Stalking the Planta Genesta

By the summer of 1151, Eleanor had psychologically poised herself for flight. Developments in recent months had helped set the stage in her own mind for an escape from the hated Île-de-France, and she was busy dreaming of her return to the Maubergeonne Tower in Poitiers. At this moment, no definite date had been established, but she knew that her release was now only a matter of months.

In January, Abbot Suger had died and with his passing had crumbled the last remaining barrier between Eleanor and her liberation. Renewing her demands with greater urgency, she found Louis in a more receptive frame of mind, and while he still professed to love her, his protestations had grown considerably weaker. Perhaps he himself acknowledged that loving her had become a luxury he could ill afford. By this time his ardor had been greatly corroded by the nervous fear that he might die without an heir, and even had he and Eleanor been compatible, he might have entertained thoughts of divorce by now. As for those who reiterated Suger’s arguments in protesting the loss of Aquitaine, Louis might well have retorted, “What good is Aquitaine to a king without a son?” After more than a century and a half of Capetian rule, was he to be the last of his dynasty? Eleanor, after all, had failed him. He had never been able to satisfy her, and as beautiful and exciting as she undeniably was to him, as magnificent her heritage, it was almost with a sense of relief that he agreed to relinquish the most highly prized heiress in Christendom. But with Louis, maddeningly hesitant and slow moving, a decision was rarely implemented with speed. Doubtless he must have pointed out to Eleanor that they were not persons of ordinary circumstance who could go their separate ways without careful preparation. There were Frankish garrisons in the major towns of Aquitaine, and now, in this delicate situation, they must be withdrawn in peaceful, orderly fashion before a divorce could take place. Then the queen could return to her lands without anxiety about possible conflict between the king’s men and her own vassals. This was an argument certain to sway Eleanor, who gave Aquitaine precedence in everything; indeed, as time passed, she would give the impression of being willing to level Europe if she thought it would benefit her homeland.

Even the lapse of centuries is unable to blur her impetuosity, but in this case, she stilled her impatience. That summer, standing on the brink of a new life, her mood was one of sheer radiant happiness. Just outside Paris, girls and boys were dancing the traditional caroles on the sloping grassy hillsides, clapping and chanting in the warm sunshine. In the cool green garden of the Cite Palace, under the pear and lemon trees and the wooden trellises, the queen’s head buzzed with ecstatic plans for her homecoming. Now, surely, nothing could go wrong.

Unfortunately, we do not know the details of how Eleanor viewed her future. For years she had spent her time waiting—for pregnancy, for the departure of the great Crusade, and then for the leave-taking from the Holy Land, but most agonizing, the wait to be free of Louis Capet. Now that her wait had nearly ended, she must have formed in her imagination a thousand plans and visions, foremost among these the creation of a magnificent court in Poitiers, a mecca for troubadours and poets in the cultured tradition of her grandfather or of Raymond of Antioch, but one still uniquely her own. After her journeys to the East, she knew better than anyone the exquisite possibilities open to a person of determination and imagination, two qualities that she possessed in large amounts. Her nature had never been the compliant female so idealized in medieval times by the ruling class but yet, in reality, so rarely found. From her childhood in William IX’s court, indulged, rarely disciplined, admired by parents and poets, she had developed a strong sense of her own worth, a healthy ego we would term it today, and she had never stopped rebelling against the secondary role foisted upon her as queen of France. After years of being caged, or at least thwarted in her desires, her need for independence converged with an overwhelming passion to rule. Pleasure in life, for the mature Eleanor, meant sovereignty, personal as well as political.

At the same time, with her keen intelligence, she must have been aware of the difficulties facing an unmarried female ruler of a land as violent as Aquitaine. Uneasily she would have recalled the incident of her father’s betrothed being kidnapped by the count of Angoulême—and Emma of Limoges had only been a minor heiress. What was to prevent an ambitious knight, some younger son with no prospects, from boldly snatching her as she rode along a deserted road in Poitou?

To discourage such notions she would need an exceptionally strong bodyguard at all times. Or a husband. Unlike her childhood heroine, Saint Radegonde, who had fled her husband only to embrace the monastic life, Eleanor hungered for a man. Bearing in mind her robust sexual drive, unsatisfied for her entire adult life, there is no doubt that she must have given serious consideration to the question of remarriage. How eagerly she must have looked forward to romantic love and physical enjoyment. At that time, however, had she mentally run down the list of available lords of sufficiently high position, she would have regretfully concluded that not one was simultaneously unmarried, of a suitable age, and appealing. She had no intention of being pushed into another marriage of purely political convenience. When she married, it would be to a man of her own choice, a gallant chevalier on the order of her Uncle Raymond or even Geoffrey Anjou.

Since, at last, Eleanor would be taking her position as sovereign of her own fief, she had an exceptionally strong interest in the activities of Aquitaine’s neighbors, especially its northern neighbors, the Plantagenets. During that summer, people in the Île-de-France spoke of no one but Geoffrey and Henry, against whom Louis was shortly to launch a campaign. The earlier confrontation had been aborted by Suger’s truce, although scattered attacks on Norman castles had continued. But without the abbot’s sagacious counseling, a real war now seemed inevitable. In early summer, Louis mustered his forces on one side of the Norman border, while Geoffrey and Henry assembled their army on the other. To Eleanor, observing these preparations, the dispute may have seemed petty and senseless. Apart from Louis’s natural interest in seeing the Plantagenets ousted from Normandy, an objective that fell into the category of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, because he had already confirmed Geoffrey as duke in 1144, the immediate pretext for hostilities concerned Louis’s seneschal for Poitou. At Montreuil, on the frontier between Poitou and Anjou, Gerald Berlai had erected a well-fortified castle, from which stronghold he had, apparently, harassed the surrounding countryside. This troublesome Berlai so annoyed Geoffrey that he had spent nearly a year besieging Gerald’s supposedly impregnable fortress and finally had managed to capture it, along with Gerald and his family. Gerald’s importance as representative of Capetian royal interests in Poitou failed to deter Geoffrey, who suspected Louis of encouraging his seneschal’s forays into Angevin territory. The count’s summary treatment of his prisoners, incarceration in a maximum-security dungeon, seemed unnecessarily harsh to his contemporaries, and Louis, with nothing better to do at the moment, vowed that he would fight on Berlai’s behalf. Behind this, of course, lay his marked sensitivity to Henry’s neglect in rendering homage for Normandy. This act, by which an overlord formally confirmed a vassal in his possessions, in no way implied that Louis had any authority over Normandy. Nevertheless, feudal custom demanded that the fiction be observed. That the insolent youngster would blithely disregard his obligation implied, to Louis at least, a distinct lack of respect.

If Eleanor believed that fighting the Plantagenets was a waste of time, she needn’t have concerned herself unduly, because the war collapsed in a farce typical of Louis’s military ventures. At the last moment he suddenly developed a fever and, pleading illness, rushed back to the Cite Palace, where he took to his bed for the remainder of the summer. During his convalescence, royal advisers persuaded him that a king who had lately worn the Crusader’s cross should hesitate to shed Christian blood, no doubt a polite way of suggesting that the Plantagenet grasp on Normandy was now too strong to be easily broken. In the end, Louis agreed to call upon Abbot Bernard to mediate a settlement.

In the last week of August, Geoffrey Anjou and his son arrived in Paris. Louis, still confined to bed, managed to rouse himself and greet the visitors, but from the outset, the atmosphere seemed highly un-conducive to reasonable discussion. For one thing, the weather had turned oppressively warm and humid. The Great Hall of the palace felt like an oven, the courtiers sweated, and irritability made everyone’s temper short. Moreover, the spectacle caused by the Plantagenets’ insolent entry into the hall quickly dispelled any hopes of an easy reconciliation. Not only did they bear themselves in a manner shockingly defiant of their overlord—from another point of view their entrance might be considered wonderfully bizarre—but Geoffrey had dragged with him Gerald Berlai, swaddled in chains, to answer charges. This method of displaying a noble prisoner horrified the Franks, especially Abbot Bernard, who intensely disliked Geoffrey and who had already been instrumental in arranging for his excommunication over this matter. Nevertheless, the sight of Berlai in chains moved him to offer a lifting of the ban in exchange for the seneschal’s freedom. Geoffrey’s audacious response favorably impressed Eleanor, who herself was feeling little respect for the Franks or Abbot Bernard at that particular time: He would not release Berlai, Geoffrey stoutly announced to the old man, and for that matter he would have hung him long ago if not for the Truce of God in effect while Louis had been absent in the Holy Land. Furthermore, he did not care whether or not Bernard absolved him. With that, he launched into a public prayer, declaring that if holding Berlai a prisoner were a sin, then he refused to be absolved. This appalling blasphemy catapulted Bernard directly into one of his prophetic trances in which he threatened that Geoffrey would surely meet an early and sudden death and, nothing if not explicit, added that the count would be dead within a month. Geoffrey did not appear to be in the least concerned.

