Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  Despite the loyalty of the English, king Richard was anxious to return to his lands across the Channel, which he still loved best. After only a few weeks in England, having imposed even harsher taxes and sold yet more offices of state, he summoned his English knights — as many as one in every three — to follow him to France. On 22 April he left Winchester for Portsmouth, where he and his mother took ship, but only to be blown back by a fearful storm. Eventually it abated and on 12 May they were able to sail, with their fleet of one hundred vessels. The king had left England for the last time, although he was to reign for another five years. Nor would Eleanor herself ever return to England.

  The royal couple landed at Barfleur, to receive the same ecstatic welcome from the Normans that they had been given by the English. Their progress through Normandy took them to Caen and Bayeux and then to Lisieux. At Lisieux they went to the house of the archdeacon, John of Alençon, to spend the night. That evening, much to his embarrassment, the archdeacon was informed by a servant that count John was waiting at his door ‘in a state of abject penitence’.

  Philip of France had no use for ruined allies who had lost their lands, and the count had been brought very low. The prodigal son hoped that his mother might at least temper the wrath of his brother. The archdeacon went into Richard’s chamber, where the king was resting before supper, but was too nervous to speak. However Richard at once guessed that John was outside. ‘I know you have seen my brother’, he said; ‘he is wrong to be afraid — let him come in, without fear. After all, he is my brother.’ John entered, threw himself on the ground and crawled to the king’s feet, begging for forgiveness. ‘You are a mere child’, said Richard; ‘you have been ill advised and your counsellors shall pay for it.’ There was clearly an element of contempt in the king’s magnanimity: the ‘child’ was nearly thirty. Nevertheless Richard produced a fatted calf, in the shape of an enormous salmon that had just been presented to him by some loyal Norman, and ordered it to be cooked, telling John to make a good meal. The following year he gave him back Ireland, together with his county of Mortain and earldom of Gloucester, and also his honour of Eye. For the rest of the reign John remained loyal. In fact he owed his miraculous pardon to his mother: Roger of Howden makes it perfectly clear that it was due entirely to Eleanor’s pleading. As will be seen, her motives cannot have been wholly maternal.

  Richard wanted to return to the Holy Land as soon as possible. Unfortunately Philip II’s determination to destroy the Angevin empire made it out of the question, and the king had to spend the rest of his life in almost unceasing frontier warfare with the French. Eleanor was by now too old and infirm to take part in these campaigns, as she might well have done had she been younger. Nevertheless, she must have had full confidence that Richard, who had the reputation of being the best soldier in western Europe, would prove more than a match for Philip of France.

  Nor was her confidence misplaced. In June Richard hurled Philip out of Normandy, pursuing the French king with such speed that he had to hide in a roadside church. At the same time Richard restored order in Aquitaine, committing his usual atrocities when punishing rebellious barons, and also recovered eastern Touraine. Even if he did not regain all the territories that John had surrendered to the French, he had good reason for satisfaction when he concluded a twelve-month truce with Philip in November 1194.

  John was by now fighting for his brother with enthusiasm. In May at Evreux he had 300 prisoners decapitated and stuck their heads on stakes around the citadel in a vain attempt to frighten it into surrender. Even king Richard was horrified, and rebuked the count.

  The following summer the king’s former gaoler, the emperor Henry, proposed an alliance with Richard and sent him a golden crown as a token of his sincerity. He hoped to make France a vassal state of the empire and was considering a joint Anglo-German invasion. Hearing of these moves, Philip invaded Normandy once again. A meeting at Vaudreuil between the two kings ended in uproar when Philip accused Richard of breaking his word; the latter was so angry that he chased the Capetian for some miles. In the autumn Philip took Dieppe, burning the port and the English shipping in the harbour; Richard succeeded in capturing Issoudun in Berry. A new peace was then made, giving Philip the Vexin and the Auvergne, but Richard kept his gains.

