Queen of the English

Snow had blotted the roof of the Tower of London and spread a ghostly white sheet over Billingsgate and Castle Baynard. Along the embankment by the Thames, the choking aroma of woodsmoke from bonfires drifted over the frozen river. From the manor house at Bermondsey, Eleanor could watch girls and boys skating on the river, shrieking their pleasure at the sun. Some made sleds from blocks of ice and were pulled along by their friends; others tied to their feet the shinbones of animals, and with poles that they struck against the ice for momentum, they were “propelled swift as a bird in flight or a bolt shot from an engine of war.” Around the entrance to Bermondsey hung the ribauz, those good-for-nothings who were always begging and plundering at the slightest provocation, and the king’s bailiffs periodically shouted them away in “English,” that queer Teutonic jargon spoken by the lower classes. Ever since Christmas, a constant stream of barons had been pouring into Bermondsey to discuss “the state of the realm and the restoration of peace” with their king, bringing with them their dogs, pet monkeys, parrots, and hawks. The Great Hall more nearly resembled a menagerie than a royal dwelling.

From the beginning, Eleanor felt ambivalent about her new land. England stirred in her a feeling of protectiveness, and in its hardworking people, level-headed and eager to reconcile liberty with order, she must have sensed a spirit akin to her own. Nevertheless, she who loved music and beauty, the gracious easy living that she knew so well, found none of it here. The civil war had ended, but its scars remained, and the memories of privations still cast their shadows over everyday life. Frivolity was not an attitude that came naturally to the English, nor did it appear to be one that might be induced in these sober tradesmen with their unpolished wives. Poetry they had little taste for, the etiquette of courtly love they would have greeted with open-mouthed gapes. Here was nothing of the silken charm of Aquitaine, of wit and romance, of troubadours wracked by containable passion for unattainable loves. While Henry had come to the throne with an abiding love and a practical working knowledge of the land he was to rule, Eleanor was too much a child of the south, too much a grandchild of William IX, ever to be completely at home in such a backwater of civilization, and in those early months of 1155 she must have felt alien indeed.

Perhaps the most striking fact about the first year of Henry’s reign was Eleanor’s utter lack of significance. Eagle though she may have appeared to her subjects, to the chroniclers she remained a cipher to be commented upon only for the standard female achievement—on February 28, 1155, she gave birth to her second son, who was christened Henry after his father and grandfather. Otherwise, the chronicles have nothing to say, and the reason, of course, may have been that Eleanor was content to spend her time tending her two infants, gossiping with her sister and Henry’s half sister, Emma, an illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey of Anjou. It is difficult, however, to imagine Eleanor voluntarily insulating herself in the women’s quarter at Bermondsey and bouncing babies on her lap, not because she lacked maternal instinct but because it was customary for upper-class women, and royalty especially, to hand over their infants to the care of a nurse almost immediately after birth. A more likely explanation for Eleanor’s seeming inactivity was that her husband, having located capable men to assist him, had no particular use for her administrative talents at this time.

Once the formality of the coronation was out of the way, Henry immediately set himself to the task of resuscitating the kingdom from a state of total decay. Not only were the national resources exhausted, but also the legal and administrative machinery of government had rusted to a standstill. Working in his favor was one factor: For the first time since the Conquest, a new king had succeeded to the throne without a competitor and with the good will of his subjects. Still, the work cut out for him was nothing less than the creation of order out of chaos, and it is understandable if he approached it with some anxiety. The most important post he had to fill was that of the chief justiciar, the person who would head the judicial system, supervise the routine matters of government, and act in the king’s place when he was out of the country. With a desire to show his subjects that he held no resentment toward those who had supported Stephen, that the past was past, he divided responsibility for this job between Richard of Luci, a man who had served King Stephen faithfully but who was also thoroughly familiar with the workings of governmental machinery, and Robert, earl of Leicester, who had been one of those barons to change his allegiance and come over to Henry during the campaign of 1153. As treasurer of the exchequer, Henry selected Nigel, bishop of Ely, and for his chancellor, accepting the recommendation of the archbishop of Canterbury, he agreed to take on Theobald’s archdeacon and protégé, Thomas Becket. Theobald had assured him that Becket was an able person, and although Henry had brought to England his mother’s chancellor, William de Vere, with whom he was well satisfied, he felt that it would be politic to accept Theobald’s suggestion. It certainly would not hurt to put himself in the Church’s good graces. The office of chancellor, important but lacking prestige, was mainly a secretarial position; it consisted of supervising the royal chapel, the collective name for the household clerks; heading the secretariat where the royal will was translated into charters, letters, and writs; and acting as custodian of the Great Seal. The appointment of a civil servant to handle his paperwork was not a decision that Henry pondered for long.

Thomas Becket had accompanied Archbishop Theobald to the coronation, and afterward he stuck close to his master’s side during the trip from Westminster Abbey to Bermondsey. If Eleanor failed to notice him at the coronation, she could not have avoided him during the Christmas court at Bermondsey, where the cleric was first brought to Henry’s attention as a prospective chancellor. Thomas was a slender, unusually tall man with dark hair, aquiline features, and hands so long and tapered that they would have looked well on a woman. Although he had a slight tendency to stutter, he spoke well, being one of those people with the facility for making complicated subjects seem plain to his listeners. Also notable were his intelligence, charm, and a gaiety of temperament, whether natural or assumed it was hard to tell. Whatever sparks of interest flew between Thomas and the Plantagenets at Bermondsey were solely on the part of Henry, who, always affable, seemed to take an immediate liking to the archdeacon and his cheerful badinage.

If the meeting at Bermondsey made little impression on Eleanor, it was the most momentous day in Thomas Becket’s experience. Born in London, the son of a prosperous Norman merchant, Thomas was brought up in middle-class respectability, educated at Merton Priory in Surrey, and had also studied in Paris while Eleanor had been queen of France: As his father, Gilbert Becket, prospered, he managed to acquire some property and also served a term as sheriff of London. Into his spacious house came rich young noblemen, one of whom taught the boy Thomas the aristocratic pleasures of hawking and hunting. His father’s affluence did not, evidently, endure, for by the time Thomas had grown to adulthood, his father was poor, his mother had died, and entertaining was no longer done in his home. With no career prospects on the horizon, he was obliged to work for three years as a clerk and accountant in the business of a kinsman, a dreary existence for an ambitious young man with a taste for elegance. Finally, two of his father’s friends recommended him to Archbishop Theobald, and Gilbert himself pulled strings by reminding the archbishop that long ago they had been neighbors in Normandy. As a result, Thomas was taken into Theobald’s household and given a place on his staff. During the ten years that followed, and despite the fact that he was twice dismissed and then reinstated, Thomas rose to a high place at Canterbury, where he became Theobald’s adviser, diplomatic courier, and general dogsbody. It was not until the autumn of 1154 that the archdeaconry of Canterbury fell vacant and Thomas had been appointed. Now, barely two months later, came the dazzling promotion to king’s chancellor.

That winter Eleanor saw little of her husband, who, she knew by now, hated to remain in one place longer than a week and sometimes grew restless within a matter of days. Before the end of January, he was off to clean up unfinished business from Stephen’s reign; first on his agenda was the demolition of unlicensed castles built illegally during Stephen’s lax rule and the ejection from the country of the hated Flemish mercenaries, whom Stephen had used to buttress his position. There still were, in fact, a few rebellious barons who remained loyal to the dead king, and now Henry showed them that he would tolerate no opposition. Marching on Suffolk and then York, he besieged one castle after another until he had brought the troublemakers to submission. He was away when his son was born in February but returned to London several weeks later. Wasting no time in celebration or relaxation, he immediately called a council of all those bishops and abbots who wished to have their charters renewed. That Eleanor did attempt to involve herself in affairs of state at this time is evident from the fact that her name appears as a witness, along with Richard of Luci and Thomas Becket, on charters granted to the canons of Holy Trinity and Christ Church. Two weeks later, she traveled with Henry to Wallingford, where the king had called together the barons and bishops of the realm to swear allegiance to his eldest son and, in case of William’s death, to Henry as his second heir. This must have been a jubilant occasion for the queen. Secure in the love of her powerful husband, the matriarch of a now solidly established dynasty, her position assured after her uncertainties in France, Eleanor, at thirty-three, was entering her prime. The attacks of melancholia that had oppressed her in the Île-de-France had evaporated in the April greenery of England; boredom had no chance of surfacing in this atmosphere, frenzied and vigorous, created by her youthful husband’s zealousness and his passionate addiction to movement and power.

