‘She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed.’
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
‘A very clever woman, most noble of blood, but fickle.’
Gervase of Canterbury
Henry and Eleanor were crowned ‘king and queen of the English’ by the archbishop of Canterbury on 19 December 1154. So unanimous was the acclaim that archbishop Theobald had had no difficulty in governing the kingdom during the six weeks between Stephen’s death and Henry’s arrival. It was probably at the coronation that Henry received his name of ‘curtmantle’, on account of his waist-length French cloak, which made an odd contrast with the old-fashioned voluminous garments of the English magnates. As was customary, the new king issued a coronation charter, but it was not the usual list of concessions designed to please the great. Instead Henry II promised to restore lands and laws to what they had been at the death of his grandfather Henry I in 1135.
Presumably Eleanor was intrigued by her new country. Although she knew the Balkans, the middle east and Italy, and had experienced extremes of hot and cold weather, the damp English climate with its rain and fogs must have been an unpleasant surprise, even if summers were warmer then than they usually are today. An enthusiastic Englishman, William FitzStephen, writing only twenty years later, has left an attractive picture of the London of Henry II:
On the east stands the Tower, exceeding great and strong, whose walls and bailey rise from very deep foundations, their mortar being mixed with the blood of beasts. On the west are two strongly fortified castles, while from them there runs a great continuous wall, very high, with seven double gates, and towers at intervals along its north side. On the south, London once had similar walls and towers; but the Thames, that mighty river teeming with fish, which runs on that side and ebbs and flows with the sea, has in the passage of time washed those bulwarks away, undermining them and bringing them down. Upstream, to the west, the royal palace rises high above the river, an incomparable building ringed by an outwork and bastions two miles from the city and joined to it by a populous suburb.
There were thirteen greater churches and 126 smaller ones.
Apparently London’s outskirts were equally agreeable:
On all sides, beyond the houses, lie the gardens of the citizens that live in the suburbs, planted with trees, spacious and fair, laid out beside each other … To the north are pasture lands and pleasant open spaces of level meadow, intersected by running waters, which turn mill wheels with a cheerful sound. Nearby lies a great forest with wooded glades full of lairs of wild beasts, red and fallow deer, boars and bulls.
The corn-fields produced abundant crops, and William rhapsodizes about the variety of food — ‘dishes roast, fried and boiled, fish of every size, coarse meat for the poor and delicate for the rich, such as venison and various kinds of birds’ — to be found every day in ‘a public cook-shop’ near the river. He speaks of scholars’ competitions, tournaments in boats on the river, and many other amusements.
But one suspects that William FitzStephen was the eternally self-satisfied Londoner, blind to any of his city’s imperfections. In reality Eleanor’s London was probably dismal enough when compared to contemporary Paris or Bordeaux, but it was her husband’s capital and she made the best of it. An abundance of imported goods must have done much to soften its discomforts. And many Londoners could make themselves understood in their peculiar Anglo-Norman dialect of French. (A modern comparison might perhaps be the difference between Australian and English.) It was a long time since Norman courtiers had sneeringly named Henry I and his English queen ‘Godric and Godgifu’ because of their partiality for Saxons. The two peoples had intermarried so that nowadays language was a matter of status rather than race. Every upper- and middle-class Englishman spoke French, which was the language of commerce as well as of the court and the castle.
King Henry had little time to ponder on the differences between the ways of life in his widespread domains. The ‘nineteen years-long winter’ of his predecessor’s reign had left much of England in miserable disorder. The monks of Peterborough (who had stubbornly continued to keep their chronicle in Anglo-Saxon) give an appalling picture of conditions in the fenlands, terrorized by robber barons in impregnable castles.
When the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men. Then, day and night, they took people they thought had any goods — men and women — and imprisoned them, torturing them with indescribable tortures to extort gold and silver; no martyrs were ever so cruelly tortured. They were hung up by the thumbs or by the head, with weights tied to their feet. Knotted ropes were fastened round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brain. They put them in prisons where there were adders and toads and killed them that way too.
