‘Now she pays it.
The misery of us, that are born great,
We are forc’d to woo, because none dare woo us.’
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
‘… the duchess of Normandy, who was young and of great worth and understood courage and honour and liked songs in praise of her. The songs of Bernart [de Ventadour] pleased her and she took him for her guest and made him welcome. He was long at her court and fell in love with her, as she did with him. But while he was there, king Henry of England married her and took her from Normandy and led her away.’
Raynouard, Choix des poésies originales des troubadours
Eleanor had escaped from an unhappy and frustrating marriage, but — as was so painfully demonstrated during her journey home — found herself in an even more humiliating situation. This stately and masterful lady, who as queen of France had been accustomed to deference and respect, might now expect as unmarried heiress to Aquitaine to be seized at any moment and married at the point of the sword. She was once more what she had been when her father died — the quarry of every fortune hunter and robber baron.
The only escape possible was remarriage to a man of her own choice. An English chronicler (Gervase of Canterbury) suggests that Eleanor dispatched envoys to Henry, duke of Normandy, to offer him her hand, but this is unlikely. What probably happened was that she sent secretly to Henry accepting an offer that he had made, perhaps in Paris the previous summer. Her vassals had already been summoned to meet her, ostensibly to consider military matters, and she was therefore able to ask for their approval of the match without delay. Ironically, although she was no less closely related to the duke than she was to Louis, the couple did not bother to obtain a papal dispensation (although in 1146 a proposed marriage between Henry and Eleanor’s daughter had been vetoed by St Bernard on the grounds of consanguinity). On Whit Sunday, 18 May 1152, eight weeks after the annulment of her first marriage, the duchess of Aquitaine was married to the duke of Normandy in the cathedral church of Saint-Pierre at Poitiers.
After her ex-husband, Henry was unquestionably the most eligible bachelor in France. Besides Normandy he had inherited Maine, Anjou and Touraine from his father and he had a good chance of obtaining England as well. As has been seen, the fact that he was eleven years younger — he had been born in 1133 — was no obstacle. In person he was a big stocky man of enormous energy and physical strength, with a deep barrel chest and the bandy legs of a horseman. He had a large round head with a square freckled face, bulging blue-grey eyes, and close-cropped red hair and beard. He was carelessly dressed, blunt and unceremonious in manner and without any trace of his mother’s notorious arrogance. He was as energetic and restless as he was moody, constantly on horseback, moving endlessly from place to place. An expression amiable to the point of gentleness could change suddenly and terrifyingly, his face purple and his eyes shot with blood; there were astonishing outbursts when he would roll on the floor screaming and biting the rushes. He ate little and drank even less, his chief amusements being hunting and hawking. He was no less vigorous in mind than in body, and unusually well educated. (Twelfth-century magnates were often surprisingly literate: the duke’s father had learnt his military strategy by studying Vegetius’s De re militari.) Henry read and wrote Latin — which he spoke fluently in his hoarse, cracked voice — as well as French and Provencal, and is said to have had some knowledge of every tongue ‘from the coast of France to the river Jordan’. He would frequently withdraw to his chamber with a book. For all his vigour and intelligence, however, Eleanor can scarcely have realized that she was marrying one of the great men of her century.
Eleanor no doubt thought that in marrying a much younger man she was obtaining a biddable husband who would let her keep her newly regained power. She was mistaken; but to begin with, the marriage between the eighteen-year-old duke and the twenty-nine-year-old duchess seems to have been happy enough. Henry was passionately in love with Eleanor’s mature beauty and intellect. As highly sexed as he was vigorous — to judge from his string of mistresses — he gave his wife all the children she wanted; and although he preferred scholars to troubadours, he shared at least some of her intellectual pursuits.
Politically, Henry had taken a calculated risk in marrying Eleanor. The effort needed to keep Aquitaine and its aggressive baronage under control might well prove so exhausting as to hamper him in winning England. On the other hand, if she had taken someone else for her husband he would have been a constant threat to Anjou, which was separated from Poitou only by the river Loire. And Henry was never frightened of taking risks.
Louis was horrified by the news. No doubt he had expected any prospective suitor of his former queen to ask his permission before marrying her. After all, Eleanor was his ward and Henry was his vassal, so they were legally bound to seek his leave. It was just the sort of callow misjudgment that Louis would make. Plainly he and his advisers were horrified by the tidings, realizing that they had made a terrible political blunder. Some of the outrage felt by the French court is echoed by the malicious lie recorded by a chronicler that Henry’s father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, had been Eleanor’s lover and for this reason had forbidden his son to marry her. At one stroke all abbot Suger’s worst forebodings had come to pass. Not only had the Capetian monarchy let Aquitaine slip from its fingers but the duchy had been snapped up by one of the king’s most formidable vassals. If Henry obtained England in addition, he would be the most powerful ruler in western Christendom.
As usual Louis VII reacted violently and too late. Nevertheless he managed to assemble a dangerous-looking coalition. It included the king’s brother, the count of Dreux, whose lands bordered Normandy; the new count of Champagne; Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey, whom he had deprived of the four castles left to him by his father and who hoped to become count of Anjou in his place; and Eustace, count of Boulogne, who was king Stephen’s eldest son and heir, and Henry’s rival in the succession to the English throne. Quite apart from what they might take from the duke’s territory, these five intended to conquer Aquitaine and divide it between them. Henry, himself naive on this occasion, had not expected such a storm. He was busy on the Norman coast preparing to invade England when in June he heard that Louis was attacking his eastern borders. He rode to meet him at such a ferocious pace that many of his men’s horses foundered, and, when the French king retreated hastily, laid waste Dreux and then struck southward, capturing Geoffrey’s chief stronghold of Montsoreau and Geoffrey himself together with most of his supporters. Louis retired to his bed with a fever, worn out after only two months of fighting this alarming opponent, and agreed to a lengthy truce.
