‘Greatest of earthly princes.’
Richard FitzNigel on Henry II, Dialogus de Scaccario
‘But in my bosom shall she never come
To make my heart her vassal.’
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
Although ‘the Angevin empire’ is a modern term, it is not far from the reality. It is true that twelfth-century Christendom recognized only two emperors — the Greek basileus at Constantinople and the German king of the Romans — and that Henry was the vassal of the king of France, who always retained a theoretical overlordship. But in terms of territory, of wealth and knights, the English king was unquestionably regarded by contemporaries as the most formidable monarch in western Europe. His wife shared his pinnacle. She had more than regained the eminence lost when Louis rejected her. With Henry she wore her crown at Lincoln at Christmas 1156, at Bury St Edmund’s at Whitsun 1157 and at Worcester at Easter 1158, although the couple then solemnly placed their crowns on the cathedral altar and swore a strange oath never to wear them again.
On the other hand Eleanor possessed much less power than when she had been Louis’s wife. Admittedly twelfth-century English queens were regalis imperii participes (sharers in the kingship); as queen regnant Eleanor was entitled to ‘queen’s gold’, a special payment made to her on the issue of royal charters, and when Henry was out of the kingdom any writ was issued in her name and under her seal. Yet the real ruler in the King’s absence was the justiciar. The most recent biographer of Henry II points out: ‘There were brief periods when queen Eleanor acted as regent in her husband’s absence, but she seems to have lent little more than the authority of her name to the actions of his ministers.’ Moreover Henry ruled Aquitaine himself, something that Louis VII had never dared to do. Dr Warren adds: ‘It may well be that her political marriage to Henry of Anjou brought her neither the power nor the influence she — a duchess in her own right — thought to be her due. She had to contend not merely with the dominating personality of her husband, but also, until 1167, with the influence of an even more proud and strong-willed woman than she herself — his mother, empress Matilda.’
Always a realist, Eleanor soon realized that she would never be able to control this dynamic young man. No doubt, like most of his contemporaries, she found him as enigmatic as he was strong. So masterful a woman must quickly have tired of being tamed, but even if she resented it she recognized that she had met her match. She bided her time.
In any case, as has been seen, up to the late 1160s Henry kept Eleanor busy with bearing children. Eight pregnancies must have sapped even her enormous strength and vitality. Probably she solaced herself with the hope that she would recover her political power when her second surviving son, Richard, grew up and she could govern his inheritance of Aquitaine as regent. In the meantime she had to be content with mere splendour.
Eleanor’s earliest rival in Henry’s affections was not a woman but a man, the chancellor Thomas Becket, who had received his high office shortly after the king’s accession to the throne. Born in 1118, Thomas was the son of a London merchant who had originally come from Rouen; in those days the leading London merchants ranked with barons, and the lesser ones were equated with knights. In appearance he was tall and good-looking, with a hawk-nosed pale face that reddened when he was angry or excited. As quick-witted as he was observant, he was a stimulating and amusing conversationalist. Besides studying in Paris, he had been attached to archbishop Theobald’s household, whose atmosphere has been likened to a twelfth-century All Souls, but he was essentially an administrator and no intellectual. Although devout to the point of secret asceticism, he was obviously an ambitious career ecclesiastic who was thought of as a king’s man in the latent struggle between the secular power and the rights of the church.
As archdeacon of Canterbury Thomas Becket had held the most important ecclesiastical position below that of bishop. Only a few weeks after obtaining it, he was made chancellor of England, probably at Christmas 1154. His contemporaries write that Thomas stood with the king as Pharaoh did with Joseph. As his greatest biographer has observed: ‘The eight years of his chancellorship are all but unique in the annals of the English monarchy between the Conquest and the age of Wolsey. At no other time did a minister of the Crown combine the assets of complete royal confidence and delegation of power with such talents of administration, of diplomacy and of display.’ He even organized the demolition of the robber-barons’ castles. He became a kind of grand vizier, the alter ego of the king who appreciated his fine mind and driving energy and relished his witty conversation. The pair spent whole days together, hunting and hawking and playing chess as well as endlessly discussing the business of the realm. Henry even entrusted to him the upbringing of his heir. For his part Thomas was plainly fascinated by the magic of royalty and the excitement of court life. Despite the fact that Henry was sixteen years the younger, a deep friendship developed between king and chancellor.