This sort of tempestuous drama, at once stunning and titillating, had not been witnessed in the Capetian court for many years. If Louis needed further proof of the Plantagenet menace, Geoffrey’s performance offered conclusive evidence. Cranky and feverish, the king did nothing to dissipate the tension, and the opening session broke up shortly thereafter when Geoffrey stalked from the hall in a fit of the black bile that the Franks commonly associated with the Angevins. To Eleanor, the scene must have brought back memories of her father and grandfather, neither of whom had been intimidated by the clergy and who, in fact, derived a singular pleasure from tweaking their noses. Clearly Geoffrey, no puppet to be danced on Bernard’s strings, was a man cast from the same mold as her forebears, and she could not have helped but secretly applaud him.

During the parley, Eleanor had an opportunity to study both men. At thirty-nine, Geoffrey still retained the striking physical attributes that had won him the nickname le Bel. But it was Henry who drew her attention. While not as good looking as his father, he had a face and figure that riveted all eyes to him. He gave the impression of having superabundant physical energy, a magnetism that in theatrical parlance would be termed stage presence, and he exuded a rugged maleness. Eleanor’s eyes must have traveled almost greedily over his broad chest and square shoulders, over his arms as muscular as those of a gladiator. His close-cropped reddish hair and the high ruddy color in his freckled face made everyone around him, especially the pale Louis, look frail and sickly in comparison. He had prominent gray eyes, clear and mild when in a peaceable mood but that day bloodshot and flashing like balls of fire, and a gravelly voice, like that of a man who spends most of his time out of doors. There was nothing monkish about him.

It was obvious to Eleanor that here was no mirror of courtly chivalry. On the contrary, from his appearance alone it was almost impossible to distinguish him from a servant. His hands looked rough and coarse, his clothing of good quality but carelessly worn; flung over his shoulders was an absurdly short cape, contrary to all the current styles for men. Apparently he did not care what he looked like, nor what others might think of him. Throughout the meeting, he never once sat down, but stalked about impatiently, as if he begrudged wasting his time on boring trivialities. This was not a man who indulged in coquetry or wooing. One might expect the elegant Eleanor to have dismissed the rough-hewn youth as one of many persons with whom she might have to deal when she resumed control of her duchy. Significantly, she did not.

Despite the angry manner in which the Plantagenets had left the meeting, they did not depart from the court. Their visit lasted several days, perhaps as long as a week, and at the end of it, with no further threats from Bernard, they agreed to release Louis’s seneschal and, far more importantly, surrender a portion of the Vexin and the city of Gisors in exchange for Louis’s recognition of Henry as duke of Normandy. The Vexin, a tract of land on the northeast frontier between Normandy and France, had been a bone of contention between the two powers since the tenth century, when it had been partitioned, the northern portion becoming part of the duchy of Normandy, the southern half part of the demesne lands of the Capetians. Although Henry and his father considered occupation of the Vexin vital to the security of Normandy, they had nevertheless already relinquished half of this buffer zone to Louis in 1144 as the price of Geoffrey’s recognition as duke. Now, much to the amazement of the Franks, they volunteered to part with the remainder. Such totally baffling behavior was attributed to Bernard’s dire warnings; on the face of it, the only possible conclusion to be drawn was that Bernard had worked another miracle. As Eleanor knew, this was not the case at all.

That something of significance happened during those few days in August would in time become clear. That Eleanor decided to marry Henry, and that he eagerly fell in with the idea, would also become clear. But why and how this decision came about remained a mystery to twelfth-century historians. William of Newburgh tried to explain it this way: “For it is said 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 with her own, and for this reason she had desired and procured the divorce.” Apparently discontent with such a superficial analysis. William goes on to add that Eleanor “was greatly offended with the king’s conduct. even pleading that she had married a monk, not a king.” Newburgh, who wrote his history some forty years later while canon of an Augustinian priory, was a chronicler of sound judgment, but as a churchman, he could only hint at the underlying reason for a liaison between two such unlikely individuals as Eleanor and Henry. On the other hand, Walter Map, a courtier and clerk in Henry’s household some years later, did not hesitate to repeat salacious gossip, but even so, his analysis probably came closer to the truth when he wrote that Eleanor “cast glances of unholy love” upon Henry. The whys and wherefores of sexual attraction, often discounted by historians, proved to be of overriding significance in the case of Eleanor and Henry.

We know nothing about the precise circumstances of their first tryst in the Cite Palace beyond the fact that it was initiated by Eleanor and must have been intense and conclusive. Perhaps taking advantage of Louis’s incapacitation, Eleanor might have sent a trusted servingwoman through the dark, silent passageways with a message that brought Henry to her chamber after the palace had fallen asleep. Perhaps it did not happen that way. But in whatever manner they managed to meet, it was accomplished so skillfully, so secretly, that no one in the Cite Palace knew of it, an extraordinary feat considering that privacy in medieval castles was virtually nonexistent. Later, it would be said by their contemporaries that Henry debauched and filched his overlord’s wife from beneath the king’s own nose. If any seduction took place at this time, and it may well have, it would have been Eleanor who did the seducing, for the eighteen-year-old boy awakened an overwhelming feeling in her. Neither the eleven-year difference in their ages nor the obvious fact that he was no chivalrous knight with pretty speeches for the ladies could quench her longing. She was ready and ripe to be undone by a truly lascivious man. That the physical attraction was mutual is strikingly evident from the eagerness with which Henry responded to her advances, and perhaps it was to him that Eleanor remarked that she had married a monk.

And yet powerful sexual attraction can be easily assuaged—and was certainly done so in Eleanor’s era—without resorting to marriage. Both Eleanor and Henry were far too practical to be swept away by physical passion alone, and their conversations in those secret meetings touched on more important subjects than the carnal. Their alliance had to be predicated on two developments that had not yet, and might never, occur: first, Eleanor’s ability to secure a divorce and the restoration, free and clear, of her duchy; and second, Henry’s rise to the throne of England. Doubtless Henry pointed out to her that his mother’s, and his own, efforts to win over the English barons were finally beginning to bear fruit. During the past year, he had assumed a commanding lead in his struggle against King Stephen in that the English had grown heartily sick of civil war and now spoke of an arrangement whereby Stephen would rule until his death and Henry reign as his successor. While the risks for Eleanor and Henry were great, so were the stakes. For Eleanor, there was always the hazard of Louis’s learning of her intentions and preventing a divorce but, on the other hand, a crown. The nature of the gamble was also clear to Henry: By marrying the queen he would incur Louis’s hostility, but this seemed a small price to pay for a young man entertaining visions of an empire. Created duke of Normandy, he would inherit the counties of Anjou and Maine on his father’s death, and now England too seemed within his grasp. By marrying Eleanor, he could take on Aquitaine as well. The prospects fired his imagination, for, if successful, he would someday rule an area from Scotland to the Pyrenees, an empire larger than any other feudal monarch. And another thought may have entered his mind. Henry was too realistic to overlook the fact that many believed the duchy of Aquitaine to be ungovernable, but this seemed a minor consideration compared to the dangers that Eleanor’s remarriage to anyone else would have created for him. Her divorce would remove Capetian influence from Anjou’s borders, but real security for Henry could only be found in marrying Eleanor himself.

In light of these considerations, the difference in their ages counted for nothing. In the future, Henry expected to have need of a queen, and one as beautiful and rich as Eleanor, regardless of her tarnished reputation as an adulteress, could certainly not be bypassed. Dominated as he was by his mother, he had no objections to an older woman, indeed the age difference in his own parents’ marriage must have made it seem natural. From all contemporary accounts, Henry neither looked nor acted his age, and at eighteen he had already matured into a self-assured adult with a will of iron, a determination to achieve his ends no matter the cost, and a capacity for work that would never fail to astonish his subjects. All in all, he was the most formidable man that Eleanor had ever met, as well as the most businesslike. If it occurred to her that Henry desired her for her lands, that exploiting heiresses ran as a tradition in his family, she could afford to overlook the cynicism of such behavior. In actual fact she had as much to gain by the marriage as he. As immense as her physical needs might have been, it was not in Eleanor’s character to settle for just any young stud. Whether she would have wanted Henry Plantagenet if she had not been convinced that he would be the next king of England is highly doubtful.