As pleased with herself at this point as she undoubtedly was, she had no intention of remaining at Bermondsey, in her opinion a less than appropriate residence for the royal family. In the spring, she prevailed upon Henry to begin renovations on the dilapidated palace at Westminster. The assignment was turned over to Thomas Becket, who threw himself into the work of supervision with such zeal that between Easter and Whitsuntide the restoration was completed. In fifty days he accomplished a job that normally would have taken several years. So many workers were hired that they could barely hear one another speak, and, the chronicles tell us, the scene resembled the Tower of Babel.

In early June, then, Eleanor and her household traveled up the broad strand of the Thames to the hamlet of Charing, past the gardens and suburban villas of wealthy Londoners, to Westminster Palace. The plan of the great block of buildings was, in fact, two palaces joined into one. The new palace, the home of the royal family, was adjoined on the east by orchards, gardens, and thick woods, which extended down to the edge of the Thames; the old palace, lying within a separate enclosure to the south, was chiefly used for business offices of state officials and as living quarters for the resident courtiers. There was a spacious courtyard, which, whenever Henry happened to be in residence, would be forever thronged with valets polishing his hunting spears, falconers sunning their hooded birds on stone benches along the walls, the king’s shaggy wolfhounds, and an endless procession of clerks, sergeants, and men-at-arms, intent upon the king’s business. Everything considered, the palace lacked the elegance of others Eleanor had observed during her travels—there were no mirrors of polished steel, no carpets, no mother-of-pearl inlaid chairs—but it was large, functional, and a great deal more comfortable and regal than Bermondsey. Some of her lack of enthusiasm for Westminster may have had more to do with the man who restored it than with the buildings themselves.

Thomas’s efficiency notwithstanding, Eleanor soon found that there was more to Becket than had first met the eye, for the chancellor, so lately trodding the halls of Canterbury in his drab cleric’s gown, had been transformed within the space of a few months from a sparrow into a peacock. And this metamorphosis, fostered by the king himself, had been accomplished so swiftly that Eleanor had no choice but to deal with it as an established fact.

Roger of Hovedon, a royal clerk, wrote sourly of the intimate relationship between Henry and his chancellor, commenting that the king “bestowed upon him many revenues, both ecclesiastical and of a secular nature, and received him so much into his esteem and familiarity that throughout the kingdom, there was none his equal, save the king alone.” In Eleanor’s mind, the king had only one equal, and as his consort, it should have been herself. With reasons that ran closer to the bone than mere jealousy, she was both angry and resentful at the unusual turn in the relationship between the king and his chancellor. Henry had embraced him with such affection, one could even say passion, that they might have been taken for soul mates. They became inseparable: “The King and Becket played together like little boys of the same age, at the court, in church, in assemblies, in riding.” They were together when Henry resided in London and when he traveled through the country; they hawked and hunted, ate together, even caroused together, although the chaste and sober Thomas did not participate in Henry’s wenching. This curious behavior, which would be highly suspect today, surprised Henry’s contemporaries, but at the same time they read into it no deeper meanings. Outwardly, Thomas appeared more regal than the king. In contrast to his master, a man who “wears leggings without any cross-wrappings,” whose “caps have no elegance,” and who “wears the first clothes that come to hand,” Thomas had so many silk cloaks that he was rarely seen in the same outfit twice. Displaying a self-made man’s eagerness for the trappings of status and rank, he preened like a grand vizier, a fact that neither escaped nor distressed Henry. He found it a source of pleasure and sometimes enormous amusement. Various anecdotes were later collected by Becket’s friends to demonstrate his intimacy with the king, such as this one by William Fitz Stephen. One cold day the two men were riding through the streets of London, when Henry noticed an old man in a ragged coat coming toward them.

“Do you see that man?” asked the king.

“Yes,” replied Thomas. “I see him.”

“How poor he is, how frail, and how scantily clad. Would it not be an act of charity to give him a thick warm cloak?”

Becket, not yet following Henry’s train of thought, readily agreed. “It would indeed; and right that you should attend to it, my king.”

Whereupon Henry lunged over and playfully tried to pull the chancellor’s cloak of scarlet cloth and gray fur from his shoulders. When the startled Becket resisted, the two of them played tug-of-war with the cape until their horseplay threatened to tumble both of them from their horses. “At last the chancellor reluctantly allowed the king to overcome him, and suffered him to pull the cape from his shoulder and give it to the poor man.”

What Fitz Stephen neglects to mention is that Becket had dozens of capes just as fine.

Like a man with a new, adored mistress, Henry could not do enough for Becket. The riches that passed through the chancellor’s hands were enormous, and almost daily Henry seemed to heap new honors upon him. He kept a residence of his own, paid for by the king, where there was open house every day, his table welcoming men of every rank, from visiting foreign dignitaries to ordinary knights. There was no stinting.

He ordered his hall to be strewn every day with fresh straw or hay in winter, and with green rushes or leaves in summer, so that the host of knights who could not find room on the benches might sit on a clean and wholesome floor without soiling their precious clothes and fine underwear. His board was resplendent with gold and silver vessels and abounded in dainty dishes and precious wines, so that whenever food or drink was commended by its rarity, no price was too high to deter his agents from purchasing it.

The chancellor’s personal brand of hospitality was as gracious as his menu was lavish. If we can believe the chroniclers, there was grace in his every gesture, refinement in his every word and action. He played the perfect host, supervising the smallest detail of domestic service, noting the position of each guest, inquiring for the absent, and if a man modestly took a lower place than his rank demanded, Thomas would have him reseated properly. So sumptuous was his establishment, so much the center of all that was going on in London, that Henry himself was known to ride his horse into Thomas’s hall as he sat at dinner. Leaping over the table, he would sit down amid the courtiers in their finery and demand to be fed. But Henry was no fool, and above and beyond his love for Becket, there was another reason why he permitted his secretary to play king. Certain aspects of kingship bored him: Keeping a splendid court, extending hospitality to visitors, impressing foreign rulers, in fact all the pomp and ceremony associated with monarchy were chores on which he disdained to waste his time and which he willingly shifted to Becket.

To Eleanor’s great chagrin, the court over which she should have presided and which no woman in Europe knew better how to conduct, had somehow slipped through her fingers and drifted down the Thames to Thomas Becket’s splendid mansion. Visiting dignitaries who should have come to pay their respects to the queen were instead taking their meals and exchanging elegant chitchat with the chancellor, and even the king himself seemed to prefer Becket’s company to her own. Whether or not she admitted it, Becket, so amusing and sociable, was better able to handle the king’s moods than she. Like the doting mother of a temperamental child, Thomas could sense a storm coming before it arrived; he knew how to ward off Henry’s unaccountable—and accountable—rages, gentle him along until he’d soothed his master into good humor once more. Standing on the sidelines at Westminster, Eleanor watched it all with detachment and made no attempt to compete. She was too experienced a woman to make an issue of her husband’s infatuation with Becket, no matter how much she may have personally loathed the man, and she affected to notice nothing in the hope that their attachment would wear itself out in time.

In general, Eleanor was not overly fond of clerics, and the virginal Thomas, whose celibacy was unnecessary, since he had never taken priestly orders, impressed her as the worst kind of prude and hypocrite. Contemporaries, noting that in youth Becket had taken a vow of chastity from which he had never deviated, did not seem to find it unusual that he feared intimate relations with women, nor did any of them, friend or enemy, ever impute to him homosexual leanings, which of course does not mean that he did not have them. He did not seem to dislike women, although the evidence we have eight hundred years later to prove that he did is scant. It was said that he adored his mother, “taking her as his guide in all his ways, as his patroness in life, and placing all his trust in her, after Christ.” And in a letter he wrote later in life to a nun named Idonea, he encouraged her to rely on female strength, citing Scriptural references to “the courage of a woman when men failed, leaders were terrified and the priests had fled.” Despite his almost feminist rhetoric, he did not like the queen any more than she did him, but any open show of hostility would have been unthinkable. As a cleric, he probably inclined toward the Church’s view of her, that she was a “loose” woman, who had divorced and remarried under highly suspicious circumstances. He had heard the tattle about her frivolous behavior in Paris and her reputed infidelity at Antioch and undoubtedly received an earful of gossip from his friend John of Salisbury, who had observed her firsthand while she was seeking Pope Eugenius’s approval for a divorce.

