Bernard softened immediately, and struck a deal with the distraught queen. According to the Vita Tertia, Fragments of a Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, by Galfredas Claras Valensis, the cleric told Eleanor, “My child, seek those things which make for peace. Cease to stir up the king against the Church and urge him to a better course of action. If you will promise to do this, I in my turn will promise to entreat the merciful Lord to grant you offspring.” His words had an immediate effect on Eleanor. Later that day, Louis and his rebellious vassal Count Theobald of Champagne signed a peace treaty, quite possibly due to Eleanor’s pressure on her husband. Soon, Eleanor became pregnant, bearing her first child, a daughter, Marie, in 1145. But because France was under Salic law, where only males could inherit the crown, Louis remained without a successor.
His soul was still tormented by the fiery debacle in the church at Vitry-sur-Marne. So, he seized his chance to make reparations when he received word that on Christmas Eve 1144, the Moslem Turks had captured Edessa, one of the four Christian states surrounding the Holy Land, comprising the region known to Europeans as Outremer.
Here was Louis’s chance to become a Crusader. Ignoring Abbé Suger’s advice to remain in France and continue trying to beget an heir, Louis took the Cross on Easter Sunday 1146. To the surprise of many, the adventurous Eleanor was right there with him. After a year of preparation, the Pope himself blessed this Second Crusade in June 1147, and God’s army of 100,000 strong began its long march toward Jerusalem. Baby Marie was left safely behind in France.
On March 19, 1148, Eleanor and Louis arrived in Antioch, another of the Outremer Christian states. Antioch’s prince was Eleanor’s thirty-six-year-old cousin, the handsome and brave, if somewhat impetuous, Raymond of Poitiers. Eleanor and Raymond spent hour after hour alone together, and in public they were always head-to-head in animated laughter and conversation in langue d’oc, their native tongue—the dialect spoken in southern France.
Louis, who understood none of it, as his mother tongue was the northern langue d’oeil, grew jealous and assumed that they were flirting outrageously, quietly wondering whether anything untoward was transpiring right under his nose. It was partly Louis’s envy that led to his refusal to aid Raymond in a preemptive strike against Edessa so that the Turks would not be tempted to invade Antioch as well—a strategic disagreement that further increased the rift between Louis and Eleanor. Louis had vowed not to wage war before he had cleansed his soul in Jerusalem. So Eleanor resolved to support Raymond on her own, threatening to remain behind in Antioch with her numerous vassals.
Eleanor and Louis argued bitterly over this issue. Louis reminded his queen that she was not only his vassal, but as his wife she was his property. Eleanor, bristling, brought out the heavy artillery, insisting that their marriage was legally invalid anyway, as they were too closely related in the eyes of the Church. She demanded a divorce.
Louis was just as aware of their degree of consanguinity, but he could not bear to lose Eleanor. For one thing, her immense holdings of land would revert to her possession and control, which would reduce his kingdom to its previous puny size and jeopardize its security. That rationale was a predictable one. But the king had another argument for hanging on to his wife for dear life: according to John of Salisbury, writing a few months later, in 1149, Louis “loved the Queen almost beyond reason.”
What to do, what to do? Once again, Louis listened to questionable counsel. His chaplains advised him to eliminate Raymond’s undue influence on the queen and assert his rights as her husband by abducting Eleanor and carrying her off to Jerusalem. Louis agreed to the scheme, but it was Eleanor’s reputation that suffered. The dramatic circumstances surrounding her hasty departure fueled rumors that would persist for centuries claiming that Louis had snatched her from an adulterous—and incestuous—affair with Prince Raymond of Antioch. Given their degree of consanguinity, the royal marriage was incestuous as well, although the couple had conveniently overlooked this detail for years!
Eleanor was infuriated by Louis’s ignominious treatment of her, and from that point on resolved to have as little to do with him as possible.
In 1148, at Christmas, a heavy-hearted Louis wrote to Abbé Suger from Jerusalem, informing him of his intention to seek a divorce from Eleanor as soon as he returned to France.
The royal estrangement dragged on into the spring. Louis’s Crusade had so far yielded nothing but tremendous loss of life and precious equipment. But another life would be forfeited that would strain the marriage even further.