By the first week of September the hot weather still had not broken. The Plantagenets, grateful to be leaving the stinking, stifling alleys of the Île-de-France, made their amends to their Capetian overlord: Gerald Berlai and his family were released, the Vexin and Gisors formally relinquished, all the loose ends harmoniously tidied up. The count and duke, so recently testy, now appeared as mild as lambs, equably agreeing to anything, for the loss of the Vexin seemed a trifling cost to pay for the promise of Aquitaine. Louis marveled at his good fortune, and if any trace of a satisfied smile appeared on Henry’s face as he solemnly placed his hands in the king’s to swear fealty and then receive the kiss of peace, Louis failed to notice.

Years later, chroniclers would claim that Geoffrey strongly disapproved of his son’s intrigue with Eleanor. According to Gerald of Wales, “When Geoffrey was seneschal of France, he had carnally known Queen Eleanor of whom he frequently forewarned his son Henry, cautioning him and forbidding him in any wise to touch her, both because she was the wife of his lord, and because she had been known by his own father.” Gerald, who claimed that he had heard the story from Bishop Hugh of Lincoln who, in turn, had been told by Henry himself, cannot be regarded as an objective commentator because of his strong personal antipathy to Henry. Nor is Henry particularly reliable, because by that time he was not averse to spreading calumnies about Eleanor. Had she been Geoffrey’s mistress, it would not have been in keeping with the count’s character to have objected to the marriage on that ground, not in view of the lands that such a union would bring into the Plantagenet holdings. Moreover, it is difficult to explain his public conduct at Paris without assuming that he knew of Henry’s pact with Eleanor—and approved it.

When the two men left Paris in the early days of September, they must have felt exhilarated by their success. They had, unfortunately, been compelled to barter the Vexin, but neither of them regarded this as anything but a temporary loss. Now that Henry had been recognized as duke of Normandy, he was in a far better position to further his ambition to invade England, and on September 14, he planned to meet with a council of his Norman barons to discuss that very project. His most immediate concern was raising money to pay an army of mercenaries, and now, in full control of his duchy, such funds could be more easily obtained. As they galloped along the road to Angers on September 4, evaluating their gains and losses, no doubt chortling treasonously over their ease in duping Louis, the heat and dust grew almost unbearable. At the river Loire, twenty-five miles southeast of the capital city of Le Mans, where Henry had been born, they stopped to swim in the refreshing water. That night, Geoffrey was seized with chills and fever, and three days later, as if to prove the uncanny accuracy of Bernard’s prophecy, he died, all remedies having failed to save him.

Meanwhile, even before the news of Geoffrey’s death had drifted back to Paris, Eleanor had already pressed Louis into taking the first steps toward a divorce. In late September they set out on what would be their last progress through Aquitaine. That this was no casual holiday was evidenced by the size and importance of their escort. Accompanying Louis were his secretaries, Thierry Galeran and Adam Brulart; his chancellor, Hugues de Champfleuri; and an imposing number of prelates and barons. Eleanor, however, seems to have had a separate retinue of southerners, including Geoffrey du Lauroux, the same archbishop of Bordeaux who had officiated at her marriage; her old friend Geoffrey de Rancon; the bishops of Poitiers and Saintes; and prominent vassals, such as the viscount of Châtellerault and the count of Angoulême. Most of these men were either close family friends or relatives. The royal retinue celebrated Christmas at Limoges and from there traveled south to Bordeaux. On February 2, 1152, they were at Saint Jean d’Angély, where they observed Candlemas in the local abbey. During this circuit, Aquitaine was stripped of its Frankish garrisons and administrators and the domain set in order for Eleanor’s return. Later that month, Eleanor and Louis took leave of each other for the time being, she returning to Poitiers while he traveled on to Paris. Now all that remained was the formality of convening a special assembly to pronounce the decree.

In Eleanor’s lifetime and for long afterward there was a widespread impression that Louis had sufficient cause to repudiate her on the grounds of adultery but, out of the goodness of his heart, settled for an annulment based on the legal subterfuge of consanguinity. The Minstrel of Reims embroidered a colorful scene that has no foundation in fact but nevertheless reflected popular perception of the divorce. “And he [Louis] took counsel of all his barons what he should do with the queen and he told them how she had demeaned herself.

“I’ faith,” said the barons, “the best counsel that we can give you is that ye let her go; for she is a very devil, and if ye keep her long we fear that she will cause you to be murdered. Furthermore, and above all else, ye have no child by her.”

In the minstrel’s opinion, Louis “therein did he act as a fool. Far better had it served him to have immured her; then had her vast lands remained to him during her lifetime, nor had those evils come to pass that did befall.”

This excerpt underscores the agonizing dilemma facing Louis. If he divorced Eleanor for adultery, she would not be able to marry again during his lifetime and thus her fief would eventually be inherited by their daughters. But if he did that, he himself would not be able to remarry either. If he imprisoned her, Aquitaine would remain his, but again there could be no possibility of his remarriage. Foolish as his decision may have appeared to some of his contemporaries, in the end he had no choice. By 1152, not only were his barons eager for a new queen, but Abbot Bernard also sanctioned the divorce. Aside from Bernard’s personal hostility toward the queen, there was the certainty of her consanguinity to the king; from every angle, he could not regret her loss to the kingdom of France.

On March 21, 1152, the Friday before Palm Sunday, Eleanor arrived at the royal castle of Beaugency near Orleans for the annulment proceedings. A great assembly had gathered for this important occasion, which, although dignified, turned out to be more or less routine, confirming the clauses already agreed upon. Witnesses came forth with recitals attesting that the king and queen were related by blood within the prohibited degree. The princesses Marie and Alix were declared legitimate and their custody awarded to the king. The archbishop of Bordeaux, acting on Eleanor’s behalf, asked for reassurances that the queen’s domains would be restored intact and, equally important to Eleanor, that she might marry again so long as she gave Louis the allegiance a vassal owed her overlord. Without further delay, the annulment was formally pronounced by the archbishop of Sens.

A chronicler of a later century would paint a fanciful picture of a distraught, weeping queen, fainting, protesting her innocence, carrying on in such hysterical fashion that the prelates and barons feared for her sanity. What more likely happened is that Eleanor and her escort of vassals mounted and rode away from Beaugency with the greatest possible speed. There is no reason to believe that she and Louis parted on anything but cordial terms, although the cordiality on the king’s part would be short-lived. He had never truly desired the divorce, and the parting must have been unpleasant. On that final day of their marriage at Beaugency, the last time they would ever meet, there were surely moments when he regretted his decision. Perhaps he had been wrong to repudiate her, perhaps he should have allowed Marie and Alix to accompany her. Having no talent for prophecy, he wished her well.

If the day had seemed a sorrowful ending for Louis, it meant a bright new beginning for Eleanor. On that warm spring Saturday as she took the road south toward Poitiers, the countryside glistened, and every tree unfurled its green banners. It was a day when the towns bustled with activity, when people were stripping trees to make palms for the processions the following day or decorating the fronts of their houses. But part of the excitement was created by Eleanor herself, in that not every day did a divorced queen ride by. She had been preceded by news of her release, and people lined up to wave and stare. Near the city of Blois, however, she received her first real indication that life as the ex-queen of France might prove to be, not only difficult, but perilous as well. Stopping for the night, probably at one of the local abbeys, she learned that Theobald of Blois, second son of Louis’s vassal the count of Champagne, was plotting to kidnap her. While Eleanor may have been prepared for such an attack at some distant time in the future, she must have been startled to find it happening the day after her divorce. Protected by her escort, she quickly left Blois and hurried south toward the county of Touraine, which belonged to Henry and might offer greater safety. Nevertheless, on her guard now, she took the precaution of sending scouts ahead to make certain that no other ambitious knights lay in wait. As she neared the river Creuse, where she planned to make a fording, she was warned “by her good angel” that Henry Plantagenet’s seventeen-year-old brother, Geoffrey, had arranged a full-scale ambush at Port-de-Piles. Changing her route, she managed to detour around Geoffrey and finally crossed into Poitou “by another way.” Although she had outwitted both would-be seducers, Eleanor would not have found these two escapades flattering; indeed, she must have felt highly incensed to know that she had become fair game for every unemployed knight. Used goods she might have been, a rich, no-longer-young woman who, gossip said, had been repudiated by her husband for unseemly conduct, but she was not yet reduced to marrying second sons.