If Eleanor resented the honors Henry bestowed so prodigiously upon his chancellor, she seemed to have adopted a mask of indifference to his growing wealth and power. By virtue of the fact that he was constantly at Henry’s side, she had ample opportunities to observe the man, and her resentment toward the manner in which he had usurped her place would not totally have clouded her objectivity nor prevented her from making a sharp analysis of his motives. Like everyone else, she could see how much Henry adored Thomas, but what would have interested her far more were Thomas’s feelings for her husband. Behind the chancellor’s open, easy friendliness, did she detect hints of insincerity? In off moments, when Thomas let down his guard, did she catch some message in his eyes that spelled out less worthy emotions—that the chancellorship was a highly lucrative job and nothing more, that befriending Henry was a necessary, if tedious, requirement for keeping that powerful position? It is tempting to imagine that she sensed there would be no need of her interference, that Becket himself would be the architect of his own ruin.

For that matter, Thomas was not her only rival for the king’s time and attention. As she had discovered by now, Henry was a notoriously unfaithful husband. As king, infidelity was his privilege and prerogative, one which he would make use of all his life. He took his pleasure among the trollops along the Thames; he scouted amusing taverns, where he picked up women; in his travels around the country, his retinue swarmed with “court prostitutes” and waferers, the makers of thin sweet cakes, who had a reputation for being pimps. Sometime after he and Eleanor arrived in England, she became aware of the existence of his illegitimate son, Geoffrey, the son of the prostitute Ykenai, and also another infant William, whose surname is recorded as Longspee or Longsword, and whose mother was probably also of low birth. The circumstances under which Geoffrey came to her attention have not been recorded—perhaps the child’s mother died—but early in the reign, Henry recognized the boy as his son and brought him to live at Westminster, where he was placed under Eleanor’s care. Why she tolerated the presence of Geoffrey in the royal household is anybody’s guess. Perhaps she felt that Geoffrey, despite his unwholesome lineage, had done her no harm and, as Henry’s son, deserved to be well treated; perhaps she wanted to impress Henry with his good fortune at having a wife who would treat his bastard like her own legitimate children. Most likely, however, the decision was Henry’s, and she had no choice in the matter. In addition to Geoffrey, he had many other bastards, she knew not how many. Passing through a village, he would sleep with a girl once, get her with child, and then forget all about her. If this facet of her lusty husband’s nature caused her any pain, it would have been beneath her royal dignity to express it.

In September, Eleanor moved her household to Winchester, joining Henry, who, in the company of Becket, had been away nearly the entire summer, chasing fox and deer in the New Forest and other royal preserves. “He delighted beyond measure in birds of prey,” wrote Gerald of Wales, “especially when in flight, and in hounds pursuing wild beasts by their keen scent, both for their resonant and harmonious voices and for their swift running. Would he had given himself as much to his devotions as he did to the chase!” Now, after several months of relaxation, the king was ready to return to business. On September 29, which was Michaelmas and the traditional time of year for receiving reports from the exchequer, Henry was anxious to review the crown’s revenues for the first nine months of his reign. On this occasion, however, he called together a council of his barons in order to introduce a plan he had been mulling over during the summer. This was not the first time Eleanor had heard him talk about conquering Ireland, and considering Henry’s insatiable appetite for land, an appetite she saw no reason to curb, she may have encouraged him. If so, any influence she may have had was immediately dispelled by the presence of her mother-in-law. Living in semiretirement in Rouen, devoting herself to pious works and the management of Henry’s Continental provinces, Matilda had maintained a strictly hands-off policy in regard to the English, and although no one could accuse her of meddling, she did surreptitiously counsel her son from time to time. On this, her first and last visit to England after Henry became king, Matilda firmly shoved Eleanor still further into the background. At Winchester, she dominated the council, immediately opposing Henry’s plan to invade Ireland and give it to his youngest brother, William. In her opinion, Ireland, poor and barbaric, was not worth the trouble of conquering, but a more overriding objection lay behind her advice. She brought to Henry’s attention the alarming information that his brother, Geoffrey, discontent with his inheritance, was claiming (and probably correctly) that his father had meant Henry to relinquish Anjou once he had succeeded to the throne of England. Since it was clear to him that Henry had no intention of abiding by their father’s wishes, he was stocking his castles for war, and Matilda, whose shrewd old eyes were rarely fooled, saw that Henry stood in danger of losing one of his mainland estates.

While Henry and Matilda put their heads together over the embarrassing problem of Geoffrey, Eleanor was far from supine. If she could not establish her authority as a sovereign in England, at least she might reap some of the benefits of queenship by having an income of her own. To this end, she used this meeting of the exchequer to declare her financial independence from her husband and introduce an innovation, the payment of queen’s gold. No consort before Eleanor, or after her for that matter, had access to her own financial resources. Although Eleanor received an allowance for her expenses from the treasury, and the pipe rolls are full of entries documenting such payments, she now instituted a method by which all payments to the king must be accompanied by a further payment to the queen. “Whoever promises a hundred or two hundred marks to the King is thereby indebted to the Queen in one mark of gold for 100 marks of silver, and so on.” It is obvious that Eleanor carefully thought out her ingenious idea before proposing it. For instance, she had no intention of leaving her income to chance, nor would she rely on her husband or Richard of Luci to collect her queen’s gold: at future meetings of the exchequer. she would send her own specially appointed officers to handle her collections. “Observe too,” commented the chronicler, “that though the King may refund part or all of a debt owed the crown, it will be for the Queen to decide about her share, and without her consent nothing owing to her can be refunded.”

With Matilda’s departure, Henry and Eleanor lingered at Winchester throughout the autumn and remained there to celebrate Christmas. These months were a period of inactivity. Eleanor had become pregnant again, and Henry, lacking battles to fight in England, brooded about his menacing brother. In the end, he decided that after the holiday he would cross the Channel to deal personally with Geoffrey. This would have been an ideal opportunity for Eleanor to visit Aquitaine, but such a trip did not, evidently, accord with Henry’s plans. During his absence, England would be officially governed by Richard of Luci, but at the same time he promised Eleanor an active part in the government, even though he was unwilling to appoint her regent. These dollops of executive responsibility that Henry would dole out on occasion were not so much done to assuage Eleanor’s desire for authority but rather for reasons of his own self-interest. His empire, too large to supervise personally, could not have been ruled without some delegation of authority. Never fully trusting his hired assistants during the early part of his reign, Henry much preferred to leave a member of his family on the scene. Eleanor he trusted, Eleanor was industrious, and he must have been aware that she knew how to rule as well as any man he had appointed to office.

The second year of the reign opened with the queen in full command. In retrospect, it would prove to be a tranquil year, one without history, because the chroniclers do not record a single event of any consequence. For the first time, Eleanor had an opportunity to travel about on her own, and she began to develop a grudging kind of affection for the land, so different from her beloved Aquitaine. In the twelfth century, England was still covered with mile upon mile of dense forest, where wolves and wild boars could be hunted, but there were also huge open spaces of moor and fenland, unpunctuated save for the muddy tracks that passed for roads. The queen’s retinue could be seen toiling over the green hills, through valleys where sheep and cattle grazed and where rye, barley, and wheat were cultivated in strips, through roofed and spired cities surrounded by their thick walls, past slumbering villages with thatched huts and, in the distance, a monastery or grim castle frowning down on the countryside. During the winter and spring Eleanor traveled extensively and lived on a more than comfortable scale, running up expenditures of more than £350, a considerable sum for the age. Normally, only Richard of Luci had authority to order payments from the exchequer in Henry’s absence, but many of the writs authorizing payment during this period were signed by the queen herself, an indication of Henry’s trust in her.

Although the English tended to be suspicious of foreigners, especially a foreigner with a reputation like Eleanor’s, they discovered that the Eagle was more than a glamorous personality. Actually, the sight of the queen dispensing justice and conducting the affairs of the realm surprised no one, for England was full of competent women who spent their time running estates, fighting lawsuits, even standing sieges when their husbands were absent. There was a constantly recurring need for wives to take their husbands’ places, and when a man was called away on business or on a military expedition, it was the wife who managed the manor or fief. A goodly share of the business Eleanor did during her travels was no doubt with members of her own sex. Working with Richard of Luci and her own chancellor, Matthew, she dispensed justice through a stream of writs, some of which still survive:

Eleanor, queen of the English, etc. to John fitz Ralf, sheriff of London, greeting. The monks of Reading have complained to me that they have been unjustly disseised of certain lands in London.... I therefore order that you enquire without delay whether this is so and if you find out that it is true, reseise the monks. Unless you do this, the king’s justice shall do it for we will in no way suffer that the monks lose unjustly anything that belongs to them. Farewell.