  One beneficiary from the peace negotiations during 1196 was Richard’s former betrothed, Alice of France, who was still unmarried at thirty-three in an era when royal princesses usually became brides at twelve or thirteen. She had been moved from her prison at Rouen to various castles, in case of any attempt at rescue. Her half-brother Philip, moved by considerations of strategy rather than affection, at last obtained her release and married her to count William of Ponthieu, whose county lay between Flanders and the northern Plantagenet lands; he was a usefully placed ally should king Richard and Baldwin of Flanders try to join forces. But at least Alice had acquired a husband whose rank was worthy of her. One cannot but suspect that Eleanor’s withdrawal from affairs of state at this time had saved Alice from perpetual imprisonment.

  A marriage of which Eleanor almost certainly knew and approved in advance was that of her daughter Joanna, the widowed queen of Sicily. Toulouse had always evaded the Plantagenets, but its acquisition meant the completion of their French empire. Eleanor had some claim to be considered its rightful heiress, and long ago both her husbands had claimed it in her name. Raymond VI, who succeeded his father in 1195, was not a very promising husband. He had already been married several times and was excommunicated for abandoning one wife to take another. Now Richard persuaded him to take Joanna as his fourth bride, giving her Agen for her dowry. It was not a happy match, but little could be expected from a man so unchristian as to incarcerate a previous spouse in a house of Albigensian perfecti, a Manichaean monastery where strict austerities were practised. Raymond himself was far from austere, and kept a harem. Nevertheless Joanna bore him a son and heir, the future Raymond VII (who would one day be the victim of the Albigensian crusade, a holocaust that was to destroy Provençal civilization and the troubadours). Even so, Toulouse was a valuable ally.

  Probably the question that continued to worry Eleanor after Richard’s return was the succession. She appears to have developed an intense dislike for the duchess Constance, mother of the heir presumptive, Arthur of Brittany. The duchess was very different from even a northern Frenchwoman, though French was no doubt her first language; most of her Breton subjects still spoke their Celtic tongue. Her marriage to Geoffrey Plantagenet can hardly have been particularly happy in view of his sour, twisted nature, but Constance was to experience worse. When Geoffrey died, Henry II married her off to earl Ranulf of Chester, who promptly took the title of duke of Brittany, only to be chased out of the duchy by the Bretons after the old king died. In 1196, when Constance was on her way to Richard’s court, Ranulf seized her and imprisoned her in one of his castles. Eventually the couple reached some sort of agreement, but later they fell out again and there was a divorce in 1199; it was rumoured that the earl had been infuriated by count John’s lustful advances to her. Eleanor’s distaste for the duchess may be attributable to the fact that if Arthur succeeded, Constance, who was regent of Brittany, might reasonably expect to become regent of England and the entire Angevin empire as well; but there was almost certainly a personal element in her antagonism.

  It would be interesting to know more about Constance, but the chronicles tell us very little. She may well have been a woman of the same forceful stamp as Eleanor herself, for Constance too was an heiress who lost her inheritance through marriage and regained it through her son. Shakespeare’s characterization of her is astonishingly plausible, although it is based only on Holinshed’s muddled reading of unreliable chronicles. In King John he portrays a mother trying desperately to save her child from implacable enemies. We can be sure that ‘ambitious Constance’ recognized that Arthur’s very existence was a threat both to John and to Eleanor.

  The queen mother looked for an alternative he
ir. Revealingly, she ignored John, although he was her own son; plainly she knew him too well to trust him. Her choice fell on another grandson, Otto of Brunswick, Matilda’s child. In the spring of 1196, with Richard’s approval, he was made duke of Aquitaine. Indeed Otto may have been promised the succession to the Angevin empire in its entirety, including England. But Otto disqualified himself by being elected emperor. Eleanor had every reason to hope that Richard might live for many years yet, however — perhaps until long after she herself was dead.

  By the late 1190s it seemed that Eleanor’s trust in her favourite son had been justified. Admittedly he was living apart from Berengaria, who appears to have been made to live away from the court on her estates in Maine, but at least Eleanor had no cause for jealousy. Chroniclers testify to the fact that Richard was becoming positively respectable. He heard Mass each day with commendable devotion (although he would not take communion, from scruples over his hatred for king Philip), gave alms to the poor, treated the clergy with respect, and even began to restore the church plate seized to help pay for his ransom.

  Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that he retained the same cynicism about churchmen displayed by his mother in her prime. When the preacher Fulk of Neuilly accused him of begetting three shameless daughters, Pride, Avarice and Sensuality, Richard was ready with a retort worthy of William IX: ‘I give my daughter Pride to the Knights Templars, my daughter Avarice to the Cistercians, and my daughter Sensuality to the princes of the Church.’ No story illustrates more vividly how much he was a son after Eleanor’s heart, but, like her, he was no persecutor of clerics.

  Richard — ‘great one’, as she called him — was exactly the heir the queen mother wanted. With his gifts as a soldier and a statesman, he appeared certain to defeat Philip of France and to perpetuate the Angevin empire. But Eleanor now watched from a distance.

  15 Fontevrault

  ‘Divine inspiration made me wish to visit the holy convent of the nuns of Fontevrault.’

  A charter of queen Eleanor

  ‘O God, O my God, hear me also a widow.’

  The Book of Judith

  The foremost authority on Eleanor’s letters and charters, Dr Richardson, has shown that there is little documentary trace of her life between June 1194 and April 1199. In fact she had retired to her favourite religious house, the abbey of Fontevrault, near Chinon on the borders of Touraine and Anjou. Here she had come in moments of peace during the past, and now she returned, instead of going back to Poitiers. Here she plainly hoped to die. Her relationship with Fontevrault, on the banks of the river Vienne, reveals an unexpected and attractive side to the queen mother. It is the key to much of her personality in middle and old age.

  The abbey had come into being almost by accident. Towards the end of the eleventh century a wandering preacher from Britanny, Robert of Arbrissel, established a little community on a patch of land near a fountain — i.e. Fontevrault — building huts and a chapel. Men and women lived apart, the former cultivating the land, the latter leading a life of contemplative prayer. Meanwhile Robert himself continued his wandering and preaching, mainly in Anjou and Poitou. His chief concern was to be ‘above all a guide and a comfort to all who were desolate or who had gone astray’, according to his earliest biographer, Baudry of Bourgueil. Robert was such an attractive personality and his sermons were so inspiring that he drew more and more people to his community, especially ‘the poor, the sick, the incestuous, concubines, lepers, the weak and the aged’. It was a time when many new monastic orders were emerging. What made Fontevrault unusual was the number of women who joined it.

  Robert did not care where they came from. At Rouen he converted an entire brothel whose inmates followed him home. So large did his community become that he had to divide it, setting up other settlements. Fontevrault itself contained 300 women, as well as the men. Robert found many rich benefactors and was therefore able to build a great abbey at Fontevrault and dependent priories. He gave his flock a rule based on that of St Benedict, but with startling innovations. Each house was to be a double community of men and women — monks, lay brethren and nuns — although Robert regarded the latter as the most important. The head of the new order was to be a nun, the abbess of Fontevrault. She had to be a widow, because widows were both chaste and maternal and were accustomed to handling people and to running houses and managing property. The heads of the priories were also to be nuns. The rule made the monks and lay brothers completely subject to the abbess and her prioresses.

  When Robert lay dying in 1116 he said: ‘What I have built, I built for the sake of the nuns. I gave everything for them — my life, my ministry and my disciples.’ He wanted to help all female victims of society, especially those who had been ill treated by men. Moreover he wished to provide a refuge not only for poor women and prostitutes, but for great ladies as well. In his day, marriage to a high-born woman was the quickest way to rank and fortune and the surest means of building a dynasty, as queen Eleanor knew only too well. Men married heiresses and then cast them off to marry richer ones, which was why so many marriages were within forbidden degrees of consanguinity, which could be used later as grounds for divorce. And wives had no redress or escape if their husbands beat them or installed concubines.