By Easter, safely home in the Maubergeonne Tower, she began life anew. A household had to be assembled, clerks hired to write letters and charters, notices sent to her chief vassals informing them of her divorce and asking them to render homage and swear fealty to the countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine, grants and privileges renewed for various abbots and abbesses. In the midst of the chaos, Eleanor’s first preoccupation seems to have been her determination to rid Aquitaine of Frankish influence. While Louis’s staff had been evacuated, she did not, evidently, believe this sufficient, for immediately she declared null and void every act she had made together with her ex-husband, as well as those he had made alone. During these first weeks after her homecoming, we have documents attesting to her industriousness as an administrator but not to the arrangements she was making in her private life. How she prepared for her marriage to Henry, what letters were sent and received, what last-minute reservations she may have experienced, have long been a subject of speculation. Although it is generally accepted that she summoned Henry to Poitiers, so shrouded in secrecy were their communications that no document remains to betray them.

Eleanor’s position was extremely delicate on two levels. In her capacity as duchess of Aquitaine, she was a vassal of Louis’s, and as in the case of any vassal, protocol demanded that she secure his approval before marrying, though obviously this was one formality she could not afford to render. As Louis’s former wife, she knew intimately his feelings of dislike for Henry: aside from flouting his authority as her overlord, she was about to deliver a stinging personal blow by marrying his chief enemy, a factor that may well have been part of her initial attraction to Henry. In a sense, she was about to take a deadly revenge, both personal and political, for fifteen years of boredom and entrapment, but one false step now, and to her peril, she would find the king’s army pouring over her borders.

In mid-May, Henry and a few companions arrived in Poitiers, and on Sunday, May 18, barely eight weeks after Eleanor’s divorce, the marriage ceremony took place. No trumpets signaled their union. It was a subdued, almost surreptitious celebration, witnessed only by close friends, family, and household members. Although the occasion lacked the ostentation normally associated with the wedding of two distinguished persons, nevertheless precautions had to be taken in order to assure the validity of the marriage contract. Ironically, Eleanor was more closely related to Henry than she had been to Louis, their common ancestor being Robert II, duke of Normandy, and it was necessary to locate canonists who would issue the proper dispensations. The alliance so skillfully nurtured to fruition during the past seven months would have mighty and far-reaching consequences, but in May 1152, Eleanor was only concerned about the immediate ones, and the days following the wedding offered a temporary respite from the storm that she expected to break over her head.

Sexual attraction, her intuition that Henry would someday be the most formidable sovereign of his generation, a need for an efficient protector of Aquitaine, perhaps also her deep need to hurt Louis: These had been the main factors in her hasty selection of a husband. But she did not know Henry as a person. Now, during this honeymoon of sorts, she had an opportunity to scrutinize more closely the volatile man she had chosen. Basically she found that, though her judgment had been sound, he was a complex man with a host of contradictory qualities. Like herself, he had been given a first-class education, both at his father’s court and in the English household of his uncle Robert, earl of Gloucester. Both Matilda and Geoffrey, despite their personal animosity for one another, had apparently been in agreement that Henry should be educated in a manner befitting a future king. Under the direction of his tutor, Master Matthew, archdeacon of Gloucester, Henry learned a smattering “of all the languages which are spoken from the Bay of Biscay to the Jordan but making use only of Latin and French.” From his father he received the usual training in riding, jousting, falconry, and hunting, and as an adult, these arts were to be a consuming obsession with him; neither was his military education neglected, for Geoffrey was known to have owned a fourth-century Roman handbook on war. For a layman, Henry was well read, sometimes taking books to bed, and he sought out the company of intellectuals, with the result that he constantly squirreled away information. “Anything he had once heard worthy of remembrance he could never obliterate from his mind. So he had at his fingers’ ends both a ready knowledge of nearly the whole of history and also practical experiences of almost everything in daily affairs.”

From the earliest age, his head had been crammed full of tales about his illustrious ancestors: his great-great-great grandfather the legendary Fulk the Black, who had defeated an army of Bretons before the age of fourteen; his great-grandfather William the Conqueror, who had seized the throne of England after the battle of Hastings; his mother, who had escaped from beleaguered Oxford Castle by walking through Stephen’s lines in the dead of a snowy night. Inspired by these daring exploits, Henry himself had made an expedition to England when he was fourteen to snatch Stephen’s crown but, once there, realized that he had no money to pay his soldiers. In the end, Stephen had lent the young fighting cock the funds to return to Normandy.

Although Henry thought troubadours and games of chivalry a waste of time, he was not, Eleanor discovered, without refined tastes. His mother had taught him how to behave like a gentleman, and he was capable of great gentleness, courtesy, and at times even delicacy. In later years, on a windy day, he was out riding with a distinguished clergyman Dom Reric, when a Cistercian monk stumbled and fell in front of his horse. The wind blew the Cistercian’s habit over his neck, exposing his backside. “Curse that religion that reveals the arse,” muttered Dom Reric. Henry, however, looked away in silence and pretended to see nothing. Matilda also passed along a brand of cynical wisdom peculiarly her own, and in Walter Map’s opinion, “to her teaching we may confidently impute all those traits which rendered him unpleasant.” In one of her parables, she impressed upon her son that “an untamed hawk, when raw flesh is often offered to it, and then withdraw or hidden, becometh more greedy and is more ready to obey and remain,” a policy of tantalization that Henry would put to good use in his relationships with family, friends, and enemies. Another piece of advice that Henry liked to repeat was Matilda’s admonition to be “free in bed, infrequent in business.” His freedom in bed Eleanor no doubt counted as a blessing, at least in the early stage of their marriage, and in this respect he must have provided a startling and delightful contrast to Louis Capet.

In personal appearance, however, Henry was anything but heroic, and as Eleanor now had a chance to observe, he was slightly bowlegged, a characteristic that would become more pronounced as he aged, and he complained incessantly about ingrown toenails and blisters on his legs. Although fairly slender for a stocky person, he had a phobia about growing fat, saying, whether true or not, that he possessed a natural tendency to corpulence. As a result he was forever dieting, fasting, or wearing himself out physically through violent exercise.

But his most remarkable characteristic, the one that amazed his contemporaries and must even have startled Eleanor, who herself possessed an abundance of vitality, was his demonic energy. In the twentieth century, he surely would have been diagnosed as a classic case of hyperactivity. Constantly in motion, he rose before cockcrow; seldom sat down except on horseback or at meals, which he ate quickly; and to the dismay of his subjects, he transacted all business standing up. While talking or listening, his eyes and hands were incessantly moving, touching birds, dogs, armor, hunting spears. Even during Mass, which he attended every day more out of duty than piety, he paid no attention to the service but could be seen talking business to his clerks, doodling, or looking at books. Never wasting a minute, he sometimes worked through the night and, wrote Ralph Niger, “shunned regular hours like poison.”

To Eleanor, hearing him shout in his hoarse voice his favorite oath “By the eyes of God!” it must have seemed as though a tornado had descended on the Maubergeonne Tower. Had she ever been inclined to think of him as a raw, inexperienced youth whom she could dominate and advise, she would have realized her mistake during this period. Moreover, as distressing as it may have been to acknowledge, his behavior plainly indicated that he was not helplessly in love with her, or perhaps in fairness to Henry, he had bigger things on his mind at the moment. What need had he to tarry with a bride when there was an island to conquer, a throne to win? Eleanor, a realist, was also a romantic, and this realization must have hurt. Nevertheless, she understood that unforeseen circumstances had forced him to postpone his invasion of England several times. His father’s death had obliged him to visit Anjou in order to take possession of his heritage and assure the fidelity of his vassals. Growing impatient, his supporters in England had sent Earl Reginald of Cornwall to implore haste, and on April 6, after a meeting of Henry’s barons at Lisieux, preparations had moved forward, only to be canceled due to his wedding trip. Now he was in a fever to be off. Since we know that he was at Barfleur on the Normandy coast about the middle of June, he could not have stayed longer than two weeks with Eleanor, perhaps less, because nine days after the wedding, attending to business again, she granted a charter to the Abbey of Saint-Maixent.

Meanwhile, the tidings of Eleanor’s marriage had exploded like a series of strategically placed bombshells in various cities of Europe. Among the disgruntled was Henry’s brother, Geoffrey, so lately thwarted in his own ambition to marry Eleanor and still smarting at the disappointingly small inheritance—three castles—he had received from his father. Henry of Champagne, betrothed to Eleanor’s seven-year-old daughter, Marie, and dreaming of acquiring Aquitaine in her name, saw his prospects melt away. And King Stephen’s son, Eustace, clinging to the hope of being crowned king of England someday, could only gnash his teeth when he learned that his rival pretender now owned half of France.