With Henry and Becket away, Eleanor found herself in a position where she could do much as she liked. Significantly, we hear no reports of her court resembling any that she had presided over in the past; there were no poets, no troubadours, no sumptuous feasts a la Becket, in fact no gaiety to speak of, only sobriety and hard work. The pipe rolls show, however, that her personal standard of living remained high, her elegant tastes unchanged, and her family well cared for. There are expenditures for candles and incense, allowances for her two children, even an entry for the purchase of a baby carriage. With her she had Petronilla and her two brothers, all of whom she supported in generous style. During her first four years in England, the rolls show thirty-six entries indicating exchequer payments to her half brother William alone, as well as liberal allowances for Petronilla’s wine. Neither did Eleanor care for the forebears of Courage, Watney’s, and Whitbread; she disdained ale as an uncivilized beverage, much preferring the full-bodied wines of her homeland, and thus began the ever increasing importation of the wines of Bordeaux. Perhaps at this time she had built along Thames Street her own dock, Queenhithe, where the ships of Aquitaine tied up. Queenhithe, adjoining Vintners’ quay, was a curved basin that cut deeply into the riverbank. Guarding the entrance to this prominent wharfing space was a gate that could be closed when necessary and a gatehouse tower. Years later, visitors would still consider it one of the most interesting sights in London.

While Eleanor was proving herself a highly efficient sovereign, Henry was having more difficulty than he had anticipated in handling his brother. Geoffrey’s claims to Anjou and Maine were excellent, but what he failed to consider was that Henry never gave up any land he once acquired, and the loss of this territory, lying between Normandy and Aquitaine, would cut the two duchies off from each other. After a stormy meeting at which they failed to come to terms, Geoffrey sped back to his castle of Chinon with Henry and his army in hot pursuit. In the end, “now humbled and penitent,” he was stripped of his castles and forced to forfeit all claims to Anjou and Maine and content himself intead with a promise of an annuity amounting to one thousand pounds sterling and two thousand pounds Angevin (one Angevin pound was worth about one-fourth of an English pound). At the time, this settlement may have sounded generous to Geoffrey, but he had no way of knowing the worthlessness of Henry’s promises. In the two following years he received a total of only eighty pounds.

While Henry was fighting his brother in Anjou, Eleanor was fighting for the life of their two-year-old son, William, in England. Whether the child had been in poor health for some time or whether he succumbed to a passing fever is unknown. Poor sanitary conditions, combined with a primitive state of medicine, were sufficient cause for sudden death, and the lives of children, especially vulnerable, were often ended by smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and dysentery. The death of the young was part of the natural order of life, and even in the case of a prince, no cause of death was given, none requested. Although people of the twelfth century felt an immense resignation in the face of death, they were by no means indifferent to the loss of their children. The pain of losing their firstborn son would have deeply hurt both Eleanor and Henry. The little prince was buried in Reading Abbey, at the feet of his great-grandfather Henry I.

In June, still mourning for her son, Eleanor gave birth to her third child by Henry, a girl whom she named Matilda in honor of her mother-in-law. That summer she lost all interest in remaining in England; the reins of power had grown burdensome, and she wanted nothing better than to return to her homeland. In July, within weeks of Matilda’s birth, Eleanor packed up her children and household, withdrew funds from the exchequer and, whether or not Henry approved, crossed the Channel to Normandy. By August 29 she was reunited with her husband at Saumur, in Anjou, and in October the entire family traveled back to Aquitaine. Henry agreed to this southern progress more to please Eleanor and mitigate her bereavement than from any inclination of his own. Moreover, it was becoming increasingly clear to the queen that, far from sharing her love of the south, he regarded it as a source of irritation and wished to spend as little time there as possible. In England, “swords were beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks, and none now girded himself to battle” but none of his policies, none of his carefully devised instruments of government, worked with Eleanor’s vassals. The region’s natural anarchy, comparable to the disorders that had beset France 150 years earlier under Hugh Capet, offended Henry’s every instinct for law and order. Louis Capet had been unable to rule it—his officials could not keep even a modicum of order—and if Henry had wondered whether he could do better, he was not long left in doubt. The ducal authority of Eleanor’s forebears, that long line of Williams, had been acceptable to the southern counts and viscounts only so long as it remained ineffective, as fortunately or unfortunately it nearly always was. In Poitiers and Bordeaux, the Williams had maintained estates and fortresses, but in the rest of the vast region, authority rested in the hands of the local lords, whose word stood for law in their respective neighborhoods. The various subdivisions of the duchy professed to have nothing in common, save a long tradition of mutual enmity—the Gascons mistrusted the Poitevins, the Poitevins despised the people of Limoges. For that matter, in 1156 about the one thing Eleanor’s vassals could agree upon was their dislike of Henry Plantagenet and his annoying attempts to introduce centralized government.

While Eleanor’s liege men joyously received their duchess with troubadours and pretty speeches, they treated Henry, at best, as if he were merely a titular consort, at worst an object of contempt. As he had demonstrated at Limoges only a few months after their marriage, nothing could work him into a rage faster than the Aquitainian nobles, whose insolence and intractability he believed proverbial.

Henry’s legendary tantrums were generally attributed to his demon ancestors, that is, they were excused as falling beyond the range of his control. But people do not get into rages in which they scream and bite the furniture because they can’t help it. Under certain conditions, such as delirium due to illness or extreme intoxication, a person may lose all control, but these are exceptional instances. In a normal state, people are responsible for their behavior, and Henry, normally, was a responsible person. His fits of anger were nearly always a form of blackmail in that he performed in the presence of an audience for the purpose of gaining some goal. In early childhood he had perfected his act in hate-filled castles, where his mother and father had quarreled and screamed. His outbursts, done for effect, relieved him, but they also allowed him to get his way. It had worked in the nursery, and it continued to work when he grew up.

Even in the first months of her marriage, then, Eleanor had been aware of the spectacularly poor beginning her husband had made with her subjects, and she knew her people well enough to predict that Henry could look forward to a difficult task in introducing Anglo-Norman concepts of government.

In her assessment of the situation, Eleanor had been right. Even minor barons refused their feudal duties to Henry, and the oaths of homage he forced from them were of little practical value. That fall, however, as they made their progress through Poitou, Henry seemed determined to show them that he would tolerate no further defiance. In Limoges, he exercised his feudal rights by making the young heir to the viscountship his ward and then turning over the government to two Normans. In Poitou he unceremoniously ejected the viscount of Thouars from his lands and destroyed his castle, ostensibly for having aided Geoffrey Plantagenet in his recent rebellion but in truth because he found the viscount a troublesome vassal. He wished to leave no doubts in the minds of the southern nobles that he would assert his ducal rights, no matter how many castles he must raze, and in this he appeared to be successful. As the royal family traveled south to hold their Christmas court in Bordeaux, Eleanor’s vassals came forth to offer homage to Henry as well as the two children, but an indication of how little he trusted their word is evident from the fact that he took hostages to ensure their fidelity.

In this depressing and unstable atmosphere, it may have seemed to Eleanor that she had lost Aquitaine forever. In some ways. her marriage to Henry and her ever-growing family (she had become pregnant again in December) had been made at a great price; the political realities of the situation were now coming home to her as she acknowledged Aquitaine as a place where she might never live again, at least not with Henry Plantagenet. Beyond that, her domains were a source of friction between them, for she did not completely agree with Henry’s policies. In theory, she heartily approved of the concepts of centralized government, which she had seen operate successfully in England, Normandy, and Anjou, but in practice, she had little hope of their acceptance in her own land, where the autonomy of the barons was traditional. Moreover, Henry’s policy of appointing foreigners to key government posts only exacerbated opposition. Eleanor had complete trust in her uncle, Ralph de Faye, and felt content for him to remain her deputy, but Henry viewed Ralph’s supervision as ineffective, and by Henry’s standards, it undoubtedly was. Eleanor must have suspected that the only way in which Henry could maintain his policies was by incessant war with her vassals or the constant presence of either Henry or herself. Henry had no intention of relocating in Aquitaine, nor would he permit Eleanor to return on a permanent basis. And by December he was already agitating for her return to England, where he had more urgent need of her services.

However reluctant to leave the south, Eleanor was back in London by February 1157. Henry had not accompanied her and the children, partly because he remained unsatisfied as to the security of his Continental possessions, partly because he still did not trust Geoffrey. When he finally joined her after Easter, it was not for long, because immediately he began planning an expedition against the Welsh.