After spending Easter in Jerusalem, Louis and Eleanor set sail for home—in separate ships. Eleanor’s vessel got caught in the middle of a naval battle between the Sicilians and the Byzantine Greeks, and for two months Louis had no news of his wife. When Eleanor landed safely in Sicily, she received news that the Turks had invaded Antioch after their departure and beheaded Raymond. Eleanor blamed Louis for his death.
On the Italian mainland, the royal couple met with the Pope, and each employed the pontiff as a personal marriage counselor. According to John of Salisbury, Louis told Pope Eugenius that he “loved the Queen passionately, in an almost childish way.” And Eleanor privately confided her doubts about the marriage’s validity because of the consanguinity issue, admitting to His Holiness that she and Louis no longer had sex. The Pope’s response was not only to reiterate his sanction of the royal marriage but to escort Eleanor and Louis to a lavish, sensuously appointed bed and encourage them to heed nature’s call. John of Salisbury wrote that the king was delighted, making amorous overtures to his queen “in an almost puerile fashion.” By the time they returned to France on November 11, 1149, Eleanor was pregnant.
But the ugly rumors of Eleanor’s alleged infidelity with Raymond preceded her, and not only did the French believe them, but they blamed her for the failure of the Second Crusade. Louis’s chaplains then persuaded him to remove any governmental power and authority from her hands.
In the latter half of 1150, Eleanor gave birth to another daughter, Alix. It was a huge disappointment to Louis and, as far as the queen was concerned, offered further proof that God disapproved of their marriage. After fourteen years of wedlock and only two girls to show for it, surely there must be a greater plan at work. Eleanor’s reiterated desire for a divorce was unwittingly aided by the French barons, who encouraged Louis to put her aside for the sake of the succession, and marry another (and less controversial) woman who would bear him sons.
The following summer, another catalyst for Eleanor’s divorce appeared on the horizon—or, more specifically, at court—in the persons of the handsome Count Geoffrey of Anjou, known as Geoffrey le Bel, and his son, the stocky, redheaded Henry, now Duke of Normandy.
Evidently, there was an instant undercurrent of sexual tension between the twenty-nine-year-old Eleanor and the eighteen-year-old Henry—the man destined to become Eleanor’s future husband and King Henry II of England. Days later, Eleanor obtained Louis’s consent to a divorce and the first steps were taken to annul their marriage. They embarked on a final trip to Aquitaine, where Louis’s officers were replaced by Eleanor’s, although she would remain Louis’s vassal.
Eleanor last saw Louis in September 1151. There were no tearful good-byes, even with little Marie and Alix, who, in accordance with French law, were left behind in Paris to be raised in their father’s court. Eleanor had lost custody of them and would not see them again.
On March 11, 1152, a synod of bishops convened to debate the validity of the royal marriage, and ten days later, with the approval of Pope Eugenius, the union was annulled on the grounds of consanguinity. During the Middle Ages, it was exceptionally rare for a woman to seek and receive a divorce, and when a noblewoman, even a queen, received her decree, her ex-husband usually shoved her into a convent.
But Eleanor had beaten the system. She was a free woman, and though no longer Queen of France, governed lands far vaster than the little kingdom on the Seine. She was now mistress of her own destiny. O
r was she? In reality, she was a prime target for kidnappers. If she were violated, she would have to wed her abductor and everything she owned from her body to her estates would become his, a dynamic that played itself out centuries later between Mary, Queen of Scots and the 4th Earl of Bothwell.
But Eleanor’s cunning and political savvy prevented her from becoming a victim. And although their divorce redrew the map of France and significantly altered the balance of power in the realm, Louis—though not without regret—got what he wanted out of the annulment as well. He was now free to marry again, and in the grand scheme of things, his eagerness to have a successor outweighed the loss of Aquitaine, Poitou, and Gascony.