The man most stunned, however, was Louis Capet. If he had considered the possibility of Eleanor’s remarriage, it would have been to some inconsequential baron of his own choosing, not to Henry Plantagenet. The conspiracy perpetrated by his former wife and her new husband, the scope of their perfidy, their contempt for every tenet of feudal custom and law, overwhelmed him. The bitter sting of humiliation lay, however, in the realization that Eleanor, his vassal, had married without his permission, that Henry only last year had sworn fealty and received the kiss of peace. But other aspects of the disaster simply confused him: Had Eleanor forgotten that a marriage between Henry and the Princess Marie had been declared unlawful? How could the woman who had nagged him with her scruples about consanguinity from Antioch to Beaugency have now married a man to whom she was even more closely related? Burning with hatred of the crafty Plantagenet who had “basely stolen” his wife and, for the first time, with an equally intense hatred of Eleanor, Louis huddled with his advisers in an effort to surmount these calamitous developments. Solutions—revocation of the annulment, excommunication—were suggested and discarded. When a letter ordering the appearance of the duke and duchess in the French court to answer charges of treason failed to bring a response, Louis settled on more practical means of dealing with the situation. Provoked beyond endurance, he acted quickly for once and formed a coalition of all those who had a grievance against Henry. Backed by his brother Robert, Theobald of Blois, Henry of Champagne, Eustace, and Geoffrey Plantagenet, Louis decided against attacking Aquitaine, which the coalition had resolved to divide among themselves, but instead charged into Normandy to confront Henry directly. Immediately it became apparent that he had chosen the wrong tactic.

At a furious rate, Henry bore down from Barfleur to the Norman-French frontier, and so rapidly did he move his forces that, it was said, several horses fell dead on the road. He ignored Louis’s troops and, like a whirlwind, began to ravage the Vexin and the lands belonging to Robert of Dreux before turning west to Touraine, where he deftly relieved his brother of those three castles that had comprised his miserly inheritance. Attacking here, counterattacking there, within six weeks he had routed each of his opponents. To Louis, it must have seemed that he could do nothing right. Bereft of hope, bewildered, he came down with another fever and retired to the Île-de-France to brood upon the irretrievable loss of Aquitaine, which, in his opinion, should have been the lawful inheritance of Marie and Alix.

These were anxious weeks for Eleanor as she waited for the attack that never came, but as news of Henry’s successes filtered back to Poitiers, she must have been relieved at this confirmation of his abilities as a soldier. At the same time, however, she had reason for continued apprehension. By the end of June she had been forced to accept the disheartening fact that she had not conceived. Even though Henry desired sons with no less passion than Louis, he had married her despite her poor record as a breeder. Somehow she must have convinced him that those two lone pregnancies in fifteen years had been due to Louis’s lack of libido, but now, desperately anxious to prove her fertility and give him an heir, she realized that conception might be equally difficult with Henry, for entirely different reasons. If Louis had rarely made use of his conjugal privileges, Henry simply was not present to share her bed. Under the circumstances, it was unclear when she might see him next, for once he reached England there was no way of telling how long he would remain. For the moment, all she could reasonably do, however, was live her own life as duchess.

About this time she had a seal made, which gives us a fairly good impression of her majestic beauty. On one side is the full-length figure of an extremely slender woman, bare-headed, arms outstretched, holding in one hand a falcon and in the other a fleur-de-lis; the inscription reads, “Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine.” On the seal’s obverse side, inscribed with her newly acquired titles—duchess of Normandy, countess of Anjou—she wears a form-fitting gown with tight sleeves and, over her head, a veil that falls to the ground. Her charters and official proclamations in the early days of June 1152 convey a sense of her authority as well as pride in her new marital status: “I, Eleanor, by the grace of God, duchess of Aquitaine and Normandy, united with the duke of Normandy, Henry, count of Anjou ... ” Unlike most charters, these are strongly colored by emotions, positive as well as negative. To the Abbey of Montierneuf, for example, she reextended all the privileges granted by her great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, but she made no mention of her ex-husband, who had also accorded benefits to the monks. At the Abbey of Saint-Maixent, however, acknowledging the fact that she had taken back the woods that Louis had donated to the abbey, she renewed their rights to the lands “with a glad heart” now that she was joined in wedlock to the duke of Normandy. It was at Fontevrault, though, that her exhilaration shines through most clearly. To this abbey, which had meant so much to her grandmother Philippa and which would have enormous significance in her own life, she confirmed “with heartfelt emotion” all their existing privileges and added a personal donation of five hundred sous. In this particular charter, in which she mentioned her divorce and recent marriage to “my very noble lord Henry,” she expressed her feeling that she had come to Fontevrault “guided by God,” and certainly the deep impression made upon her that day would be confirmed by her continuing preference for Fontevrault above all other religious establishments.

While Eleanor had always been popular in Aquitaine, her vassals had never taken kindly to her first marriage. Whatever threats Louis had posed to their independence were nothing, however, compared to the ominous prospects of being ruled by Henry Plantagenet. When Eleanor had presented her new husband to her barons at the time of the marriage, they had given him a cool reception, and over the summer she had been forced to acknowledge a disquieting truth: If rumor could be believed, many of her vassals were saying that Henry had no claim on their loyalty, other than as the husband of their duchess, of course. Understandable was the deep misgiving with which they contemplated the possibility of Henry’s ascension to the throne of England, since it presented to them the distasteful prospect of a ruler whose authority would be backed by massive resources. For a people intolerant of any authority but their own, Eleanor’s new marriage came as an unwelcome surprise, which they did not intend to accept with good grace. At this time, however, Eleanor, perhaps sensibly, perhaps stupidly, seems to have given little thought to this problem, feeling no doubt that her vassals’ hostility to Henry would dissolve in time, and in any case, they had no choice but to eventually accept him.

In late August. Louis Capet’s threat to Plantagenet security over, Henry unexpectedly returned to Poitiers. Eager to take advantage of this opportunity to introduce a wider range of her vassals to their new duke, as well as to acquaint Henry with her ancestral possessions, Eleanor quickly arranged an extensive tour that would take them to every corner of the duchy. That autumn was, in retrospect, a joyous period, probably the most idyllic she would ever spend with Henry, because, for one thing, she had him to herself for four unbroken months. If, as far as Henry was concerned, the progress represented more or less a tour of newly acquired property, it was for Eleanor both a holiday and a homecoming, the first extended period she had spent among her own people since the divorce. Followed by mule trains and cartloads of baggage, they leisurely pursued the trails southward through Poitou, into the Limousin, down past the salt marshes of Saintonge, as far south as the rugged country of Gascony, all the while meeting old friends, sipping the hearty Bordeaux wines, loosing their falcons against the deep blue autumn skies. And everywhere that Eleanor traveled, she was followed by song and loud laughter, by boisterous crowds of knights, ladies, poets, and hangers-on. Every night there were banquets in great halls blazing with candles and the best plate: musicians to sing war songs, crusading songs, love songs, and, most assuredly, the bawdy songs of William the Troubadour; gossip of the latest seductions, marriages, and political feuds. There was talk of Byzantium and the Holy Land, with audiences eager for Eleanor’s tales of her travels. Henry, affable and relaxed most of the time, seemed to find her duchy to his taste, particularly when he could indulge his love of hunting and falconry. At other times, sensing the hostility of Eleanor’s vassals, he just barely managed to curb his temper, and on one occasion, he was unable to do so.

Henry and Eleanor had pitched their tents outside Limoges; despite the royal welcome extended by the townspeople, at mealtime Eleanor’s cook complained that the town had failed to send the customary provisions to the ducal kitchen tent. When Henry demanded explanations for this oversight, the abbot of Saint Martial’s informed him that the town was only obliged to provide victuals when Henry lodged within the city walls. This was putting altogether too fine a point on feudal obligations to suit Henry, and indeed the Limousins could not have made their low opinion of the duke more obvious.

There at Limoges, Eleanor had first witnessed one of Henry’s temper tantrums. The Angevin reputation for “black bile,” even her own fire-breathing father’s outbursts, had not prepared her for the sight of Henry in the grip of rage. Losing every vestige of self-control, he rolled on the ground, shrieking, writhing, and kicking. With spittle leaking from his mouth, he bit blankets, gnawed on straw, smashed furniture, and lashed out with hand or sword at anyone foolish enough to remain in the vicinity.

In the midst of just such a fit, Eleanor had stood by while Henry ordered the newly built walls of Limoges to be razed and their bridge destroyed so that, in future, no abbot could use them as an excuse to withhold from their duke his just and reasonable dues. If she received a rude shock from both her husband’s behavior as well as his order to tear down the town walls, she did not interfere because, as distressing as the command may have been, the insult reflected on herself as well and could not be tolerated.

