welcome. He was long at her court and fell in love with her, as she did with him. But while he was there, king Henry of England married her and took her from Normandy and led her away.’

  Raynouard, Choix des poésies originales des troubadours

  Eleanor had escaped from an unhappy and frustrating marriage, but — as was so painfully demonstrated during her journey home — found herself in an even more humiliating situation. This stately and masterful lady, who as queen of France had been accustomed to deference and respect, might now expect as unmarried heiress to Aquitaine to be seized at any moment and married at the point of the sword. She was once more what she had been when her father died — the quarry of every fortune hunter and robber baron.

  The only escape possible was remarriage to a man of her own choice. An English chronicler (Gervase of Canterbury) suggests that Eleanor dispatched envoys to Henry, duke of Normandy, to offer him her hand, but this is unlikely. What probably happened was that she sent secretly to Henry accepting an offer that he had made, perhaps in Paris the previous summer. Her vassals had already been summoned to meet her, ostensibly to consider military matters, and she was therefore able to ask for their approval of the match without delay. Ironically, although she was no less closely related to the duke than she was to Louis, the couple did not bother to obtain a papal dispensation (although in 1146 a proposed marriage between Henry and Eleanor’s daughter had been vetoed by St Bernard on the grounds of consanguinity). On Whit Sunday, 18 May 1152, eight weeks after the annulment of her first marriage, the duchess of Aquitaine was married to the duke of Normandy in the cathedral church of Saint-Pierre at Poitiers.

  After her ex-husband, Henry was unquestionably the most eligible bachelor in France. Besides Normandy he had inherited Maine, Anjou and Touraine from his father and he had a good chance of obtaining England as well. As has been seen, the fact that he was eleven years younger — he had been born in 1133 — was no obstacle. In person he was a big stocky man of enormous energy and physical strength, with a deep barrel chest and the bandy legs of a horseman. He had a large round head with a square freckled face, bulging blue-grey eyes, and close-cropped red hair and beard. He was carelessly dressed, blunt and unceremonious in manner and without any trace of his mother’s notorious arrogance. He was as energetic and restless as he was moody, constantly on horseback, moving endlessly from place to place. An expression amiable to the point of gentleness could change suddenly and terrifyingly, his face purple and his eyes shot with blood; there were astonishing outbursts when he would roll on the floor screaming and biting the rushes. He ate little and drank even less, his chief amusements being hunting and hawking. He was no less vigorous in mind than in body, and unusually well educated. (Twelfth-century magnates were often surprisingly literate: the duke’s father had learnt his military strategy by studying Vegetius’s De re militari.) Henry read and wrote Latin — which he spoke fluently in his hoarse, cracked voice — as well as French and Provencal, and is said to have had some knowledge of every tongue ‘from the coast of France to the river Jordan’. He would frequently withdraw to his chamber with a book. For all his vigour and intelligence, however, Eleanor can scarcely have realized that she was marrying one of the great men of her century.

  Eleanor no doubt thought that in marrying a much younger man she was obtaining a biddable husband who would let her keep her newly regained power. She was mistaken; but to begin with, the marriage between the eighteen-year-old duke and the twenty-nine-year-old duchess seems to have been happy enough. Henry was passionately in love with Eleanor’s mature beauty and intellect. As highly sexed as he was vigorous — to judge from his string of mistresses — he gave his wife all the children she wanted; and although he preferred scholars to troubadours, he shared at least some of her intellectual pursuits.

  Politically, Henry had taken a calculated risk in marrying Eleanor. The effort needed to keep Aquitaine and its aggressive baronage under control might well prove so exhausting as to hamper him in winning England. On the other hand, if she had taken someone else for her husband he would have been a constant threat to Anj
ou, which was separated from Poitou only by the river Loire. And Henry was never frightened of taking risks.

  Louis was horrified by the news. No doubt he had expected any prospective suitor of his former queen to ask his permission before marrying her. After all, Eleanor was his ward and Henry was his vassal, so they were legally bound to seek his leave. It was just the sort of callow misjudgment that Louis would make. Plainly he and his advisers were horrified by the tidings, realizing that they had made a terrible political blunder. Some of the outrage felt by the French court is echoed by the malicious lie recorded by a chronicler that Henry’s father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, had been Eleanor’s lover and for this reason had forbidden his son to marry her. At one stroke all abbot Suger’s worst forebodings had come to pass. Not only had the Capetian monarchy let Aquitaine slip from its fingers but the duchy had been snapped up by one of the king’s most formidable vassals. If Henry obtained England in addition, he would be the most powerful ruler in western Christendom.

  As usual Louis VII reacted violently and too late. Nevertheless he managed to assemble a dangerous-looking coalition. It included the king’s brother, the count of Dreux, whose lands bordered Normandy; the new count of Champagne; Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey, whom he had deprived of the four castles left to him by his father and who hoped to become count of Anjou in his place; and Eustace, count of Boulogne, who was king Stephen’s eldest son and heir, and Henry’s rival in the succession to the English throne. Quite apart from what they might take from the duke’s territory, these five intended to conquer Aquitaine and divide it between them. Henry, himself naive on this occasion, had not expected such a storm. He was busy on the Norman coast preparing to invade England when in June he heard that Louis was attacking his eastern borders. He rode to meet him at such a ferocious pace that many of his men’s horses foundered, and, when the French king retreated hastily, laid waste Dreux and then struck southward, capturing Geoffrey’s chief stronghold of Montsoreau and Geoffrey himself together with most of his supporters. Louis retired to his bed with a fever, worn out after only two months of fighting this alarming opponent, and agreed to a lengthy truce.