Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen
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Was Eleanor another empress Livia or was she the ‘woman beyond compare’ of Richard of Devizes? The most important hostile testimony is that of St Hugh of Lincoln, whose prophecy of the imminent end of the Plantagenet dynasty all but came true. This Carthusian bishop was not just an eccentric clairvoyant. On the contrary, he was a very practical saint who despised popularity, protected Jews, and defied in turn Henry II, Richard I and John — each of whom respected and liked him, even John. Far from being a misogynist like St Bernard, Hugh thoroughly enjoyed having pious ladies to dine with him. Yet Hugh regarded Eleanor as a wicked adulteress whose sin had left an appalling curse on her progeny, although in the same breath he could speak in the warmest terms of Louis VII, the husband who had cast her off. It is difficult to explain this apparent confusion in the saint’s mind. Perhaps he believed, mistakenly, that Louis had repudiated his queen because of adultery. A more sinister interpretation of his condemnation is that he thought he recognized some inherent evil in Eleanor.
It is reassuring that other contemporaries had a different opinion of her. Half a century later the chronicler Matthew Paris wrote of 1204, ‘In this year the noble queen Eleanor, a woman of admirable beauty and intelligence, died’. And Matthew had surely spoken with people who remembered her. As for her virtues, the good sisters of Fontevrault — who admittedly must have been somewhat biased — extolled their benefactress in their necrology, claiming that ‘in the conduct of her blameless life, she surpassed all the queens of the world’. No doubt they were thinking of the devout old lady whom they had known when she had spent her last years with them, not of the mother queen who, in her lust for power, had raised a vast international rebellion against her husband and turned his own children against him, who had made almost a lover out of her favourite son, and who had ruthlessly altered the succession to the Angevin empire. The nuns conveniently forgot the frivolous patroness of troubadours who had dared to laugh at St Bernard and the monks, the haughty, luxury-loving queen who had ridden in pomp through so many exotic capitals and who had even threatened a pope. All that was many years ago and the nuns may be forgiven; her life, though hardly a happy one, had been so long and varied that it was impossible for ordinary mortals to understand her, let alone to judge her. Certainly Eleanor’s love of Fontevrault and the years that she spent there are the best witness in her defence.
Eleanor of Aquitaine will always remain a fascinating enigma. Her elegant effigy still lies gracefully at Fontevrault, crowned and wimpled and holding a prayer book. She is between her estranged husband Henry II, who stole her inheritance and imprisoned her, and that dearest of all sons, Richard Coeur-de-lion. Nearby lie her daughter Joanna of Toulouse and her daughter-in-law Isabella of Angoulême. By the conventions of mediaeval art her marble face can scarcely be a natural likeness, but it is the face of an extraordinarily attractive woman.
Table of 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