Nevertheless, the southerners adored their duchess and delighted in making much of her, but if the limelight fell continually on Eleanor and rarely on Henry, he made no complaint. Even though the days seemed to pass in almost aimless fashion, appearances were deceptive. Like a businessman whose uppermost thoughts are always occupied by self-interest, Henry’s seemingly lackadaisical behavior covered a shrewd analysis of his wife’s resources. Taking advantage of all and any opportunities to further his invasion plans, he was quick to reconnoiter the harbor towns, where he made arrangements to hire ships; in Gascony he was able to recruit additions to his infantry. All in all, it was a productive trip.

By December the ducal chevauchée disbanded; Eleanor returned to Poitiers, while Henry went on to Normandy, where he visited his mother in Rouen and, perhaps more important, availed himself of the services of a moneylender. A man who “detested delay above all things,” he set sail in a severe winter gale with a fleet of 36 ships, 140 knights, and 3,000 men-at-arms. On January 6, 1153, he landed at Bristol, but desire not always being destiny, his future was by no means a certainty.

Never the type of woman to depend upon the presence of a man to keep her occupied, Eleanor saw no point in playing the abandoned wife. Another woman, even now, might have retired to her quarters and resigned herself to sitting out the war, killing time as best she could until her spouse’s return. Such meek behavior, however, required a less ambitious temperament than Eleanor possessed, and moreover, it did not, evidently, jibe with what Henry seemed to expect of her. He was not a man who scorned female intelligence, his mother having been the equal of any man and indeed, some said cuttingly, masculine enough in her thinking as to suggest that she might be the superior of most men. Growing up in the company of a mother such as Matilda, Henry emerged with a healthy admiration for high-spirited, assertive women, a factor that no doubt played an important part in his attraction to Eleanor. While by no means liberated from the masculine prejudices against women that were rife in his age, he nonetheless recognized administrative competence when he encountered it. If it occurred within his own family, so much the better, since he tended to distrust outsiders. If the capable person happened to be female, he was not so foolish as to reject her for that minor disability. Therefore, when he departed for England, he left Normandy in the care of his mother, while delegating Eleanor to rule over Anjou as well as her own estates. From a practical standpoint, it suited his purposes admirably to use Eleanor, now and in years to come, as a sort of stand-in for himself. Superficially it would appear, and may initially have seemed to Eleanor herself, that he was offering a position of corulership, an equal partnership in his government, but his magnanamity would turn out to be highly deceptive. Henry did not think of her as an equal nor could he bear to see power slip from his own hands, but it would be a number of years before Eleanor could acknowledge this fact. If she misjudged her husband, he was equally blind in reading her desires, for, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, she was one of those “women desiren to have soverainetee.”

It has been suggested that she now took up residence in Angers, the ancestral capital of the Angevin counts, although probably at least part of her time was spent in Poitiers. As her deputy in Aquitaine she appointed her uncle Ralph de Faye, who was her mother’s brother and whom she trusted. If after her years of struggle to return to Aquitaine, she felt reluctant to pull up stakes once more, she made no objections. This was not the first time that she had been obliged to place a husband’s priorities above her own, nor would it be the last. Her confidence high, she surveyed her present as well as her future and found it full of promise. Not the least of her satisfactions was the discovery, shortly before Henry’s departure, that she was expecting his child. Exultant and no doubt enormously relieved, she had been able to bid him farewell with a full and optimistic heart.

The castle of Angers, still standing today, was completely rebuilt in the thirteenth century, but a hundred years earlier it still must have been a comfortable, imposing residence. The city of Angers itself, no provincial hinterland, had its full share of schools, churches, and convents; philosophy and poetry were not unknown there, and the Loire valley produced an exquisite vin rose. In short, it offered possibilities for Eleanor who, instead of relaxing and slipping into a contented, idle pregnancy, embarked on a more strenuous program than she had undertaken in years, both as an administrator and as a woman intent upon enjoying herself. During 1153 she was free to live a life of her own design, and regardless of Henry’s less than enthusiastic attitude toward troubadours, she had collected a number of them during her autumn travels. To Angers, then, she transported her household of Poitevins, her assorted vassals and relatives, including, no doubt, her sister, Petronilla, and her two illegitimate brothers, William and Joscelin, and the enthralled music makers who asked nothing better than to sing her praises. Released from all restrictions at last, she was able to push from her mind any lingering memories of Louis’s puritanical court, even to some extent able to dismiss her young husband, who also had no use for the trilling of troubadours, and create for herself the milieu she loved best.

The glimpses we catch of Eleanor during this interlude come from poetry rather than from chronicles or charters, and they reveal a woman young, vibrant, and eager to be adored. Her pregnancy notwithstanding, there was no dearth of men ready to fall in love with her and, an equally important consideration, to receive the rewards she distributed with a generosity reminiscent of her grandfather. By right of inheritance and by her own intelligence, she was amply equipped for the role of literary critic and patroness and, quick to recognize artistic talent, she extended her patronage to Bernard of Ventadour, a gifted poet who had been banished from his last place of employment for making improper advances to the lady of the castle. The son of an archer and a kitchen servant, Bernard may have emerged from humble beginnings, but he had been taught the art of poetry by his master, Eble II of Ventadour. Just as Henry Plantagenet, the man of action, appealed to one side of Eleanor’s nature, Bernard appealed to another: her love of romance; her fantasy of being worshiped: her belief that despite the teachings of the Church, women were not inferior to men, not their equals, but their superiors. The sensitivity of a man like Bernard, whom Henry would have dismissed as effeminate, was a magical quality that drew her just as strongly as Henry’s quest for political power; she would never be satisfied with a man who combined anything less than both of these traits.

For Bernard’s part, he could no more resist Eleanor than a bee the blossom. In 1153, times were hard in Europe; there had been famine in some places, and people were occupied by more serious matters than hiring poets. The duchess of Aquitaine, however, “was young and of great worth, and she had understanding in matters of value and honor, and cared for a song of praise.” In the next century it would be claimed that Bernard became Eleanor’s lover, but at the time there was no insinuation of overfamiliarity. On the contrary, Bernard’s lyrical passion was entirely suitable in a troubadour addressing a beautiful young duchess. It was the sort of admiration—chivalrous, wildly romantic, essentially meaningless—that Eleanor had always enjoyed, something to which she had been accustomed at the court of William the Troubadour. In Bernard’s panegyrics, we see Eleanor through the gallant eyes of the poet but perhaps as other contemporaries saw her as well: “gracious, lovely, the embodiment of charm,” “lovely eyes and noble countenance,” “one meet to crown the state of any king.” When Bernard thinks of her, he feels “a wind from paradise,” when he looks at her, his heart is so full of joy that everything in nature seems changed, and “I see in the winter only white, red and yellow flowers.”

I am not one to scorn
The boon God granted me;
She said in accents clear ..
Before I did depart,
“Your songs they please me well.”
I would each Christian soul
Could know my rapture then,
For all I write and sing
Is meant for her delight.

In England, however, no troubadours composed songs, no ladies played games of love with their preux chevaliers. “The kingdom,” said a chronicler, “was suddenly agitated by the mutterings of rumors, like a quivering bed of reeds swept by the blasts of the wind.” England waited to see if Matilda’s nineteen-year-old son, whom some called “intrepid” and others called “rash,” would bring King Stephen to heel, or vice versa. Actually, from the moment of Henry’s landing at Bristol, everything, the weather included, seemed to conspire in his favor. Undeniably, his own shrewdness was a factor, for instead of attacking Stephen at Wallingford, which had been under siege for a year, he made a surprise attack on Malmesbury Castle, a strategy that had the effect of obliging the king to come to him. When the rival armies finally faced each other across the Avon River, “the floodgates of heaven were opened and heavy rain drove in the faces of Stephen’s men, with violent gusts of wind and severe cold, so that God himself appeared to fight for the duke.” Henry, the storm at his back, calmly accepted the king’s surrender of Malmesbury. After this bloodless victory, he ceased to be regarded as a brash young adventurer, and some of England’s most powerful nobles began coming to his support with money and troops. Thus, by the beginning of summer, Henry felt secure enough to go to the aid of his besieged followers at the castle of Wallingford. Once again, circumstances—some said divine will—prevailed to clear the way for his success. When King Stephen was thrown from his horse three times prior to the battle, his advisers interpreted these incidents as ill omens. “It was,” the chronicles tell us, “terrible and very dreadful to see so many thousands of armed men eager to join battle with drawn swords, determined, to the general prejudice of the kingdom, to kill their own relatives and kin.” Standing on opposite banks of the Thames at a narrow place in the river, Henry and Stephen spoke together out of earshot of their armies. Shortly afterward, each man returned to his troops, announcing that the battle had been called off but offering no explanation.