Henry and Eleanor then went on progress through her domains. The inhabitants were quickly taught that their new master was a very different man from Louis VII. At Limoges, when the monks of the abbey of Saint-Martial refused feudal dues by a legal quibble, he promptly demolished the walls that had only recently been built to protect both abbey and town. No rebelliousness is recorded elsewhere in Aquitaine at this time.
In January 1153 duke Henry sailed for England, landing in Dorset and making for Bristol, which had always remained loyal to Matilda’s cause and from where her party controlled a large area of the south-west, extending as far east as Wallingford on the river Thames. He was soon joined by Robert earl of Leicester and later earl Ferrers came over to him with other former supporters of king Stephen — many English lords had lands in Normandy. In July he relieved the heroically loyal town of Wallingford, while another group of his supporters under Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk, also waged an effective campaign. Stephen, brave but incompetent, fought on in the hope that he might be able to bequeath his crown to his eldest son Eustace; he still controlled most of England, and Eustace was ruthless and determined. But in the middle of August, count Eustace choked on an eel during dinner at Bury St Edmunds, where he had been plundering the abbey lands. Stephen was heartbroken. Abandoning the claims of another son, at Christmas at Westminster he formally recognized the duke of Normandy as his heir, and in January 1154 at Oxford he made his barons do homage to Henry as their future king.
While her husband was away in England, Eleanor’s principal residence appears to have been Angers, the capital of Anjou. It was — and still is — a most agreeable town on a beautiful site overlooking the river Loire, with fine buildings that included a strong palace-citadel. There were abbeys both inside and outside its walls and even schools of learning as at Orleans and Chartres. The local white wines were already famous.
On 17 August 1153 she gave birth to her first son, who was named William after her father and grandfather. Meanwhile Eleanor was able to amuse herself in a way that had all too often led to trouble when she was married to Louis. No doubt remembering Marcabru, the duchess gave shelter to an even more famous troubadour, Bernart de Ventadour. Despite his lordly name he was not a nobleman; his mother had been a kitchen servant of the family of Ventadour in the Limousin. There was a tradition of gai saber in this family and the lords of Ventadour encouraged Bernart to cultivate his remarkable poetic talent. As so often, the young man’s verses to the lady Alaiz, wife of Eble II of Ventadour, were a little too warm; the affair ended with Alaiz being imprisoned and then cast off, and Bernart himself had to flee for his life. He quickly found a congenial refuge with Eleanor, probably about the time Henry was fighting king Stephen, and soon developed an extravagant passion for her that he made known in some of his most admired songs. A thirteenth-century biographer says that ‘he was a long time at her court and he fell in love with her and she fell in love with him’. Later Bernart described himself as being ‘like a man beyond hope’, sighing ‘in such a state of love I was, though I would come to realize that I had been a madman’, that his wits fled whenever he saw the duchess, and he had ‘no more sense than a child, so overcome by love was I’. He told Eleanor — whom he addressed as ‘my magnet’ [mos aziman] — ‘You have been the first among my joys and you shall be the last, so long as there is life in me.’ In Provencal his songs have a liquid beauty that must have enchanted the duchess and her court.
According to a somewhat dubious tradition, Henry then summoned Bernart to England. A hundred years afterwards the biographer Uc de Saint-Circ explained that the duke, understandably uneasy at the poet’s outpourings, took this means of removing him from his wife’s court. Bernart did not enjoy England and wished he was a swallow who could fly back to Eleanor ‘across the wild, deep sea’. He managed to return, but Eleanor herself was soon to go to England. In the end Bernart found a new patroness to worship — Ermengarde, viscountess of Narbonne — and finally died a monk.
There is no information about the relationship between Eleanor and Bernart other than his verses and some later and highly inaccurate chronicles, but her patronage shows impeccable literary taste. Bernart de Ventadour is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest troubadours. It is revealing that in one of his poems he compares his love for Eleanor with that of Tristan for Izeut la blonda, showing that the duchess and her court were already familiar with the Arthurian cycle at this early date.
Duke Henry returned from England in April 1154. He and Eleanor then went to Rouen, where for the first time she met her mother-in-law Matilda, the daughter of Henry I of England and grand-daughter of the Conqueror, and the widowed empress of Germany who had nearly become queen of England in her own right. For all her ability and her bravery, however, the arrogance of ‘the lady of the English’ had tipped the scales against her in a ferocious war of succession. Even so she had sometimes shown herself magnificently resourceful. Trapped in Oxford during the winter of 1142, Matilda had herself lowered down from the castle walls and then with only three knights, dressed all in white like herself, had crossed the frozen river beneath and calmly walked unseen through Stephen’s camp to safety. Now she had passed all her claims to Henry, contenting herself with giving advice and helping him to govern Normandy. This splendid virago seems to have mellowed with age, and there is no record of any clash with her daughter-in-law. No doubt she recognized her as a woman of the same mettle as herself.
At last, on 25 October 1154, king Stephen died, and the news reached Rouen early in November. Terrible weather kept Henry from his kingdom for another month. Finally, despite the contrary winds, he set sail with Eleanor from Barfleur in a fever of angry impatience. The voyage must have been as miserable as those she had known on the crusade, and the ship lost contact with the fleet in a dense fog. But after twenty-four hours of storm-tossed peril she and her husband were blown on shore near Southampton.