The monks tell of boxes in which men were crushed with stones until their ribs, legs and arms were broken, of massive chains locked around a man’s neck and throat so that he could neither lie nor sit and was unable to sleep. The poor suffered no less than the rich, their oppressors killing ‘many thousands’ by starvation. Further, ‘when the wretched folk had no more to give, they robbed and burned all the villages, so that you could easily go a whole day’s journey and never find anyone occupying a village or cultivated land. Corn was dear, and meat and butter and cheese, because there was no one in the country. Many unhappy people died of starvation; some lived by begging, who had once been rich men; others fled the country.’ In the west, in the north, in many midland shires, in the Thames valley and in Kent it was as bad. Indeed, when Eleanor first came to England she found a miserable land, ‘where men said that Christ and his saints slept’.
Many robber barons remained undisturbed in castles they had built unlawfully — simple, easily erected affairs of earth mounds, ditches and stockades — continuing to terrorize entire districts. In the fortnight after his coronation Henry issued a whole series of orders to deal with the problem. Illegal castles must be demolished and mercenaries must leave. Any royal lands given away by king Stephen or seized by the barons were to be restored to Henry. He is said to have pulled down over a thousand castles, and within three months nearly every mercenary had left England. William of Newburgh (the greatest of the twelfth century historians of England) says that these men were so terrified, and slipped away in so short a time, ‘that they seemed to have vanished like phantoms’. All were cowed by this formidable ruler who inexorably increased his iron grip over the entire country, travelling its length and breadth, deciding law suits and punishing criminals, and reinstating men in manors of which they had been wrongfully dispossessed. In a few months he brought back the peace and order of his grandfather’s day, becoming a byword for swift justice.
This was only the beginning of Henry’s programme of more efficient government. He improved the existing machinery, and then created new institutions. There was a comprehensive investigation of royal dues and a methodical examination of revenue; tax collection was made more thorough and new taxes imposed, Exchequer officials receiving every encouragement. A new and purer silver coinage was issued. The administration of the common law was drastically reformed by the introduction of the assize system and the rise of local juries; judges travelled regularly through the shires, dispensing justice at set times of the year. The king also hoped to harmonize ecclesiastical and secular courts, so that the latter could deal with crimes committed by clerics. He strengthened his rule over every area of his domains, centralizing the administration at Westminster and Rouen.
Nonetheless Henry’s own presence was the surest guarantee of good conduct. He was constantly in the saddle, a royal judge perpetually at assize, interviewing sheriffs and checking tax receipts. Walter Map wrote feelingly: ‘Solomon says “There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air: the way of a serpent on a rock: the way of a ship in the midst of the sea: and the way of a man with a maid”. I can add a fifth: the way of a king of England.’ Peter of Blois complains how Henry was always leaving early or changing his mind so that the vast royal retinue was thrown into complete disorder — ‘a lively imitation of hell’. Courtiers and officials accompanying him often found when they reached their destination that there was accommodation for the king alone, and would draw their swords to fight for a hovel ‘which pigs disdain’. One night, he rode over the Welsh mountains in drenching rain for sixteen hours. Peter says that sometimes the king covered in a day five times the distance a normal man thought feasible: he probably averaged as much as forty miles.
The Plantagenet tombs at Fontevrault. Archives Photographiques, Paris.
Eleanor’s youngest son, king John: from the effigy in Worcester Cathedral. A. S. Kersting.
Eleanor had to accompany her husband along terrible roads that at best were the remains of those left by the Romans, at worst little tracks that became quagmires in winter or wet weather. No doubt she rode on horseback when she could, but if pregnant (which she frequently was) she must have had to endure travelling in clumsy, leather-roofed waggons with springless wooden wheels. It may have been some consolation that comforts were at hand in the wains that jolted after her: furniture, bedding, plate, table linen, hangings and curtains, even portable chapels, to make tolerable gaunt stone keeps or rough wooden halls.