King Stephen’s son, Eustace, disgusted at what seemed to him spineless conduct on the part of his father, left Wallingford reeling with rage. However much detested throughout England for his obnoxious qualities, Eustace considered himself the rightful heir to the throne. Plowing through the Suffolk countryside, he rode up to the Abbey of Bury Saint Edmunds, where he audaciously demanded money to pay his men. The monks, while welcoming him graciously, refused to part with their silver. On August 17, “he ordered all the country round about, and especially St. Edmunds’ harvests, to be plundered and all the loot to be brought to a nearby castle of his.” That evening, sitting down to a dinner of eels, he was said to have strangled on the first bite and to have died almost immediately.

Eustace’s sudden death can most likely be attributed to tainted fish, but to the twelfth-century mind it seemed a punishment direct from the hand of God, who seemed to be laboring in the cause of Henry Plantagenet. On November 6, 1153, his support tottering, his spirit collapsed, Stephen met with Henry at Winchester to discuss terms of peace. The two men traveled together to London, where, in the presence of the leading nobles of the land, a treaty was hammered out: “Be it known to you that I, the King of England, Stephen, have made Henry, Duke of Normandy, the successor to the kingdom of England after me, and my heir by hereditary right, and thus I have given and confirmed to him and his heirs the kingdom of England.” By the terms of the Treaty of Winchester, Stephen was to rule for the remainder of his life, with Henry, his “son and heir,” to succeed him. After a generation of civil war, the vows of fealty that the English nobles had made to Matilda had finally come to pass, and the way was paved for the first of the Plantagenet dynasty.

Stephen, however, was fifty-eight years old, in fairly good health, and although he had agreed that “in all the business of the kingdom I will act with the advice of the duke,” Henry knew that he had no real authority. He understood, too, that Stephen might live possibly another ten or fifteen years and that certain malcontents “whose teeth were spears and arrows” were already trying to sow discord between them. Having accomplished his objective and at a loss as to what to do next, Henry lingered anticlimatically in England until the spring of 1154. Around Easter, he decided to return to Normandy, where he “was joyfully received by his mother, his brothers and all the peoples of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou.”

During Henry’s sixteen-month absence Eleanor had produced a special triumph of her own. On August 17, the same day that Eustace had died, she had given birth to a son, whom she had taken upon herself to christen William, after the dukes of Aquitaine, and designate as heir to her duchy. If, as has been suggested, the name also honored Henry’s great-grandfather William the Conqueror, this surely must have been a secondary consideration in her mind. Although the chroniclers neglect to mention Henry’s wife in the list of those who joyfully welcomed his return, Eleanor had more reason than most for rejoicing. At thirty, she had killed off her past as certainly as if it had never existed, and it must have seemed as though the birth of her son represented a final ironic salvo to Louis Capet. One of the prices of divorce had been the loss of her daughters, with what anguish it is impossible to say, and any visiting privileges she may have been guaranteed had been immediately forfeit when she married Henry.

At last the self-contempt she had experienced through her inability to bear an heir for the Franks had vanished: at last the son for whom Louis had hungered had been born, but he would sit upon another throne. And as if to prove that her child were no fluke, no lucky accident from a woman almost past her prime as a childbearer, she became pregnant again just two months after Henry’s return. Looking ahead, she could see only days of honor and glory in which regret would play no part. Henry’s success in England had painted on her horizon the prospect of someday being the wealthiest, most prestigious queen in Christendom, and yet Eleanor was realist enough to understand that she never could have enjoyed that future had she not provided her young husband with a son. Henry seemed delighted with the eight-month-old infant, as he would be with all his children when they were young, spoiling them, making grandiose plans for their futures, lavishing paternal passion on them far in excess of what could be expected of the ordinary medieval father. Unknown to Eleanor at this time, William was not Henry’s only son. In the previous year, probably a month or two after William’s birth, a child had been born to an English woman of the streets, Ykenai, who, according to Walter Map, was “a common harlot who stooped to all uncleanness” and who had gulled Henry into believing the child his. “Without reason and with too little discernment,” chides Map, Henry had received the child as his own and named him Geoffrey.

Eleanor’s life underwent minor changes during the six months that followed Henry’s return. Throwing himself tumultuously into the business of ordering his affairs, he relieved her of the reins of government, an authority Eleanor may have relinquished with some relief at that time. Some of her vassals in Aquitaine, taking advantage of both duke and duchess’s absence, had begun to cautiously test their power, and Henry, after stopping at Rouen to see his mother, made a flying trip to the south in an effort to put down the smoldering fires of rebellion. Watching him in action, Eleanor was more aware than ever of the overwhelming force of Henry’s personality and his thunderous roars when thwarted. By the end of June, he was back at his mother’s court in Rouen, where Eleanor joined him and met her mother-in-law. In her relations with Louis’s mother she had been notably unsuccessful, mutual antagonism driving Adelaide from the court, but with Matilda it would be another story. There was much for Eleanor to admire in this remarkable, hard-headed dowager who had spent two decades fighting for her son’s inheritance. Fascinated by Matilda from a distance, she found, however, that it would not be easy to like her at close quarters. Aside from the empress’s cool, formal manner, she had a type of relationship with her son that immediately aroused Eleanor’s natural jealousy. From the outset, it was made plain to her that Henry truly valued only his mother’s opinion, and to a woman like Eleanor, with strong opinions of her own, this must have been exasperating indeed. The bond between Matilda and Henry, more akin to two generals than mother and son, stirred her antagonism. She soon discovered that if Henry wanted advice—and at this period he did, apparently, seek the opinions of others—it was to Matilda that he went for guidance; it was Matilda’s judgment on political affairs that he valued above all others. This must have been a disturbing revelation to Eleanor, who considered herself, by virtue of age, experience, and her capacity as his wife, to be a more fitting confidante.

Eleanor’s court was not able to survive the move from Angers to Rouen, since Matilda, though highly literate, preferred philosophers to poets; reluctantly, the troubadours made their way back to the more congenial southland. It promised to be an uneventful summer, although Eleanor would find the time passing quickly, and certainly she could never complain of boredom. Messengers, bringing news from London, Paris, and Rome, came and went continually. Henry, rarely home, had no sooner returned to Rouen than he began to think of leaving, once to besiege a troublesome vassal at Torigni, once in August to meet briefly with Louis Capet. In September, an illness sent him to bed, but he recovered rapidly, and by early October he was in the Vexin, campaigning again. During that summer reports about Louis’s private affairs drifted into the Rouen command post. Rousing himself from post-divorce lethargy, Louis set off on a pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela. Ostensibly a religious expedition, it was also for the purpose of inspecting the daughter of the king of Castile as a possible bride. Evidently Constance, a sober maiden who bore no resemblance in personality or looks to Eleanor, passed his scrutiny, for Louis returned to Paris betrothed. No doubt to Eleanor’s amusement, her former husband traveled all the way to Spain and back by way of Toulouse and Montpellier so that he would not have to ask Eleanor for a safe conduct nor step foot on her territory.

Toward the end of October, with Henry still away in the Vexin, only Eleanor and Matilda were in Rouen to receive a travel-stained courier from England, the bearer of an important message from Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury: On October 25, King Stephen had died at Dover from “a flux of hemorrhoids”—Henry must “come without delay and take possession of the kingdom.” The call, which no one had anticipated for a decade or more, had arrived like a thief in the night. Henry, who had a reputation for traveling faster than any other man in Europe, rushed back from the Vexin, and within two weeks he had collected a properly imposing retinue of soldiers, barons, and prelates, men who had long ago tied their destiny to his, as well as old crusading companions of Eleanor’s, and hurried them all to the windy harbor town of Barfleur to help him claim his first crown and Eleanor her second. Matilda, oddly enough, would not be among those present at Henry’s anointing, for she either volunteered or was requested to remain in Normandy to keep the peace, but among the party were Henry’s two younger brothers, Eleanor’s sister and brothers, and the infant Prince William.

In England, the throne remained vacant. Stephen was dead and with him had died a generation of misery and civil war. He was not regretted, but the new king, a mere lad, folk said, remained an unknown quantity. Still, people hoped great things of Henry, peace if nothing else, and the versifiers composed hopeful odes in his honor: “Then shall beam forth, in England’s happier hour/ Justice with mercy, and well-balanced power.”

