Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  Eleanor herself was still the lady of many troubadours. Helen Waddell quotes what ‘is surely the work of a German student, haunted by a passing glimpse of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and perhaps as surely her slave as Bertran de Born’. He sings:

  Were the world all mine

  From the sea to the Rhine,

  I’d give it all

  If so be the queen of England

  Lay in my arms.

  However genuine, this naïve minnesinger can scarcely have been so impressive a conquest as Bertran de Born, who was still in his twenties in the 1160s. When not a gentle, sighing troubadour strumming on his lute, Bertran was a bloodthirsty robber-baron who drove his own brother out of the family castle of Altafort in the Dordogne. He was only happy when making verses or war. Later he became the bosom friend of the queen’s eldest son Henry, and was credited by some with leading him into rebellion. Indeed Dante placed him in hell for doing so:

  Sappi ch’io son Bertram dal Bornio quelli

  Che diedi al re giovane mai conforti.

  Io feci il padre e il figlio in sè ribelli.

  (Bertram dal Bornio, be it known, am I

  Who urged the young king to rebel.

  Father and son at enmity I set.)

  It may have been a fond memory of his adoration for Eleanor that caused Bertran to revolt.

  The courtiers of queen Eleanor’s unreal world at Poitiers dressed fantastically, as was fitting. ‘They have clothes of rich and rare materials, in colours chosen to match their moods’, the contemporary chronicler Geoffrey of Vigé tells us, ‘they flaunt slashed cloaks and flowing sleeves like hermits. Young men grow their hair long and wear shoes with pointed toes’. Geoffrey also adds that one might mistake the ladies for snakes, because of the enormously long trains that they drag after them. Moreover a precursor of the Rue de la Paix clearly existed in Eleanor’s Poitiers. Among suitable presents to give to a lady, André le Chapelain lists fine handkerchiefs, circlets of gold or silver, brooches, small looking glasses, purses, girdles, combs, sleeves, gloves, rings, caskets, and almost anything else that might be of use for her toilet or on her dressing table.

  Marie of Champagne was not the only great lady to support Eleanor at the court of Poitiers. There was also the queen’s other daughter by Louis VII, Alice of Blois, together with her niece (the countess of Flanders) and Ermengarde, viscountess of Narbonne. It was indeed a most regal court, and suitably it was visited by kings. In June 1172 Eleanor received both Alfonso II of Aragon and Sancho VI of Navarre — though for this she took her courtiers to Limoges.

  From time to time the queen saw her husband. She kept Christmas with Henry at Bures near Bayeux in 1170 and at Chinon in Touraine in 1172. He still insisted on retaining ultimate control of Aquitaine. He is known to have visited the duchy in 1170 and again early in 1173, governing personally and dispensing justice as though he were the duke. One can only guess at Eleanor’s fury: not even in her own land did she enjoy real power. But the king does not seem to have noticed any resentment on her part, or else he simply ignored it. It is more than probable that his wife concealed her anger. For, secretly, she was suborning the lords of Aquitaine and Poitou, making sure that their first loyalty was to their duchess and not to the king of England.

  9 Eleanor’s Sons

  ‘From the Devil they came and to the Devil they will go.’

  St Bernard

  ‘She is cunning past man’s thought.’

  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

  In January 1169, Henry II and Louis VII met at Montmirail in Maine to negotiate (it was hoped) a lasting peace settlement. For two years both kings had been engaged in a futile war that, while being both expensive and destructive, had gained no advantage for either. Among other matters an attempt was made to reconcile Henry with Thomas Becket, but both king and archbishop were incapable of compromise. The principal business, however, was to secure Louis’s agreement to Henry’s plans for a dynastic settlement that would divide the Angevin empire among his sons and enable him to ensure the local barons’ recognition of their right to succeed. The settlement would also help the English king to subdue rebellious vassals who, in almost every part of his French domains, had recently been so troublesome. Louis agreed readily, only too pleased to guarantee the future division of his overmighty neighbour’s empire. Eleanor, of course, was not consulted. But she must have seen in Montmirail her opportunity to overthrow her husband and to regain complete independence.

  The eldest surviving Plantagenet son, Henry, was to have England, Normandy, Maine and Anjou — his father’s own inheritance — together with the overlordship of Brittany. To ensure his undisputed succession, the Capetian custom was adopted of crowning the fifteen-year-old boy king in his father’s lifetime. The coronation took place on 24 May 1170 in Westminster Abbey and was performed by the archbishop of York (Thomas Becket having refused an invitation to return to England to do so). No pomp was lacking, the crown made by the London goldsmith William Cade costing £38 6s 0d — an enormous sum for the period. His wife Margaret — Louis’s daughter — was not crowned with him, a strange and insulting omission. At the coronation banquet the old king, as he was henceforth to be known, waited on the young king. The archbishop of York commented unctuously that no prince in all the world was waited on by a king. The youth replied, ‘It is not unfitting that the son of a mere count should wait on the son of a king’. The retort tells us a good deal about the young king, who was both conceited and ungrateful. From now on he had his own household, and contemporary writers refer to him as ‘Henry III’, an eloquent testimony as to how seriously they took his kingship. It is said that Eleanor was delighted by her son’s elevation. There was, it is clear, considerable affection between her and the young king, who sometimes visited Poitiers with his wife. No doubt the queen was already working to make him her ally against the old king.