Owain Gwynedd, prince of North Wales and a perennial trouble-maker, had taken advantage of King Stephen’s laxity to push his way steadily eastward into England until, by 1157, he was threatening to capture the city of Chester. As far as Henry was concerned, the Welsh were a minor nuisance whom he had been able to place at the bottom of his priorities list; now, with both England and the mainland at peace, he was no longer content to leave the Welsh situation in this unsatisfactory state. While Eleanor supervised the routine business of government, Henry assembled an army and a fleet, hired archers from Shropshire, and ordered supplies of grain, cheese, and sixty casks of wine from Poitou.

Toward the end of July, he started out from Chester, working his way along the river Dee toward Rhuddlan, where he intended to join forces with his fleet. Before he had proceeded many miles, however, he realized that the Welsh might be more than he had bargained for. Despite his considerable experience in warfare, he had never before encountered fighters like the men of North Wales, who, evidently, had not heard of chivalry or rules of war. Essentially guerrillas, they never fought on level ground if there were forests or mountains about; they disdained niceties such as armor and the etiquette of capturing and ransoming knights. Instead, they cut off their enemies’ heads. Owain’s forces fell upon the English with such ferocity that the royal standard toppled to the ground, and Henry himself was believed dead. In the end, after sustaining heavy losses, Henry only just escaped with his life and managed to reach Rhuddlan and his navy. At that point, the king had had enough of the Welsh. Even though North Wales was by no means subdued, he established a truce with Owain and, Welsh encroachment into his kingdom checked for the moment, hurried back to Chester.

Immediately, Henry embarked on the next project on his agenda—a tour of England that would take him into every corner of his kingdom. Without returning to London, he summoned his entire court to join him at Chester. Becket, Richard of Luci, Robert of Leicester, and a host of minor officials hurried north, but Eleanor, eight months pregnant, remained behind at Westminster. In the last week of August, Henry began moving south through Warwickshire to Malmesbury, Windsor, Woodstock, and Oxford. Eleanor may have been feeling neglected, and no doubt she had been thoroughly frightened by Henry’s near death, for suddenly, with the birth of her child imminent, she left the palace and hastened to Oxford, where she joined the court caravan. Her husband’s conscientiousness in visiting every hamlet in England was all very well, but there must have been times when she was not content to languish, alone and pregnant. On September 8, at Beaumont Palace, just within the city gates of Oxford, she gave birth to another son, and the pipe rolls recorded an expenditure of twenty shillings for the lying-in. The child was christened Richard, although why this particular name was selected is not clear, since there had been no Richards in either the queen’s or the king’s immediate families. Perhaps the boy was named for Richard of Luci, whom both of them respected. A woman of Saint Albans, Hodierna, was chosen as nurse, and she cared for him together with her own son, who had been born on the same day. Hodierna and the infants may possibly have joined the royal progress, but it is more likely that Eleanor, so fearfully conscious of the high risks of infancy after William’s death, may have felt reluctant to expose Richard to the ardors of travel at so tender an age.

There is no question that she had a special feeling about this son from the outset, making it quite clear to Henry that Richard would be her heir and designating him as the future duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou as she had done with her dead son. A prophecy attributed to Merlin the Magician, whose anonymous predictions were generally regarded as a foreshadowing of the destinies of Henry II and his family, focused pointedly on this powerfully close relationship between Eleanor and her third-born son: “The eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third nesting.” Those who made it their business to interpret prophecies declared that the eagle could only be divorced Eleanor “because she spread out her wings over two realms, France and England” and that her third nesting must be Richard, who “strove in all things to bring glory to his mother’s name.” Bending the facts to fit, the chroniclers conveniently overlooked one thing: While Richard was indeed Eleanor’s third son, he was her sixth child. Daughters, evidently, did not count, either with the wizards or their interpreters.

During the next year, Eleanor and Henry would travel, at a conservative estimate, over 3,500 miles, and even though the medieval nobility took for granted a peripatetic mode of life, with frequent moves from castle to castle, this distance was beyond the ordinary. On the orderly, well-disciplined chevauchees of Eleanor’s father and ex-husband, everything proceeded according to rule. The itinerary was planned in advance, its stages duly announced and strictly adhered to so that every subject who had business with the king knew exactly when and where to find him. Every member of the royal party, from the chancellor and chaplain to the porters and laundresses, knew when the retinue would arrive and depart. Eleanor’s own chevauchées through England and Aquitaine hewed to a precise schedule, with the early part of the day devoted to business meetings and audiences, the later to socializing. A progress, no matter the country, had always been an exciting experience for Eleanor, and some of her happiest memories were her childhood travels. Touring with Henry, however, proved to be an entirely different matter and one that her contemporaries likened to a passage through the underworld.

When Henry promised to spend the day in a certain place, even if he had ordered his herald to publicly proclaim his intention, Eleanor could be quite sure that he would suddenly change his mind and decide to leave the town at daybreak. Then pandemonium would break out, with people rushing about as if they were insane, beating their packhorses and driving mulecarts into one another. Those who had been bled the previous night or who had taken a laxative were compelled to join the exodus regardless of their physical distress or be left behind. In vain did the courtiers protest their discomfort, for the word consideration did not exist in Henry’s vocabulary, at least not on business trips. If, on the other hand, he announced that he would set out early the next morning, Eleanor took it for granted that he would sleep until noon, while the loaded sumpter horses stood waiting with their burdens and the court prostitutes and the vintners took advantage of the delay to do a bit of business. Finally, the enormous royal train, numbering over 250 persons, would straggle down the highroad, but where it might stop next, no one ever knew. “When our courtiers had gone ahead almost the whole day’s ride,” wrote the royal clerk Peter of Blois,

the king would turn aside to some other place which had perhaps one single dwelling with accommodation for himself and no one else. I hardly dare say it, but I believe that in truth he took a delight in seeing what a fix he put us in. After wandering some three or four miles in an unknown wood, and often in the dark, we thought ourselves lucky if we stumbled upon some filthy hovel. There were often a sharp and bitter argument about a mere hut, and swords were drawn for possession of lodgings which pigs would have shunned.

Henry’s way of conducting the government by fits and starts bewildered his courtiers and vexed his queen, even though she must have understood that his unpredictable movements did not always spring from mere caprice or perversity. He always had a reason, usually known only to himself, but nonetheless there was method to his disorganization. When he dragged them in one day over a distance that should have taken three or four, Eleanor saw that it was to forestall some bureaucratic disaster; when he made unscheduled stops, it was to catch his officials unawares and check if they were attending properly to their duties. Still, his management of everyday business was not terribly efficient. “He was slow in settling the business of subjects, whence it happened that many, before their affairs were settled, died or departed from him dejected and empty-handed.”

Physical comforts were unimportant to Henry. But even though “the discomforts of dust and mud he suffered patiently.” others cursed and complained about “the miseries of court life” throughout the entire tour. For Eleanor, the racket and disorder, the weariness of constant travel, were bad enough, but the meals were the worst trial of all. The bread was half-baked, the fish four days old, the wine sour or thick or greasy and always reeking of pitch from the cask. There were nights when she was served wine so muddy that she had to close her eyes and filter the liquid through clenched teeth. The meat, half-cooked, was tainted and foul, and, as Peter of Blois vividly remarks, they had to “fill our bellies with carrion and become graves for sundry corpses.” There was nothing, evidently, that Eleanor could do to improve the court’s incredibly low standard of living. Despite her capacity for roughing it, she was very particular in her domestic habits. Nevertheless, everyone, the fastidious queen included, resigned himself sooner or later.

By December, the royal progress was back in the north of England, and Christmas court was held in Lincoln. The new year of 1158 opened in the far northern reaches of the country, where Henry insisted on inspecting the garrisons of castles he had taken from the Scots. In mid-January, they began to perambulate down through the center of the island, through Yorkshire, then into Nottinghamshire, where Eleanor and Henry stopped at their royal residences of Blyth and Nottingham, and finally into Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. By Easter they were in Worcester, where Henry devised a novel idea: He decided that he and the queen would renounce their crowns. The trappings of royalty had always meant a great deal to Eleanor; the elaborate pageants at Christmas and Easter, the solemn placing of the crown upon her head, the formal processions into church, and the ceremonies surrounding the king and queen’s offering and communion were highly gratifying. Nevertheless, at the offertory after Easter Mass, she and Henry laid their crowns upon the altar, vowing never to wear them again. Henry was pleased by the gesture, Eleanor no doubt less so. That year of touring with her husband must have been a disheartening, although enlightening, experience. Nothing had turned out as she expected. Long accustomed to luxury, she who had doted on gracious living, fine wines, and exquisite victuals had now spent eight months under conditions so vile that a peasant would have balked, and now she no longer had even a crown to show for it. Her feelings of discomfort were no doubt maximized during this period, because after Christmas she found herself pregnant again, for the fifth time in six years.