This brotherly affection can only have fuelled Eleaner’s jealousy and frustration. We know that she disliked Thomas, although we have no details. As Régine Pernoud comments, ‘A wife seldom warms to her husband’s best friend’. Moreover the chancellor kept such a splendid and hospitable household that it was almost an alternative court to that of the queen, especially during the first year in England, when she had to stay at Bermondsey while Westminster was rebuilt and refurbished. ‘He hardly ever dined without the company of sundry earls and barons …. His board was resplendent with gold and silver vessels and abounded in dainty dishes and precious wines’, according to William FitzStephen, who clearly remembered it with nostalgia. Henry was a frequent guest, often arriving without warning. Such competition can hardly have endeared Thomas to the queen. Above all, he had taken the power that she wanted for herself — he had usurped her place as the second person in the kingdom. Indeed Thomas Becket possessed far more influence than abbot Suger had ever had. Nevertheless, Eleanor seems to have been too shrewd to show any open enmity towards him.
The queen’s powerlessness is attested by the significant silence of the chroniclers. With one important exception almost nothing of importance is said about her before Henry’s death, so that she has been described, with perhaps a certain exaggeration, as ‘a figure of legend and romance, but not of history’; it is also true that we have no documentary evidence whatsoever about her relations with her husband until her quarrel with him in 1173. All the same, we know from the chronicles that she spent plenty of time with him and presided jointly over the court, as well as accompanying him on progress. We know too that she was with him in France; it is highly unlikely that so sensible and realistic a statesman as Henry did not ask her advice, both in dealing with king Louis and in governing Aquitaine, and her knowledge and experience must have been invaluable.
The first time that the royal couple were in France together after Henry’s accession was in the autumn of 1156, when Eleanor joined him on a great progress through Aquitaine during which they held court at Bordeaux. Henceforward she was constantly crossing and re-crossing the Channel, despite the danger and discomfort of such voyages, which frequently lasted several days.
Meanwhile, her former husband had re-married. King Louis’s new bride was a Spanish princess, Constance of Castile. Ironically, during her short marriage Constance bore Louis two more daughters but no sons. Both the French king and the English king now decided that a stable peace was desirable. Accordingly Thomas Becket led a splendid embassy to Paris in the summer of 1158. He was preceded by 250 foot soldiers and escorted by 200 knights and squires, with stag hounds, mastiffs and falcons, and brought a train of sumpter horses and eight vast waggons each drawn by five horses, which carried chests of gold and silver plate together with rich garments and silken hangings for presents. (There were also two carts containing what appears to have been brown ale, which, it was claimed, tasted much better than any French wine.) The awed French are said to have commented, ‘The king of England must be a marvellous man if his chancellor travels with such great display’. Henry himself — without Eleanor — arrived in Paris in September. A marriage was arranged between his son and heir, Henry, and Louis’s eldest daughter by his new marriage, Margaret. The dowry was the Vexin, the Norman border territory that the Plantagenet had been forced to surrender to the French king in 1152. Furthermore Louis formally gave Henry permission to reconquer the county of Nantes, which had been seized by the duke of Brittany. Later Henry took Louis on a progress through Normandy, during which the French king expressed his deep affection for him.
The marriage was a particular triumph for Eleanor. She had, after all, borne a son who might be king of France one day, unless the two daughters she had had by Louis could make good their precedence. Princess Margaret was to be brought up in England, although her father stipulated that she must never be in the custody of Eleanor.
By now Henry II had gone from success to success. He had subdued England and brought it peace, and he appeared to have pacified even the Welsh. He had acquired control of Brittany and ensured that the Vexin would eventually return to the Plantagenets. His possessions in France, including Aquitaine, were gratifyingly submissive. Understandably his ambition grew and he wanted to rule still more territory.