Louis married Constance of Castile in 1154, but she died on October 4, 1160, after giving birth to their second daughter, Alys. Alys would grow up to become the mistress of King Henry II of England, who was at the time married to Eleanor of Aquitaine. At long last, Louis’s third wife, Adela of Champagne, bore him the son and heir he’d long desired on August 22, 1165. Fourteen years later, in 1179, the prince, who would rule France as Philip II Augustus, was crowned according to Capet tradition during his father’s lifetime—but just barely. Louis had suffered a paralytic stroke on August 26, which had effectively ended his reign, and was too ill to attend Philip’s coronation ceremony. He died on September 18, 1180, and was interred in the basilica of Saint-Denis outside Paris.
HENRY II 1133-1189
RULED ENGLAND: 1154-1189
and
ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE
married 1152-1189
“. . . with a glad heart . . . now . . . I am joined in wedlock to Henry, Duke of Normandy.”
—fragment of philanthropic charter granted by Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152
IT WAS A MEETING THAT WOULD CHANGE THEIR DESTINIES and have a profound effect on the balance of power in Europe. Henry Plantagenet, the eighteen-year-old Duke of Normandy, had been remiss in paying his homage to Louis VII, his overlord, so that his title could be formally recognized. So, in the summer of 1151, Henry accompanied his father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Poitou, to the French court.
Geoffrey had been summoned to Paris on charges of illegally imprisoning a king’s high officer, a crime for which Abbé Bernard of Clairvaux had excommunicated him. To the cynical Count of Poitou this ecclesiastical punishment meant nothing, but he was still expected to answer for his political actions to his sovereign lord. The unrepentant Geoffrey dragged his prisoner in irons through Louis’s Great Hall, and hotly refused to release him. Abbé Bernard, who was present to adjudicate the matter, then launched into one of his own famously fiery tirades, prophesying that Geoffrey’s blasphemy would condemn him to an untimely death.
During this heated exchange, Queen Eleanor grew intrigued by the restless pacing of Geoffrey’s teenage son, the muscular, gray-eyed, bull-necked Henry. His legs were bowed from so much time in the saddle. Like his dashing father, he affected the sartorial quirk of garnishing his hat with a sprig of the yellow common broom plant, known in Latin as planta genista—the genesis of the family name Plantagenet.
Geoffrey of Anjou had invaded Normandy in 1141 and by 1144 the duchy was his. In January 1150, he ceded it to his son Henry. Louis VII correctly perceived the ambitious and energetic young duke as a greater threat to his crown than his father was. Henry would also become the greatest threat to Louis’s marriage.
Eleanor found herself attracted on several levels to this freckled, testosterone-fueled teen who seemed to brim with promise and potential. Her desires were obvious and the chroniclers of her day were convinced that she had acted on them, and that they were the impetus for her divorce from Louis. William of Newburgh wrote that “. . . while she was still married to the King of the Franks, she had aspired to marriage with the Norman duke, whose manner of life suited better her own, and for this reason she desired and procured a divorce.” According to Walter Map, Eleanor “contrived a righteous annulment and married him.”
Giraldus Cambrensis was a bit more lurid, claiming that Eleanor “cast her unchaste eyes on Henry immediately on seeing him. . . .
It is related that Henry presumed to sleep adulterously with the Queen of France. . . . How could anything fortunate, I ask, emerge from these copulations?” Giraldus recorded an even more sensational bit of news, adding that Geoffrey “frequently forewarned his son” to stay away from the queen, adding that Geoffrey had forbidden “him in any wise to touch her, both because she was the wife of his lord and because he had known her himself.”
Although this claim has never been proven, Henry would give it credence when he considered divorcing Eleanor in the 1170s. True or not, it has certainly done much to enhance Eleanor’s legend as a medieval Jezebel. But in the light of day, political considerations trumped any qualms of conscience: a few days after Geoffrey’s theatrical stunt with his manacled prisoner and his subsequent show-down with Abbé Bernard, the count and his son returned to court absent all trace of their Plantagenet temper. They apologized for their former misbehavior and offense to their overlord, and con-tritely offered Louis the Vexin, a small but strategically placed territory on the border of France and Normandy. Louis, always anxious to increase his kingdom’s boundaries, accepted this “gift,” utterly ignorant of any behind-the-scenes passion or political machinations between Henry and Eleanor. He gave Henry the kiss of peace, which officially acknowledged him as Duke of Normandy, and the Angevin vassals departed Paris with a spring in their steps.