  We know nothing about Eleanor’s relations with her children during their childhood. According to the custom of the age they would have been brought up away from her, first by foster-mothers and then in the households of trusted magnates, although she must have seen them all from time to time. Nevertheless it is possible that she saw more of Richard, the fourth child of her second marriage, and from a very early age, because — as the heir to Aquitaine from his cradle — he was the very centre of her hopes of regaining power. From the time of Montmirail at least, when he was still only twelve, he was Eleanor’s constant companion. In view of his later reputation for homosexuality, it is not too much to suppose that the queen was one of those excessively dominant mothers who transform their sons into little lovers; after leaving Henry she did not indulge in love affairs nor did she have any notably close male friends, and it is likely that Richard was the only man in her life and she the only woman in his.

  At Montmirail Louis both recognized Richard’s claim to Aquitaine and betrothed him to Alice, his daughter by his second marriage, who was sent to England to be brought up. No doubt Eleanor rejoiced when, in that same year of 1169, king Henry ordered that Richard be proclaimed count of Poitiers; and in the summer of the following year he was consecrated as count, and recognized as future duke of Aquitaine, in a series of splendid ceremonies. At Niort he was presented to the nobles of the region, who paid homage to him. At Poitiers in the cathedral of Saint-Hilaire, before his greatest vassals, he received from the city’s bishop and the archbishop of Bordeaux the holy lance and banner of Saint-Hilaire; he was also created abbot of Saint-Hilaire. There was a third ceremony at Limoges in the abbey of Saint-Martial, where the bishop of Limoges placed on his betrothal finger the ring of St Valerie, the Roman martyr who was the city’s patron saint. All these ceremonies were accompnied by oaths sworn on the gospels and by pontifical high Masses, followed by banquets and jousting. (Gervase of Canterbury and Geoffrey of Vigé are incorrect in saying that Richard was instituted as duke of Aquitaine as well as count of Poitiers; he did not receive Aquitaine until 1179.) Eleanor had good reason to rejoice. Despi
te his homosexuality Richard was to prove the strongest and most worthwhile of her sons.

  Geoffrey, the third surviving son, had been recognized by king Louis at Montmirail as heir to Brittany, which he would hold as a vassal of the king of England. As has been seen, he had acquired his claim to the duchy by his betrothal to the daughter of the deposed duke Conan. His position was strengthened by Conan’s death in 1170, when Henry annexed the former duke’s county of Penthièvre in Geoffrey’s name, and by the confiscation during the same year of the estates of the great Breton rebel Eudo de Porhoet. Geoffrey grew up to be one of the most evil of the Plantagenets, and once boasted that it was the tradition of his family for brother to hate brother and for a son to turn against his father. He too was to have no qualms about rebelling against Henry, which was all to Eleanor’s purpose. Like the young king, Geoffrey visited his mother’s court at Poitiers.

  The fourth son, John, received nothing at Montmirail. The king laughingly named him ‘Lackland’ but obviously meant to give him some great appanage in due course — much to the disquiet of his brothers, who feared that they would have to contribute towards it from their own territories.

  As for Eleanor’s daughters by Henry, Matilda married duke Henry of Saxony, one of the greatest of the German princes, in 1168; Eleanor was betrothed to Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1170; and Joanna, the youngest, married William II of Sicily in 1177. None of these girls played any part in their mother’s grand design.

  Meanwhile the affair of Thomas Becket finally blew up in Henry II’s face in 1170. Although the dispute had not been settled, and despite warnings, the archbishop insisted on returning to England where he was as noisily intransigent as ever. At his Christmas court at Bures in Normandy, where Eleanor was keeping him company, Henry cursed his maddening archbishop; perhaps he did not actually say, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’, but clearly he said something very like it. Four of his magnates — not mere knights — set out to do so, despite vain efforts to stop them by messengers whom the king sent in pursuit. On the night of Tuesday 29 December they hacked the archbishop to death in his own cathedral at Canterbury, deliberately spilling the brains out of his skull onto the pavement. The killing horrified all Christendom. Pope Alexander III would not allow Henry’s name to be mentioned in his presence for a week after hearing the news, Louis VII called him a ‘rebel against humanity’, and the count of Blois spoke of a ‘horrible … unparalleled crime’. Although Henry was not excommunicated and his kingdom was not laid under an interdict, he had to undergo many humiliations that culminated in 1174 with his being scourged at the archbishop’s tomb by the monks of Canterbury. Naturally his enemies, including Eleanor, believed that his power had been severely undermined.