Like William X and William IX before him, Henry looked hopefully at the great and rich county of Toulouse. Cut off from Capetian France by the Massif Central, Toulouse had once been part of greater Aquitaine. It was especially important in that through it ran the trade routes so vital for Aquitaine’s prosperity, the waterways and Roman roads that connected the duchy with the Mediterranean. Its possession would be the ultimate rounding off of the Angevin empire, which without it would be strategically unsound. Eleanor may well have encouraged Henry to assert the rights to Toulouse that she had inherited from her grandmother, although Henry was hardly the man to be unaware of such a useful claim. The present count, Raymond V, was weak and inept and at odds with his vassals, who included the formidable count of Barcelona whose wife was queen of Aragon; he was also on bad terms with his countess, Constance of France, who was Louis VII’s sister. In June 1159, Henry approached the French king to obtain his agreement on a campaign against Toulouse. Possibly to his surprise, after three days of discussion Louis refused; but Henry ignored this setback and at the end of the month set out with a vast army that had been assembling at Poitiers since March. The host was large enough for a crusade; as well as the lords of England, Normandy and Aquitaine, it included the king of Scots (Malcolm IV), the duke of Brittany, and even a Welsh prince, together with the count of Barcelona and many other of Raymond’s estranged vassals. So great a prize required a great army. Yet the English king — an experienced soldier who had fought in many campaigns — disliked bloodshed and had little taste for war; nor was he a good strategist.
Nevertheless Henry besieged and captured the fine town of Cahors, overran the rich little county of Quercy, and in early July laid siege to Toulouse itself. His intention seems not to have been to capture the city or to depose Raymond, but simply to make the count submit to his overlordship. Suddenly king Louis intervened, showing unexpected abilities as a statesman. First, he visited Henry to mediate; then, finding the English king obdurate, he installed himself in Toulouse and took over the direction of the defence. Henry was confounded. He had no desire to attack his overlord, although Thomas Becket urged him to do so; such a step meant breaking his feudal oath and, besides being dishonourable, would provide his own vassals with a dangerous precedent. Moreover the French king, despite his lack of material resources, enjoyed a moral prestige throughout France that it was unsafe to discount. And Henry had also a curious affection for Louis; as a distinguished historian has observed, after marrying Eleanor ‘Henry by turns fought, outwitted, despoiled and made friends with her sometime husband in one of the most remarkable political love-hate relationships in mediaeval Europe’. Nonetheless the English king continued to invest Toulouse even if he dared not mount an assault. At last in September he led his huge army away, having achieved nothing. He would never again be able to repeat such an expedition and had lost for ever any hope of acquiring Toulouse. He went up to Normandy, to expel invading forces led by Louis’s brother, after which he negotiated a truce.
The fiasco of the Toulouse campaign marks the end of Henry’s years of almost unbroken triumph. Henceforth he would have to fight constantly to keep his empire, though he was to do so with considerable success. For Eleanor of Aquitaine, however, the final loss of Toulouse must have been a still more bitter blow, the extinction of the dream of her father and grandfather. Without Toulouse, Aquitaine would always be vulnerable, an unpleasant fact that she must have clearly recognised. So masterful a woman never suffered gladly either fools or failure, and she may well have blamed Henry for not daring to attack Louis.
It was still possible, however, that her son would be king of France, a prize even greater than Toulouse. On 2 November 1160 five-year-old Henry and five-year-old Margaret were married at Rouen by papal legates. In consequence the English king obtained immediate possession of the Vexin and its fortresses, much to Louis’s irritation. No doubt king Henry was uneasy. Louis’s second wife had died in 1160, and with shameless haste he had taken a third bride, the sister of the count of Champagne. For the time being, however, she remained childless.
Until the beginning of 1163, Henry continued to concentrate on affairs in France, and Eleanor was with him for most of the time. They kept Christmas together at Bayeux in 1161, a year during which the queen had given birth to another daughter, Eleanor, at Falaise. The queen was also a good deal in England, where she reigned (if not ruled) as regent. When Henry returned, it was to crush a rising in South Wales, which he did by dragging prince Rhys of Deheubarth out of his mountain lair. In July 1163 all the Welsh princes paid homage to the English king at Woodstock, acknowledging him as their overlord, as also did king Malcolm of Scotland for his lands in England. But the Welsh remained unsubdued. Henry led an expedition into Wales in 1165, but it was a disastrous failure, and only a string of strong castles on the border prevented the princes from raiding deep into England.