In spite of all the discomfort, with such an active mind herself the queen must have admired her new partner’s energy and originality, his decisiveness and stream of fresh ideas. No man could have been more different from Louis VII. Eleanor frequently dispensed justice in Henry’s absence, arbitrating in disputes over land and feudal dues, and presiding over law courts. She also kept a careful watch on certain tax receipts. Throughout, she showed herself clear-headed and firm, indeed dictatorial.
In the later stages of her pregnancies and at great feasts, however, and no doubt too sometimes at her own whim, Eleanor stayed in Henry’s palaces, which were probably far from uncomfortable — at least for the queen and her ladies. The most important were Westminster, Clarendon and Woodstock. Westminster was an administrative complex and the centre of royal government, with its law court and Exchequer. It had become so derelict as to be uninhabitable, but the king had it rebuilt in 1155. It was spacious enough, possessing two great halls and a range of private apartments. Clarendon was no less impressive, with a magnificent hall and an unusually capacious wine cellar. (Its overgrown and incompletely excavated site near Salisbury is one of the most inexplicably neglected of English historical monuments.) But despite such splendours as marble pillars, these sumptuous buildings were still in many ways barbarous, with rushes on the floor, and a fireplace whose smoke had to find its way out through a louvre, and lit at night by flaring torches or guttering rushlights.
Probably only the queen’s bowers were proof against draughts, panelled, with tiled floors and glass windows, and furnished with silk hangings and oriental carpets. She is known to have bought cushions and tapestry when in England, and from the Pipe Rolls it seems that her apartments were lit by sweet-scented oil and perfumed with incense. She possessed gold and silver plate, brassware and table linen. According to Peter of Blois the royal household had to make do with ‘half-baked bread, sour wine, stale fish and bad meat’, but this can hardly have been the fate of Eleanor’s ladies, as she imported quantities of her native wine from La Rochelle and her cooks made lavish use of pepper and cinnamon. Nevertheless she doubtless presided with easy aplomb over banquets in the draughty, smoky great halls.
The queen would meet all the great Englishmen of her day. These included magnates such as Robert de Beaumont, earl of Leicester, and Richard de Lucy, both former supporters of king Stephen who had become Henry’s co-justiciars (his deputies during his absences from England). Hugh Bigod always remained a secret enemy of the new king, and William of Warenne, Stephen’s bastard son and earl of Surrey, claimed Norfolk from Hugh. Earl Ferrers of Derby and earl Patrick of Salisbury were also among the quarrelsome, battle-scarred veterans, who can hardly have made for a harmonious court.
Far closer to Henry — and therefore to Eleanor — were the great churchmen, not because the king was pious but because they were his chief administrators. The foremost was archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, a Benedictine monk and former abbot of Bec in Normandy of whom even St Bernard approved. Gracious and amiable, he was also learned, a product of the twelfth-century renaissance and fond of intellectuals’ company; his household contained many gifted young men — four future archbishops and six future bishops — and has been compared to a small university. Indeed Theobald was one of the abler and more interesting of mediaeval archbishops of Canterbury. Never an enemy of the queen as Bernard had been, he was on the contrary a peace-maker, and must have been a source of support to her.
Theobald’s chief adviser was Thomas Becket, whom he made archdeacon of Canterbury (as a deacon, not as a priest). Henry took such a liking to this brilliant and impressive man that he made him his chancellor. Thomas’s successor as archbishop Theobald’s right-hand man was John of Salisbury, a dedicated scholar who had studied at the French schools. His principal duty was drafting appeals to Rome, a function that soon made Henry dislike him. Another outstanding personality was Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford and later bishop of London. An Anglo-Norman noble already advanced in years, he was also a Benedictine monk and had once been prior of the great abbey of Cluny in Burgundy. The king trusted him and eventually appointed him his confessor. Eleanor must have met these distinguished clerics many times, often daily.