In the following months the court toured through Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Carlisle. Toward the end of July, they reached Winchester, where, fatigued and nervous after their long months of the road, they disbanded. When Henry departed for the Continent in the second week of August, Eleanor could not have been terribly sorry to see him go. She was eight months pregnant, and if she had planned on a rest, it was not forthcoming. Back at Westminster, which now must have appeared the most magnificent palace in the world, she immersed herself in work again. A writ issued in favor of Malmesbury Abbey and dated at this period reveals her as having viceregal powers, meaning that she was serving as coregent with Richard of Luci. On September 23, 1158, without fuss or fanfare and almost seeming to be an afterthought, she gave birth to another son, Geoffrey, and immediately went back to work. According to the pipe rolls, a considerable amount of business was conducted in the queen’s court that autumn, some of it, evidently, requiring her to leave London. She traveled through Hampshire, Kent, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Devonshire, and we know that on November 29 she was in the south of England, at Salisbury, because she issued a judgment on behalf of Matilda, countess dowager of Chester, as well as a certificate confirming a quit-claim. There was no time to think of troubadours or poetry, only trials to be concluded and orders to be dispatched “by writ of the king from Overseas.” By this time she had proved herself capable of replacing her husband in every way, and she had accomplished more than he was capable of; she had peopled Westminster with three male heirs.

In later years it would be suggested that every unpleasant trait exhibited by her sons must have been due to the manner in which she raised them. To establish the unfairness in such a charge, one only has to look at Eleanor’s activities during her childrens’ infancies to understand that she had small role in their upbringing. There were nurses to feed her children, comfort them when they cried, teach them how to speak, dose them with medicines when necessary, even chew their meat before they had teeth. If Eleanor was a remote figure, Henry was even worse in this respect, for he was rarely at home, and when he was, he had little time or inclination for romping with toddlers. The discipline, which was a medieval father’s primary duty, the scoldings, beatings, and admonitions to show “no glad cheer lest the child wax proud,” he largely ignored. At the same time, however, his children were never far from his thoughts, which may have been what Gerald of Wales meant when he wrote that “on his legitimate children he lavished in their childhood more than a father’s affection but in their more advanced years he looked askance at them after the manner of a stepfather.” It is true that he and Eleanor spoiled their children in their formative years, but not necessarily with physical affection or attention. Henry, especially, dreamed immense dreams on behalf of his offspring, planning for them glorious futures that would reflect on the family and, not so incidentally, extend the power of the Angevin empire. Family, empire, children—these three were all that mattered to Henry and, as time passed, to Eleanor as well. Between them, they had created an empire as well as a dynasty to accompany it; their children would be the most fortunate youngsters in the world. Even as early as 1158, politics for Eleanor and Henry had come to mean a family affair and the children a means of extending their political influence.

Sometime during the early portion of their royal progress in 1157, Henry had concocted a scheme of such audacity that probably only his mind could have conceived it. There had been talk of Louis Capet and probably more than a little mirth over the fact that Louis’s second wife had proved as inept as Eleanor in producing an heir for the French throne. In the four years since Constance of Castile had wed Louis, she had given birth to only one child, a girl named Marguerite, and Louis had been heard to grumble about his alarming superfluity of daughters. Aside from the obvious irony of Eleanor now having two sons and her former husband none, it occurred to Henry that perhaps Louis would never be able to sire an heir. Therefore, he boldly proposed to marry his eldest son to Louis’s new daughter, a stroke of diplomacy that, he hoped, would bring France into the Angevin empire and one day give young Henry the crowns of both England and France.

In view of Louis’s feelings about the parents of Prince Henry, broaching this outrageous idea to him required a considerable amount of tact and delicacy, not to mention nerve. Certainly no mention could be made of the possibility that he might never have a son; the negotiations must be conducted on a more impersonal level, such as Henry’s desire for harmonious relations between the two states. Nor could the mission be undertaken by Henry and certainly not by Eleanor. There remained only Henry’s alter ego, Thomas Becket, a man who possessed the style and diplomatic talent to carry it off.

In the spring of 1157, the chancellor had been reprieved from the barbarities of touring with Henry and dispatched to Paris with an entourage designed and choreographed to overwhelm both Louis and his court. Becket’s trip may have been Henry’s idea, but its details and execution could have been invented by no one but the queen and performed by none other than Thomas Becket. In one respect, Eleanor and Thomas were not so different; they were both adept at staging splendid shows. Collaborators for once, they created a pageant that would leave the Franks gaping in wonder, and it is almost comic to imagine the two of them, sitting in a hovel “pigs would have shunned,” dreaming up a farce that would convince Louis of England’s wealth and persuade him to give up his daughter to a man and woman he hated. When Becket’s embassy rattled across the cobbles of Paris in June 1158, people streamed from their houses to watch him go by. Two hundred and fifty footmen singing Welsh and English songs led the procession, and behind them followed the chancellor’s hounds and greyhounds, led on leashes by their keepers. There were “dogs and birds of every sort that kings and rich men use,” not only falcons but goshawks and sparrow hawks. Eight great wagons, each of them drawn by five horses, were laden with the chancellor’s belongings, and two carried English beer “made from a decoction of grain in water, in iron-bound kegs, to give to the French who marveled at that kind of a liquid, a healthful drink indeed, clear, of the colour of wine, and more pleasant to the taste.” Each wagon was guarded by chained mastiffs and by “a stout lad in a new tunic,” each horse carried a monkey on its back. Behind the wagons came twenty-eight packhorses carrying money, books, chests of gold and silver plate, and the chancellor’s chapel. Finally, as if all this might not be sufficient to stupefy the Parisians, there marched the chancellor’s personal retinue—two hundred squires, knights, clerks, stewards and lesser servants, and the sons of nobles. “All these men and all their followers shone in new holiday attire, each according to his station.” And last of all, surrounded by a few of his intimates, rode the king’s chancellor himself. To the Franks, he looked like a king: certainly, he was dressed like one, and in his chests he had brought twenty-four changes of clothing “whose texture mocks the purple dyes of Tyre,” apparel that he planned to distribute among various influential men in Paris.

Never in their lives could the Franks recall an embassy of such magnificence, and they asked each other who this man Becket could be.

When they learned that he was only a servant of the English king, they said, “Wonderful indeed is this King of the English, whose chancellor comes in such great fashion.” Eleanor could not have hoped for a more satisfactory response if she herself had put the words in their mouths.

In view of this ostentatious display of English wealth, it would have taken powerful extrasensory perception on Louis Capet’s part to guess that his former wife was not living like a Byzantine empress. Becket’s mission to France may have been a state affair, but Eleanor meant it to convey a personal message to Louis; she wanted to show him how far and how high she had come without him. He was a loser, she a winner, a perhaps cruel but common enough emotion among the divorced of any era.

One might think that Louis would have seen through this nonsense or have felt offended by such obvious showing off. But precisely the opposite seems to have happened. Perhaps he was just as bedazzled as his subjects, because he outdid himself as a host. He arranged for the embassy to be lodged in a new hall built by the Templars, the only one in the city spacious enough to accommodate so large a crowd of visitors. He also ordered the markets of Paris closed so that his guests would not be tempted to spend a penny in his capital, but Becket, who had instructions to give instead of take, sent his stewards into the suburbs to buy provisions just the same. The one-upsmanship mushroomed to absurd heights: Louis and his nobles entertained the chancellor’s party at a magnificent feast, but the chancellor, not to be outdone, entertained Louis at an even more sumptuous banquet. Years afterward, the Franks were still talking about how Becket had paid 100s. sterling for a single dish of eels. Spending with the abandon of a man on an unlimited expense account, which is precisely what he had, Becket distributed gifts all over Paris—clothing, dogs. falcons, silver plate, and, of course, those barrels of English beer. In the student quarter, where he had once lived in obscurity during the time of Peter Abelard, he fêted the scholars and their teachers and paid the debts of English students. When it came time for departure, his chests and carts stood empty, but he triumphantly carried back to England the answer for which he had come—Louis’s consent to the betrothal.