There were other problems besides the Welsh to plague Henry. At about this time he involved himself in his famous struggle with the Church. He was determined to assert his legal rights over it in non-spiritual matters, particularly over criminal clerics, who were escaping the full civil penalties by being tried by special ecclesiastical tribunals — the ‘courts Christian’. Because of an untypical situation inherited from the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, Church and state were much more closely involved with each other in England than on the Continent, with a complex intermixing of secular and clerical admistrative machinery. The growing strength and centralization of the new Angevin monarchy on the one hand and the spiritual and intellectual renaissance of twelfth-century Catholicism on the other made conflict inevitable.
Ironically, Henry brought it to a head and intensified it by making his chancellor archbishop of Canterbury in 1162; priesting and consecration transformed Thomas Becket from a king’s man into a fanatical champion of the Church’s rights. In 1163 Henry was informed that over one hundred acts of manslaughter had been committed by clerics since he had come to the throne. He was outraged by Thomas’s leniency in such cases. When a priest in Worcester seduced a girl and then murdered her irate father, the archbishop had him branded — a sentence hitherto unknown in the courts Christian, which went against his own claim that no cleric should be mutilated. A priest in Bedford killed a knight, and Thomas merely banished him. On the whole the archbishop probably had right on his side in the technical context, however, even if it was a very fine point. But he showed such extraordinary tactlessness and such inflexible obduracy that an argument between Church and state turned into a personal duel between archbishop and king. Henry tried to bully Thomas into submission and to make him accept a new legal code for the Church in England — the Constitutions of Clarendon, which forbade appeals to Rome. The archbishop took up the most intransigent position consistent with canon law: ‘Christian princes should obey the dictates of the Church instead of preferring their own authority.’ In October 1164 Thomas and the king met at Northampton, where they nearly came to blows. The archbishop fled by night and, crossing the Channel in a small open boat, took refuge in king Louis’s domains. Here he remained until 1170, his partisans squabbling with Henry’s prelates in endless wrangles, each side appealing to the pope.
Eleanor did not like Thomas Becket; indeed, a letter of 1165 from the bishop of Poitiers told him to expect no help from that direction. She took little part in the controversy, though on at least one occasion she seems to have tried to restrain Henry’s wrath. One may guess that the intractability of both her husband and the archbishop irritated so shrewd and subtle a woman; she herself would have managed the affair very differently.
Admittedly, apart from Thomas Becket, Henry kept perfect control in England. He even managed to bring the Welsh to heel. In France too he maintained his position well enough. The tacit overlordship of Brittany, which he had extracted from king Louis, brought him especially rich dividends. In 1165, after a revolt by duke Conan IV of Brittany, Henry deposed the duke, and Conan’s daughter Constance was betrothed to Henry’s third surviving son, the seven-year-old Geoffrey; Henry then took possession of Brittany in Geoffrey’s name, its barons paying homage to him. When war broke out again with Louis in 1167, Henry more than held his own.
Yet Plantagenet ambitions had suffered a terrible blow. On 22 August 1165, Louis VII’s third wife gave him the son and heir for whom he had so long prayed, the future king Philip II Augustus. Gerald of Wales, who was a young student in Paris at the time, remembered afterwards how the birth was welcomed by the Parisians ‘with joy inexpressible by human speech’, how ‘throughout the whole of that city there was such a din and clanging of bells and such a forest of burning candles’. An old woman told Gerald that one day the baby would bring disaster on the king of England, ‘as though she was saying openly, “This night a boy is born to us who, by the blessing of God, shall assuredly be a hammer to your king”’. She spoke all too truly. Philip II was going to destroy the Angevin empire. His birth was in itself a bitter disappointment for Eleanor, the end of a dream that had lasted for nearly thirty years. Now no son of her’s would ever be king of France.