Despite his hardworking routine, Henry II found time to share some of his wife’s literary tastes. This is evident in the case of Marie of France (who may have been his half sister, the bastard daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet), abbess of Shaftesbury in Dorset. Marie wrote lais (elegant narrative poems on Arthurian themes derived from Brittany) that included the tale of Tristan and Yseult. Almost certainly Marie’s charming verse found favour with Eleanor, and Henry seems to have paid tribute to the queen’s admiration in an unusually imaginative way. Near the palace of Woodstock, deep in the forest, he built a bower inspired by the tale of Tristan and Yseult; in the story the lovers communicated by twigs dropped by Tristan into a stream flowing through Yseult’s chamber, which was in an orchard surrounded by a thick fence. At Everswell, this background was recreated, complete with spring, orchard and palisade, and in the seventeenth century John Aubrey was still able to reconstruct the plan of ‘Rosamund’s Bower’. For tradition wrongly made the bower and its setting — a tower and a maze, ‘wondrously wrought of Daedalus’s work’ — the scene of Henry’s later romance with Fair Rosamund. A ballad of Aubrey’s time tells us that:
Most curiously that bower was built
Of stone and timber strong.
A hundred and fifty doors
Did to this bower belong.
However, it is likely that Henry had Everswell built to divert Eleanor in the early, reasonably happy, years of their marriage.
The troubadours and Marie of France were far from constituting Eleanor’s entire literary patronage. Her official court reader was Wace of Jersey, who borrowed from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain to compose a narrative poem in Anglo-Norman French that was largely about king Arthur — the Roman de Brut. For, due to Chrétien de Troyes and other poets, the legendary British monarch had become the rage of Henry’s court. Some noblemen (though not king Henry) modelled themselves on Arthur’s knights, and a search was made for his tomb at Glastonbury. Both the king and the queen clearly believed in the legend, and visited Glastonbury themselves; Henry told the monks where they ought to dig for Arthur’s bones. Eleanor also patronized Chrétien de Troyes, whose earliest romance, Erec et Enide, may possibly have been inspired in part by her own adventures. Another writer of the same sort, Benoit of Sainte Maure, dedicated his Roman de Troie to the riche dame de riche rei (rich king’s rich lady) and he, together with many other long-forgotten poets, must have benefited from her bounty and encouragement. Benoit speaks of ‘her whose kindness knows no bounds’.
Although there is no direct evidence, one may be sure that Eleanor’s recreations also included the twelfth-century equivalent of the stage. As well as plays in Latin and French, singers, dancers, mummers, acrobats, conjurers and jugglers would all have been included in such entertainment. John of Salisbury was plainly horrified by the artificiality and bawdiness of such performers, complaining that they played in all the magnates’ houses in London, and he compared the situation to that which had once prevailed in Babylon. One cannot escape the inference that the royal palaces were as guilty of indecencies as those of the magnates. To judge from his objective observation of Eleanor and Louis in Italy, John was neither censorious nor puritanical, so it seems that even after her marriage to Henry the queen still retained her grandfather’s frivolity and was not frightened of shocking the clergy.
Yet not all queen Eleanor’s time was spent in amusement. For thirteen years she was constantly bearing children. She had five sons — William (who died aged only three), Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and John — and three daughters — Matilda, Eleanor and Joanna. Only Geoffrey and the younger daughters were born outside England. Three of the boys became kings and two of the girls queens.
Although such fertility was a sad reflection on Louis VII’s manhood, it also gave credence to his suspicions that Eleanor’s first marriage had been cursed by God. But there were enough ill omens for her second marriage too. The Poitevin line was thought to be unlucky, and there was the hermit’s curse on all the descendants of William IX. Moreover, the Angevins themselves were hardly an auspicious stock. Henry’s forebear, count Fulk Nerra (the Black), had been an unusually bloodstained warlord even by the standards of the eleventh century, and especially infamous as a plunderer of monasteries. He had bequeathed some uncomfortable legends. The worst of these was that he had married an evil spirit, Melusine, who was the daughter of Satan himself; she was said to have flown back to hell after bearing the count’s children. Henry’s family therefore had the distinction of being directly descended from the devil.
Despite their lineage Eleanor was no doubt optimistic about her children. The frustrated wife was turning into a possessive matriarch. Perhaps it was because she had had to wait so long for sons that she became so ferociously maternal; but her children were also a means of regaining power. They were to grow up very fond of her, even if they would sometimes fail to obey her.