For this reason, after the tour had disbanded in the late summer of 1158, Henry had sent Eleanor back to Westminster to tend the kingdom while he rushed to the Continent to arrange the details of the royal alliance. He met with Louis near Gisors, in the Vexin, an appropriate conference site because of the schemes percolating in his fertile mind. In the fateful summer during which he had met Eleanor, it will be recalled, his father gave up the Norman Vexin to Louis as the price of Henry’s recognition as duke of Normandy. There was no region Henry coveted more than this buffer zone between Normandy and the Île-de-France, and he had never regarded its loss as anything but temporary. Now he proposed that Louis dower his daughter with the Vexin and its castles. Since young Henry was only three and Marguerite less than a year, there could be no marriage for at least a decade, and in the meantime, France was to retain control of the Vexin. Louis had no objections, and the meeting ended on a friendly note. Just one detail remained: the transference of the infant Marguerite to Henry’s possession so that she might be brought up, as was customary, with his family until old enough to be married. In September, Henry visited Paris for the first time in seven years, and considering the interim hostility between the two kings, he received a royal welcome from Louis and Constance. Henry’s entrance into the city was in marked contrast to Becket’s. He came as himself, simply dressed with only a few servingmen, playing the role of humble vassal to his liege lord. If there was a touch of hypocrisy here, it went unnoticed, for Louis, responding in kind, played the role dearest to himé&—the monk—and escorted Henry on a tour of Parisian churches, standing happily to one side as Henry distributed large sums of money to the monks.

It was, apparently, a time of remarkable harmony between the two kings, even though the occasion was overcast by the invisible, but palpable, presence of Eleanor. She had not been invited to Paris, of course, nor had Henry ever suggested bringing her. Such a three-way confrontation between the two kings and the woman who had had them both would have been in the height of bad taste, although one suspects that Eleanor might have enjoyed it. Certainly, the men avoided any open discussion of the queen, but finally, although indirectly, she entered the negotiations. Louis, surprisingly agreeable to every term Henry presented, balked at the thought of his daughter being reared by his ex-wife. Indeed, he flatly refused to hear of it. He did not regret retaining custody of her two daughters—how unfeminine and headstrong, how like their mother they might have turned out—nor did he regret their being raised by his pious second queen, who knew the value of docility in a female. Now he had no intention of turning over his third daughter to, in his opinion, an unfit guardian like Eleanor. Slightly annoyed but unwilling to see the alliance collapse over a minor detail, Henry suggested as an alternative that Marguerite be placed in the household of his chief justice for Normandy, Robert of Newburgh, whose castle was located near the French border. Since Newburgh was known to be a man of unimpeachable character and exceptional piety, Louis seemed mollified, and Henry was able to leave Paris with the baby. Throughout the autumn, the mood of conciliation between the Capets and the Plantagenets continued. In November, Louis decided to make a pilgrimage to Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy and requested permission to pass through Henry’s domains. Not only was it granted, but Henry himself escorted Louis to the abbey high above the sea, hearing Mass with him and dining spartanly in the refectory with the monks. Together in that silent abbey, with only the rush of the tide as background music, they would never be closer, and afterward, Louis was overheard to remark, to the astonishment of his retinue, that he knew of no man so thoroughly lovable as the king of England. After visiting his daughter and approving arrangements for her care, he returned to Paris laden with gifts and the distinct impression that the difficulties between France and England had been mended. It was an impression that would not last for long.

In London, Eleanor had followed developments on the Continent between her present and former husbands with interest and possibly a touch of amusement. Whatever other emotions she may have had at this time, she had good reason to feel gratified. There was peace at home and abroad. The quarrel sparked by her remarriage had been patched, and now her eldest son stood an excellent chance of someday wearing Louis’s crown. In England the year 1158, marked by nothing more important than a new issue of coinage, was closing amid general tranquility. Well satisfied with her administration of the country, assured that every situation remained under control, Eleanor left England in the steady hands of Robert of Leicester and crossed the Channel to celebrate Christmas with Henry at Cherbourg.

Domestically as well as politically, the Christmas court was a happy one. With another son added to their family, with their domains in peace and perfect order and the future so promising that it took one’s breath away, the Plantagenets had much cause for thanksgiving. Possibly one dark cloud dimmed their euphoria, but even that turned out to bear a silver lining. On July 26, Henry’s twenty-four-year-old brother, Geoffrey, had died. Shortly after Henry had bought him off with an annuity in 1156, Geoffrey had stumbled across a piece of good luck that undoubtedly saved him from the temptation of future strife with his brother. Brittany, in a state of anarchy ever since its duke had died twenty years earlier, was beset by rival claimants to the title, and the citizens of its key city, Nantes, tired of lawlessness, had offered the dukedom to Geoffrey. Eager for standing in the world, he accepted with delight. Now, upon his death, Henry had no intention of allowing the duchy to escape from the Plantagenet circumference, even though his claim to Brittany rested on the shakiest of foundations. During his honeymoon with the Franks that fall, he persuaded Louis to recognize him as overlord of Brittany, and he then took an army to Nantes to make certain of the city’s loyalty. When the citizens received him as Geoffrey’s rightful heir, he placed the city under the supervision of a few trusted men. Certainly, Nantes was not the whole of Brittany, but Henry felt positive that the rest of the duchy would follow in time.

With Brittany more or less added to the empire, one might think that the Plantagenets would have been content. On the contrary, their mania for land and more land continued unabated. In this respect, Eleanor was no different from, or better than, her husband. Still laboring under the impression that she and Henry were partners in all enterprises-a justifiable impression at that stage, it must be admitted—she was eager to make a contribution to the Plantagenet holdings. She had, of course, already given him Aquitaine, a gift of dubious value, but now she presented another possibility. Even though Toulouse had not belonged to her family for nearly fifty years, she had never stopped considering the county part of her rightful inheritance. That her grandmother Philippa had ruled there and her father was born there overshadowed the fact that Toulouse had most assuredly passed into the hands of the house of Saint-Gilles. A realist in most ways, Eleanor must have known that Toulouse was irrecoverable by this time, especially after Louis’s botched effort to conquer it eighteen years earlier, but that seemed to make no difference. During the Christmas festivities, when acquisition and expansion were on everyone’s mind, it is easy to see how the subject of Toulouse came up quite naturally and how Henry must have needed little prompting.

At this point there was something curiously self-defeating about the Plantagenets’ decision to gain control of Toulouse, however good their reasons for believing it a rightful portion of Eleanor’s inheritance. Henry already had more territory than he could comfortably supervise, and the last thing he needed was another rebellious province like Aquitaine. Although the Toulousains gave nominal allegiance to the Capetians, their political interests were directed southward to the Mediterranean, to Provence and Barcelona, the far south comprising a distinct region of its own. And what is equally curious at this point is why Henry and Eleanor selected this particular moment to offend Louis Capet, whose sister, Constance, widowed upon the death of King Stephen’s son, Eustace, had married Count Raymond V of Toulouse. In the past four years, Louis’s sister had borne three sons, the only male children of the Capetian royal line as of that time. To press Eleanor’s claim to the county by right of inheritance implied dispossession of Count Raymond and his family, something Louis was unlikely to regard favorably. With peace established between England and France, Henry and Eleanor could have selected no more inauspicious moment to bring up Toulouse. Perhaps Walter Map was correct when he wrote of Henry: “He was impatient of peace and felt no qualm in harassing almost the half of Christendom.” But in this case, it was not merely a matter of impatience ; plain and simple, his motive was greed. Toulouse was a rich county, and Henry could not resist. As for Louis, everyone knew that he could be easily duped.

Fortunately for the Plantagenets, the strained situation in southern France at that time lent itself to the kind of venture they had in mind. Count Raymond of Toulouse was already at war with Count Raymond-Berengar of Barcelona, in addition to other dissatisfied vassals. Henry was not so crass or unskillful as to announce his designs on Toulouse openly; instead, sometime in April 1159, he and Eleanor casually drifted south through Aquitaine, winding up at Blaye in Gascony, where he formed an alliance with the count of Barcelona. To sweeten the pot and to make certain that Toulouse, once taken, did not stick to Raymond-Berengar’s fingers, Henry proposed a betrothal between his son, Richard, and Raymond’s daughter. Their partnership sealed, he sent a formal summons to the count of Toulouse, demanding surrender of the county in Eleanor’s name, which, of course, Count Raymond refused to do. For that matter, he responded by setting off an alarm and notifying his overlord and brother-in-law, Louis Capet, of the danger threatening.