  Moreover at this most inauspicious time the English king appeared to be over-extending his resources by attempting to conquer Ireland, the most barbarous land in Christendom. It was ruled by countless petty kinglets or chieftains, who paid a loose allegiance to five over-kings and an elected ‘high king’, in a society very like that which existed in the Scottish Highlands before 1746. Their principal occupation was fighting and cattle raiding, but they were usually incapable of uniting against a common foe. The only towns were a few seaports founded by the Vikings and peopled by their descendants, and the island’s sole wealth was its rich pastureland; much of the country was covered by impenetrable bog and forest. The only exports were wolfhounds and pine marten skins. For a brief period during the Dark Ages the Irish Church had been famed for its saints and scholars, but that was now a thing of long ago save for a few newly established Cistercian monasteries. Irish morals scandalized Christendom; bishops were frequently succeeded by their sons, and the native Brehon law recognized six sorts of marriage, most of them concubinage. The pope had almost no authority in this anarchic and savage land. Henry had contemplated invading it as early as 1155 and had obtained a grant of ‘lordship’ over Ireland from the English pope Adrian IV, whose own motive was to impose proper clerical discipline. For all its poverty and barbarity, its rains and mists, here plainly was another country for Normans to conquer, just as they had done in England and Sicily. From 1169 Norman marcher lords from Wales were operating in Ireland; in 1170 they captured Dublin, its richest town, and during the next year overran its eastern coast as far south as Waterford. King Henry had no desire to see the establishment of a new and independent Norman-Irish state that would not be subject to him. In October 1171, therefore, he landed near Waterford, remaining in Ireland until the following April and extorting homage from the Norman invaders and from many of the native kings. Although he never visited it again, he was henceforth to devote much time, effort and wealth to the conquest and settlement of Ireland.

  Henry’s domains now stretched across a second sea. His vassals were some of the most unruly and turbulent in Europe — fiery Occitanians, Poitevins and Angevins, dour Normans and English, and wild Bretons, Welsh and Irish. Hardly a day went by without rebellion in some corner of his ramshackle empire. Eleanor cannot be blamed for supposing that her husband had over-reached himself, and that a concerted revolt in as many areas as possible would bring the whole rickety structure of his power base crashing down. For such a revolt she required allies who had a genuine sense of grievance and who would band together in a carefully planned campaign. By 1173 the queen had them — her three eldest sons. She must have waited impatiently for them to grow old enough to join her.

  Henry, the young king, was now eighteen. He was tall and handsome, charming and generous, and useless — ‘a restless youth, born for the undoing of many’. He was unquestionably brave and energetic, and a superbly chivalrous knight; William Marshal, no mean authority, calls him ‘the beauty and flower of all Christian princes’. But he was hopelessly unstable, as inconstant ‘as wax’. Moreover, although the young king was famed for his generosity, he was ruinously extravagant, endlessly demanding money from his father, and always in debt and borrowing recklessly. Indeed Geoffrey of Vigé says bluntly that he was ‘not so much generous as prodigal’, and Robert of Torigny simply terms him ‘a spendthrift’. Admittedly his extravagance had a certain regal panache. Once he invited every knight in Normandy named William to dinner, and more than a hundred came. His unrestrained warmth of manner, caressing speech and wild liberality, together with his love of splendour, jousting and feasting, attracted a wide following of immature young men, the only one of any distinction being the heroic William Marshal. His protégés included that inveterate trouble-maker, Bertran de Born. Even the young king’s good qualities were spoilt by excess; he was so merciful that Gerald of Wales labels him ‘the shield of the wrongdoer’. The old king treated the young king with outward respect and was fond of him; in 1172 he accorded him the honour of a crown-wearing at Winchester, when his wife was consecrated queen. But although the young king was joint monarch with his father, he had no lands of his own and had to live on what he considered a shamefully inadequate allowance. The old king refused his request to let him have either England, Normandy or Anjou, and in his father’s absence England was ruled by a justiciar. Even the members of his household were chosen for him. The vain young king deeply resented what he regarded as his humiliating situation.

  Richard, count of Poitou, was an advanced sixteen, tall, handsome and reddish-haired like his elder brother, but stockier and stronger in build, a better horseman and (later) an infinitely better soldier. In character he was already quite different: bold, daring, harsh, with a violent and sometimes cruel streak, prone to fits of terrible Angevin rage, touchy and unforgiving. Gerald of Wales likens him to a hammer. Although good-looking, he had his father’s ferocious, bulging grey eyes. Unlike the young king he was bored by tournaments, although he had a natural and savage taste for real warfare in which, even at this early age, he showed no mercy to his adversaries. On the other hand, he had his mother’s love of music and poetry, wrote excellent songs in both the Poitevin dialect of French and Provencal and composed tunes for them, sang in cho
irs and enjoyed the company of troubadours. Later Bertran de Born was to become a close friend and gave him the Provencal nickname of Oc-e-no (yea-and-nay), though he could be single-minded enough. He had a respect and affection for his mother that was probably excessive, and no doubt deep sympathy for her wrongs, imagined or otherwise; but he had little love for his father. Indeed from his youth Richard was the most formidable of Eleanor’s sons; he, too, wanted more power and more independence.