Out to sea the thunder growled, and at Barfleur Henry, immobilized, stared at the Channel churning with sleet, rain, and violent winds. Each day he consulted his mariners and swore noisily; each day, restless as a caged lion, he scanned the leaden November sky for a break in the weather, but the storms perversely continued. Monotonously, the days wore on until they had tarried in the inns and taverns of Barfleur a whole month. Eleanor had time to watch the seabirds shrieking and to converse endlessly with Petronilla and her brothers, time to ponder the bizarre twists and turns that had brought her to this sleet-swept port. Whether directed by her own sagacity or by God or even by some happy conjunction of the planets, she had fastened her future to the Plantagenet star, which now seemed destined to dominate the heavens. The weatherbeaten youth she had scrutinized so carefully in Paris only three years earlier “seemed to have obtained divine favor in almost everything, not only from the beginning of his reign but even from his first year and his very birth.” At the same time, she could not have helped but reflect how the rise in his fortunes had been connected to deaths, most of them untimely: Prince William drowning in the White Ship, Geoffrey Anjou’s sudden passing, Eustace strangling on eels, Stephen’s death only a year after Winchester. Each man’s removal from the scene had brought Henry a step closer to the empire for which he hungered. She knew that his blood raced for yet more land, more power, because he had been known to say “that the whole world was too small a prize for a single courageous and powerful ruler.” With this man she could not predict where the future might take her. For the moment there was England to think of, and from everything she knew of the country—its cold, damp climate; civilization’s last frontier, inhabited by rude barbarians—it seemed the opposite of Aquitaine and far, far worse than Paris. But there would be no returning to Aquitaine, perhaps not for many years. Aquitaine must wait, as it had always waited for her, a fair and gracious sanctuary.

By December 6, after four long weeks of waiting, the wind slackened somewhat, but fog still shrouded the shore, and the sea looked as menacing as ever. Henry, however, had reached the limit of his patience, and “by God’s eyes” he would delay no longer: the next day. he announced, was the feast of Saint Nicholas, protector of sailors and travelers, and they would sail, regardless of the weather. Before dawn, the voyagers heard Mass and then filed into the galleys. The sea was so hidden in silvery fog that the world might have ended just beyond the harbor. Eleanor, seven months pregnant and carrying her fifteen-month-old son, boarded one of the heaving vessels, which cautiously proceeded into the wrinkled face of the Channel. With her across that stretch of choppy sea she took more than her children, born and unborn: she also transferred Aquitaine to the dominion of the English crown, thus planting the seeds of that century-long conflict that would only be resolved, ironically, by another woman, Jeanne d’Arc.

On December 8, after a day and a night of rolling in the fog, the convoy finally dropped anchor on the southern coast of England, although the ships were scattered for miles along the coastline. The royal vessel landed in a harbor near the New Forest, but Henry, feverishly impatient as usual, could not be bothered to wait for his escort. Immediately, he and Eleanor set out for Winchester, which housed part of the royal treasury. The others were left to catch up as best they could. The English, incredulous at the rumor that Henry had ridden the waves of the storm, emerged from their hearths, sat down by the frozen road, and waited for a glimpse of their twenty-one-year-old king with his ruddy, leonine face and the famous queen who had divorced a dull king for a bold young warrior and who would ever be known to the English as the Eagle. By the time the royal procession neared London, its ranks were swollen by local barons and prelates and by crowds of villagers with snow-damp feet trudging in the wake of history.

Eleanor’s first glimpse of London in that chill December must have given her a moment’s pause. There is no exact way to fix the population of the city in 1154, although from various accounts an estimate of forty thousand seems reasonable. The chronicler William Fitz Stephen chauvinistically called London “among the noble and celebrated cities of the world,” renowned for its healthy air, its honest Christian burghers and “the modesty of its matrons.” The women, he added, “are very Sabines.” Eleanor saw no Sabine women; rather it was a man’s city to which “every nation under heaven delighted in bringing their trade by sea.” By the docks along the Thames, she could see wine shops and painted women and ships being repaired with pegs and nails, ropes being hauled, and crews loading. “The Arabian sends gold ... the Nile sends precious stones; the men of Norway and Russia, furs and sables; nor is China absent with purple silk. The Gauls come with their wines.” London was a rich city, where trade was god and men thought mainly about making money, where one of the biggest attractions was the Friday horse fair at Smooth Field (Smithfield), where earls, barons, and knights came to buy the high-stepping palfreys with their gleaming coats, colts stepping with jaunty tread, war-horses with tremulous ears and enormous haunches, and where, in another part of the field, countryfolk perused cows with full udders, woolly sheep, and mares fit for the plow. London, like Paris, teemed with people. The streets were lined with rows of wooden houses, firetraps smeared with red, blue, and black paint, and many of the residents were tradesmen who manufactured goods on their premises. In Chepeside, the busiest street in the city, the shops of the drapers and goldsmiths displayed silk mantles from Damascus and enameled trinket boxes from Limoges. Londoners were inordinately proud of their city. “The only plagues of London,” conceded William Fitz Stephen, “are the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires.”

The city’s most wonderful attraction, the one its citizens boasted of most often, was not a cathedral or the Tower of London or even Westminster Palace, but a public cookshop along the Thames that remained open twenty-four hours a day.

There daily you may find food according to the season, dishes of meat, roast, fried and boiled, large and small fish, coarser meats for the poor and more delicate for the rich, such as venison and big and small birds. If any of the citizens should unexpectedly receive visitors, weary from their journey, who would fain not wait until fresh food is bought and cooked, or until the servants have brought bread or water for washing, they hasten to the river bank and there find all they need.

When Eleanor rode into London, she may have wished herself, for once, one of the common folk who could stop at the Thames-side cookshop, because even though she and Henry were not exactly unexpected visitors, no proper preparations had been made for their arrival. Westminster Palace, the official residence of royalty, had been so despoiled by King Stephen’s men that it now was far beyond human habitation. While Henry might have happily bivouacked at Westminster had he been alone, Eleanor was accustomed to more comfortable surroundings. The royal family took up temporary quarters across the river from the Tower of London, in the village of Bermondsey, where there was an ancient Saxon palace and an abbey, newly built.

Eleven days after their arrival, on Sunday, December 19, 1154, Henry and Eleanor were crowned king and queen of England in the abbey church of Westminster, which was in scarcely better shape than the palace. To Eleanor, the dinginess of London’s great halls and the dilapidated condition of its churches were telling evidence of the strife that had rocked England during Stephen’s rule. Nevertheless, no expense was spared to make the coronation as magnificent a ceremony as possible. Into the abbey in solemn procession came the pages, knights, and barons, followed by the bishops, abbots, and priests, their vestments gleaming with gold and precious stones, and finally Henry and Eleanor, accompanied by Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury. The abbey shone with countless candles, the choir of monks sang lustily, and the great bells in the tower crashed thunderously. During Mass, the Archbishop anointed Henry and Eleanor with holy oils and placed the crowns upon their heads. Immediately afterward, Henry issued the customary coronation charter, a sort of printed inaugural address, in which he ignored the twenty years of Stephen’s reign as surely as if they had not existed. In practically every other sentence he referred to his grandfather, whose ruling precepts he vowed to follow: “I am granting and giving by this charter, confirmed to God and the Holy Church and to all my counts, barons and subjects, all the concessions and grants, liberties and free customs which King Henry, my grandfather, gave and granted them. Likewise I outlaw and abolish for myself and my heirs all the evil customs which he abolished and outlawed.” Denying what displeased him, saying what people wanted to hear, harking back to the past, Henry freed himself to initiate whatever innovations he pleased. In reality, he had no intention of copying his grandfather’s policies, and for that matter, the next thirty-five years would prove to be the most radical in the realm’s history—for they were years in which the foundations of English common law were laid. No ruler of England, before or after, would so strongly influence the development of its institutions as Henry Plantagenet, and so thoroughly would he do his work that, after his passing, the royal government would be able to function, if need be, without a king.

Once Henry and Eleanor had been “crowned and consecrated with becoming pomp and splendor,” they rode along the Strand among their subjects, the Londoners running up and down to stare at the lion and the eagle, booming out their approval with shouts of “Waes hael”and “Vivat rex.” Henry, proverbially careless of his clothing, knew the value of putting on a good show, and that day he looked every inch a king, a worthy successor to William the Conqueror. As for Eleanor, a Victorian biographer would dress her in “a wimple or close coif with a circlet of gems over it; her kirtle or close gown has tight sleeves and fastens with full gathers just below the throat, confined with a rich collar of gems” and over this was added “an elegant pelisson, bordered with fur.” Unfortunately, no contemporary description of Eleanor’s coronation gown has survived, if indeed any of the sober church chroniclers thought to include a fashion commentary, but it is reasonable to surmise that she wore the best of her finery. The only fact of which we can be certain was that she was pregnant.