If Louis received a rude shock from the man whom, just months earlier, he had called lovable, he did not allow it to affect his determinedly friendly policy toward the king of England. In 1159, he met with Henry in February and again in June, and although they could reach no agreement, they parted on warm terms. Louis was not the complete dupe he appeared. His hostility toward Henry had been, to a large extent, an expression of his resentment against Eleanor’s remarriage, and it had run contrary to the policy laid down by Abbot Suger, namely that the military inferiority of the French made cooperation with more powerful vassals the only sensible course. Although Louis had reached a stage of life where he preferred sensibility, nevertheless this new development created a dilemma. He could not very well contest Henry’s claim to Toulouse, because he himself had pressed it when he had been Eleanor’s husband. But neither could he accommodate Henry in his aspirations. For the moment, then, Louis stood tactfully aloof.

The early months of 1159 passed in a flurry of war fever. It is probable that Eleanor resided first at Rouen and later at Poitiers, which seems to have been headquarters for the mobilization. To be at home again must have filled her with pleasure; to be preparing for a war that would certainly be won was doubly exciting. For there was no doubt in her mind that her masterful husband, his military record unblemished save for that better-forgotten clash with the barbaric Welsh, would emerge victorious. On March 22, Henry had issued a summons to his vassals in England, Normandy, and Aquitaine to assemble at Poitiers on June 24. Not wishing to inconvenience England, so long a journey from Toulouse, he demanded only the services of his barons. Any English knight who did not wish to make the trip was assessed the sum of two marks, which would pay for a mercenary to fight in his place. In addition to the levy of this scutage, he exacted contributions from towns, sheriffs, Jewish moneylenders, and, much to their consternation and indignation, the clergy. Since the tax on the Church was collected by Becket, many concluded that it was his idea, which was probably untrue. Nevertheless, some years later bitter churchmen would remember and charge that Thomas had plunged a sword “into the vitals of Holy Mother Church with your own hand when you despoiled her of so many thousand marks for the expedition against Toulouse.” From laymen as well as churchmen, over eleven thousand pounds flowed into Henry’s treasury during the first half of 1159, enough to support a siege for at least five or six months.

On the appointed day, banners flouncing, the army left Poitiers in splendor. Altogether it was a brilliant and impressive parade of Henry’s vassals: the barons of England, Normandy, Anjou, Brittany, and Aquitaine; King Malcolm of Scotland, with an army that had required forty-five vessels to transport across the Channel; a showy contingent led by Thomas Becket, who, his ecclesiastical career rapidly fading into dim memory, headed not less than seven hundred knights of his own household, a tremendous force for that time and an indication of his extremely comfortable financial position. In addition, there was the count of Barcelona with some of the unhappy vassals of the count of Toulouse—William of Montpellier and Raymond Trencavel, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne. The last time such a stupendous army had been seen in those parts was for a major Crusade.

By July 6, Henry’s army had encamped outside the high red walls of Toulouse and, siege engines and catapults in place, settled down for a lengthy stay. Medieval sieges were painfully boring for both besiegers and besieged. Those inside the walls of Toulouse grew claustrophobic and, to relieve their restlessness, would periodically sally forth to provoke Henry’s men into a clash of arrows and swords; then they would retreat inside the walls once more. There was little for Henry to do beyond preventing food or military help from reaching the Toulousains. July and August passed to the monotonous thumps of the engineers working their stone throwers. Henry, who hated inactivity, lacked the temperament to conduct a long siege, although he had brought with him his clerks and he kept busy with administrative chores, issuing writs, hearing judicial cases, and listening to subjects who had followed him to the gates of Toulouse to seek favors or appeal law cases. Toward the middle of September, the general ennui was enlivened by a strange sight. Louis Capet appeared before the city gates and requested permission to enter. Since he had brought no army—indeed he meekly declared that he had come only to safeguard his sister—he was permitted entry. But Louis’s unexpected arrival seemed to present Henry with a dilemma, or so he claimed. Within a week, he called off the siege, declaring that he had too great a reverence for the king of the Franks to attack a city in which his overlord resided. This, of course, was nonsense, for Henry had no reverence or even respect for Louis. Probably his real reasons for abandoning the siege were practical ones: The cost of feeding thousands was turning out to be an expensive business; the unsanitary conditions had caused an epidemic among his troops; and, of course, he was bored.

Henry’s decision to abandon the war sparked the first recorded disagreement between the king and his chancellor. Thirsty for military victory, horribly disappointed that he had lost the chance to lead his troops into a real battle, Thomas angrily argued against giving up. “Foolish superstition” was what he accused Henry of, declaring that Louis himself had forfeit any consideration by siding with Henry’s enemies. Not only that, but if Henry were to assault now, he could take Toulouse and make Louis a prisoner as well. Henry, barely controlling his temper, must have reiterated that he had, after all, done homage to Louis as his feudal overlord, and to attack his person would set a poor example for his own vassals. Without being explicit, the chroniclers hint that the disagreement between the two men grew heated. In any event, Henry left Toulouse on September 26, leaving behind his churlish chancellor, who then proceeded to assault several castles in the vicinity. By the time they next met, the clash would be seemingly forgotten.

It was a jubilant Raymond of Toulouse who watched the departure of that army whose vast stockpiles of arrows, siege machines, lances, and axes had rendered the chroniclers speechless. The duchess of Aquitaine had been foiled by his father, and now history had happily repeated itself. Someday Raymond would have revenge on Eleanor, but in the autumn of 1159, such events were still far in the future.

From a careful inspection of Henry’s itinerary in the remaining months of 1159, it appears that he traveled directly north from Toulouse, by way of Limoges, to Beauvais in Normandy, where Louis’s brother had been stirring up trouble along the border. One receives the distinct impression that he purposely avoided Poitiers, that after his argument with Becket he had small desire to face his wife. It is easy to guess Eleanor’s surprise and chagrin; this had been the second time that she had sent a husband against Toulouse, and both expeditions had ended in failure. In Louis’s case, defeat had been understandable, for he was hardly a warrior. But what excuse could she make for Henry? With his resources, in terms of both manpower and money, the capture of this single city, no matter how well defended, should have been an easy matter. It must have occurred to her that Henry was not the fighter that either his mother or father had been. He had spent half a year planning the war, raising a large army and vast sums of money, but when his opponent could not be intimidated, he had given up. Others might believe Henry’s reluctance to attack his liege lord the height of scrupulousness, but Eleanor saw it as a dent in the image of a man she had regarded as invincible.

Above, the Palais de Justice, Poitiers, formerly Eleanor’s ancestral palace. On the right can be seen the Tour Maubergeonne, where Eleanor’s grandfather William IX lodged his mistress.

Right, Duke William IX of Aquitaine, a portrait from a fourteenth-century manuscript of troubadour poetry in the Bibliothèque Nationale

The figures representing a king and queen of Judah and believed to be likenesses of Eleanor and Louis were completed around 1150, shortly after the Second Crusade. From the west portal of Chartres Cathedral.

Rock crystal and pearl vase that Eleanor gave to Louis at the time of their marriage, now in the Louvre. The Latin inscription on the base reads that she gave it to her husband who presented it to Abbot Suger who in turn donated the vase to the Abbey of Saint-Denis. This is the only surviving object from Eleanor’s life.

Service de Documentation Photographique de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux

Entry of emperor Conrad III and Louis VII into Constantinople during the Second Crusade, a fifteenth-century miniature from “Grandes chroniques de France.” The artist was mistaken because the two armies entered the city at different times.

Crowned heads of Eleanor and Henry, an engaged capital from the Church of Notre-Dame-du-Bourg near Bordeaux, which now can be seen at the Cloisters in New York. Probably the carved heads date from a progress they made through Aquitaine in 1152.

Left,the remains of Eleanor’s seal. struck in 1152 shortly after her marriage to Henry, from a charter in the Archives de France

Statue of Richard I by Marochetti, 1860, outside the House of Lords, London

Tomb effigy of King John at Worcester Cathedral. John was the first Plantagenet king to be buried in England.

King John signing the Magna Charta at Runnymede in 1215

The necropolis of the Plantagenets is in the abbey church at Fontevrault. Above, the tomb effigy of Henry II; right, the tomb effigies of Eleanor and Richard. Also buried at Fontevrault Abbey are Joanna and Isabella of Angoulême.

The Abbey of Fontevrault near Tours, founded around 1099 by Robert d’Arbrissel to house a foundation of monks and nuns under the rule of an abbess. Here Eleanor spent the last years of her life.