  From the beginning, Robert separated his nuns into separate groups — lepers and prostitutes obviously required different treatment. The ladies, too, lived apart. They could become nuns, bringing their maids to be lay sisters, or they could simply live in the abbey in their own apartments; in either case they were able to retain something of their rank and status. In the words of a modern American historian, Amy Kelly, at Fontevrault ‘the hierarchies of the world were there respected, the commitment dowries regal, the dignities high, the preferments honourable’. In addition Robert ensured that the abbey should enjoy the highest social prestige and wield considerable influence by insisting that the abbess herself should belong to some great noble family. Indeed the second abbess was no less a personage than Matilda of Anjou, widow of William Atheling, the son of king Henry I of England, who had been drowned in the White Ship. Eleanor, who came to know her well, refers to her in documents as ‘my aunt’.

  Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter-in-law, Isabella of Angoulême: from a mural of about 1200 (discovered in 1964) in the Chapel of Sainte-Radegonde at Chinon. Cliché Doloire.

  Fontevrault – the twelfth-century kitchen and refectory. Photo Giraudon.

  Battered and ill-used wives from all over France flocked to this haven where they could recover their self-respect and dignity. Here they found sympathy and spiritual comfort. Among them were the two wives of Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, who fled to Fontevrault because of his outrageous behaviour. Another was Bertrada of Montfort, countess of Anjou and mistress of king Philip of France (the grandfather of Louis VII), who became a nun there and died from her austerities.

  The new order’s contribution was revolutionary in an age that had hitherto regarded women as being almost as evil as the devil himself; St Bernard once wrote that ‘to live with a woman without danger is more difficult than raising the dead to life’, and regarded noblewomen as the worst of all; he actually called his own sister ‘a clod of dung’. One has only to look at the serpentine temptresses of Romanesque carvings to realize how widespread was this fear and disgusted contempt among pious Christians of the period. In contrast Fontevrault consciously appealed to the scriptural example of the Virgin Mary and St John who took her into his house in obedience to the words of Jesus from the cross: ‘Woman, behold thy son!’ and, to John, ‘Behold thy mother.’ Symbolically, the churches of the order’s nuns were always dedicated to Our Lady and the oratories of the order’s monks to St John.

  Even in the twelfth century Fontevrault was widely recognized as playing an important part in improving the status of women and in defending their rights. Its whole inspiration publicly proclaimed their individuality and their value as human beings. Indeed the abbess or domina was probably int
ended by Robert to provide a religious counterpart to the lady or domna of the troubadours. Hitherto even mistresses had been seen as no more than sexual objects. Some literary historians (e.g. Reto Bezzola) credit no less cynical a hedonist than William IX with being converted to a new concept of womanhood by the example of Fontevrault; his early verse is sensual to the point of grossness, but in a later poem he has discovered the fascination of an unattainable Beatrice, too exalted to be possessed.

  Understandably, the order of Fontevrault became extremely popular. Ultimately it possessed one hundred dependent priories in France, together with three in England, which owed their foundation to Eleanor’s encouragement. Most of their nuns came from aristocratic families. Even in the eighteenth century Louis XV sent his daughters to Fontevrault to be educated. As Miss Kelly says, the mother abbey was an asylum for ‘ladies of rank whose worldly destinies were at an end, or the turbulent or merely inconvenient relicts of kings and princes and high barons, or the superfluity of princesses that embarrassed noble houses’.

  The ideals that inspired Fontevrault must have appealed deeply to Eleanor after her own experience of men. She too had been exploited and cast off. She had many friends and relatives among the nuns and would have known all about the abbey and its concept of a new and independent woman from a very early age. As has been seen, she endowed it as early as 1146, before she went on crusade.

  Furthermore, despite the frivolity of her early years and the misgivings of St Bernard and certain chroniclers, Eleanor was undoubtedly a devout Christian. It was not just that she approved of Fontevrault as a haven for her sex. She was plainly impressed by the fervency of its nuns and monks, by the discipline of its two strictly segregated cloisters; a monk could not enter the cloister of the nuns even to give a dying woman the last sacraments, and to be annointed she had to be carried into the abbey church. It is clear that Eleanor placed a high value on the prayers of the community.