But within days, Geoffrey caught a chill en route to Anjou. Abbé Bernard’s malediction proved true; Geoffrey died on September 7, 1151. Henry was suddenly Count of Anjou as well as Duke of Normandy.
On March 11, 1152, the synod of bishops reviewing the validity of Eleanor’s marriage to Louis VII formally determined that the royals were indeed related within the proscribed degree of consanguinity. Eleanor had her divorce. And as soon as she reached Poitou, after successfully evading two different abductors, she sent word to Henry that she was now “available” and in effect summoned him to come and marry her.
That May, Henry rode to Poitiers and on the eighteenth of the month the couple were wed in the Romanesque Cathedral of Saint-Pierre.
One has to feel sorry for King Louis. Within weeks of a divorce he never really wanted, the woman he still loved gave herself to a younger, palpably virile man who happened to be his political archrival. By marrying Eleanor, Henry increased his holdings to an area roughly half the size of modern-day France. He also had a legitimate claim to the English throne through his mother, Matilda, the daughter and heir of the late Henry I.
However, the more land an overlord possessed, the greater the difficulty he had controlling it. This dynamic ended up benefiting Eleanor. Although he was perpetually on the road, Henry could not cover such a vast territory on his own, which permitted her to be a genuine coruler. Eleanor toured their lands collecting taxes, dispensing justice, granting charters, and using her own revenues to fund construction projects.
She was a happy newlywed. In reference to one of her philanthropic efforts, she wrote that she bestowed the funds “with a glad heart . . . now that I am joined in wedlock to Henry, Duke of Normandy.” And by the end of 1152, she was pregnant.
However, her marriage to Henry was destined to be one of the most turbulent in history. The spouses were too much alike, possessed of strong-willed, formidable personalities, which made for numerous unpleasant clashes. Henry had inherited his father’s legendary temper, which manifested itself in black rages and tantrums so intense that he was known to writhe on the floor and chew at the straw rushes.
He was also ostentatiously unfaithful to Eleanor. According to the contemporary chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis, “he was an open adulterer,” indulging his vast sexual appetite whenever it suited him, siring bastards with more than one mistress. Eleanor’s views regarding Henry’s illegitimate children—whom she raised with her own offspring—have not survived. But her reaction to Henry’s infidelities may have had
something to do with the creation of her own court, where music and poetry abounded. Minstrels and troubadours composed love songs to highborn women, who, within Eleanor’s miniscule civilization, were at the top of the food chain.
Henry, however, had little use for these frivolities. Raised in the north of France, he was unfamiliar with the cult of chivalry as a romantic ideal and felt threatened by Eleanor’s court of love and the deliberately seductive, impassioned lyrics of the troubadours. He was particularly unnerved by the attentions that the most renowned of them, Bernard de Ventadour, paid to his wife, and sent Bernard packing at the first opportunity.
On August 17, 1153, Eleanor gave birth to William, her first child by Henry. He was on a military campaign in England at the time, but returned to France the following April with the triumphant news that King Stephen, cousin to his mother, Matilda, had formally acknowledged him as his successor. Henry did not have to wait long to become King of England. In November 1154, as he was at home in France busily reducing a rebel vassal’s castle to rubble, Henry received news of Stephen’s death.
Eleanor was a queen once more. Their realm would now stretch from the Scottish border all the way to the Pyrenees.
Henry and Eleanor were crowned at Westminster Abbey on Sunday, December 19, 1154. And as they toured their new realm, Eleanor received the greatest civics lesson of her life. She discovered that there was no uniform system of laws from shire to shire; the same applied to weights and measures. Trial by combat or by ordeal was still popular in many villages. Seated beside her husband, Eleanor absorbed the workings of his keen legal mind as Henry dispensed justice like a circuit judge and enacted reforms to standardize regional discrepancies regarding calculations of measurement. Henry’s decisions were well considered and equally well respected, and during his reign trial by jury gradually replaced trial by ordeal. In time, Eleanor, too, gained a reputation as a learned and fair adjudicator.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 2
