PART TWO
CHAPTER 5
‘An incomparable woman’
Queenship was an extraordinary office and any woman who inhabited it was of necessity exceptional, but Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famously exceptional woman of the medieval period. To some extent, the historical perception of her depends on a model which assumes that the stifling sexism of the Middle Ages was as apparent in everyday life as it seems to be in the history books; that Eleanor stands out because she defied, sexually, intellectually and politically, the limits placed around her gender. Yet Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Boulogne were all women who exercised political influence in government and patronage, women in comparison with whom Eleanor seems rather less of an exception. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Eleanor of Aquitaine was an extraordinary person, in many senses a less successful English queen than her Anglo-Norman predecessors, who nevertheless stamped her image on a century.
During the summer of 1137, the thirteen-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine was briefly one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. Her first taste of independence as Duchess of Aquitaine was sandwiched between the death of her father that April and her marriage to the Dauphin of France in late July. Eleanor has been called ‘a creature of romance and legend, but not of history’.1 She generated slanderous speculation in her lifetime and in the eight centuries since her death has been moulded to fit the moral, theoretical and literary fashions of the ages with imaginative abandon. Since speculation is something of a tradition where she is concerned, perhaps just one instance might be permitted here: that these few months of orphaned independence inspired Eleanor with a desire for autonomy in her own lands which coloured her judgement and actions for the rest of her life.
The Duchy of Aquitaine encompassed over a quarter of modern-day France. Though ducal authority differed according to region, being concentrated around Poitou, Eleanor’s inheritance gave her overlordship of a vast tract of land incorporating Poitou to the north and Gascony to the south, the cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne and the counties of Saintonge, Angoulême, Perigord, Limousin, Auvergne and La Marche. Trade in wine and salt, varied agriculture, the control of Atlantic ports and the junctions of the pilgrim routes to Compostella as they merged towards the Pyrenean passes made Aquitaine rich, if not quite the idyllic rural paradise the Eleanor-legend contrasts so unfavourably with the chilly north where she spent the fifteen years of her first marriage. Since the time of her grandfather, Aquitaine had been an important artistic centre, the focus of the new troubadour literature that spread its influence throughout Europe, and whose codes would affect both contemporary culture and its future interpretation.
Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, was the first known troubadour poet. Eleven of his sophisticated, often erotic lyrics survive. He married Philippa of Toulouse (giving Eleanor a claim to the county which both her husbands would unsuccessfully prosecute) and, notably, left her as regent in Poitou when he went on crusade in 1099. He then arranged for their son, Eleanor’s father, to marry Anor, the daughter of his mistress, the appropriately named Dangerosa, with whom he lived for years in flagrant double adultery. Philippa, the Duchess, departed for the abbey of Fontevrault in disgust, and William tastefully declared that he would found a rival abbey at Niort, to be served by whores, though this claim has now been confirmed as an allusion to a now-lost poem. William IX might have been as famous in his own time for his personal life as his poetry, but his son William X was a much more placid character. His main interest in life was eating, which gave Eleanor something in common with her future husband, whose father, the King of France, was nicknamed ‘Louis the Fat’. William and Anor had three children, but Eleanor’s only brother died in childhood, leaving her as heir. In 1136, William roused himself to make the pilgrimage to Compostella, but before departing he assembled his vassals and had them swear allegiance to his daughter. Aware that Eleanor’s inheritance made her highly vulnerable to bride-snatchers, he also made her a ward of the French King and arranged her betrothal to the Dauphin Louis. Eleanor and her younger sister, Petronilla, accompanied their father as far as Bordeaux before he set off to cross the mountains to Spain. He died at Compostella on Good Friday, 9 April 1137.
On the news that Eleanor had come into her inheritance, the King sprang into action. Though he was too sick and obese to rise from his bed, he insisted that his son should go immediately to claim his wife. Aquitaine was a tremendous prize in comparison with the comparatively meagre holdings of the French crown of the period, and the King was afraid it might be snatched from his grasp. So the seventeen-year-old prince - accompanied by 500 knights, his tutor, Abbot Suger of St Denis, the counts of Champagne and Vermandois and a sumptuous baggage train transporting precious tapestries, extravagant robes and chests of treasure - set off for the palace of Ombrière in Bordeaux, where Eleanor was living, surrounded by guards. He arrived at Bordeaux on ii July, crossed the River Garonne by boat to join Eleanor and their marriage was celebrated on 25 July in the cathedral of Saint-Andre by the archbishop of Bordeaux. Appropriately, given her future reputation, the bride wore scarlet. After spending their wedding night at Taillebourg en route for Poitiers, they reached the city on 1 August, the same day that King Louis died. Their investiture at Poitiers as Count and Countess was also therefore a coronation, in which Louis was described by Orderic Vitalis as coming into possession of Aquitaine as well as the kingdom of France. Eleanor was later crowned queen at Bourges.
Louis had already been crowned at Reims, according to Capetian tradition, when he became Dauphin in 1131 after the death of his elder brother Philip. Until this point, he had been intended for the Church, and was greatly influenced by his mentor, Abbot Suger, under whose tutelage he had spent his childhood at the abbey of St Denis. He was not bad looking, and was later described by John of Salisbury as loving his queen ‘almost beyond reason’, but his piety often caused him to be torn between the conflicting demands of religion and statesmanship, and his reign has been described as ‘a long career of energetic ineffectiveness’.2 Although he was known for his pacific tendencies - which marked him out among his aristocratic contemporaries, for whom making war was part of the business of being - according to the Chronique de Touraine the celebrations of his marriage to Eleanor were marred by a violent incident. One of Eleanor’s vassals, William de Lézay, had refused to attend the ceremony where oaths of loyalty were sworn to Louis as the new Duke of Aquitaine. He had also stolen some of Eleanor’s precious white hawks. Full of bravado, Louis and his companions rode off to teach him a lesson, leaving behind their chain mail because of the summer heat. De Lézay ambushed the party, and Louis’s men got the upper hand only after a nasty skirmish, culminating in Louis supposedly cutting off the thief’s hands personally. This seems like a rather pathetic attempt on Louis’s part to impress Eleanor with his prowess as a warrior, but the brutality to which he was prepared to resort in extremis reveals an unpleasant side to his character.
This explosive tendency was shamefully demonstrated at Vitry-sur-Marne in 1142 in an episode for which Eleanor was held to be partly responsible. The previous year, Louis had rashly decided to make an attempt on Toulouse, in right of Eleanor’s claim on the county, without consulting his chief magnates. To his fury, several of them refused to send their obligatory liege of knights for the attack, including Theobald, Count of Champagne. The King’s effort to attack Toulouse was an embarrassment: despite his confidence that the city could easily be taken by surprise, Louis found it well defended, and he was obliged to slink back to Poitiers, where Eleanor was waiting for him. To save face, they made a grand tour of Eleanor’s lands, but as they progressed in a leisurely manner back to Paris, Eleanor’s sister Petronilla inconveniently fell in love with the Count of Vermandois, who was married to the sister of the Count of Champagne.
The next twist in the story came when the archbishopric of Bourges became vacant and the cathedral chapter elected their own nominee, Pierre de la Chatre, over Louis’s personal candidate, Carduc. In Rome, Pope Innocent II confirmed the chapter’s choice and invested De la Chatre with the post. Petulantly, Louis denied the new archbishop entry to Bourges, despite the Pope taking the alarming step of placing the royal household under an interdict. The Count of Champagne stirred the pot by giving refuge to the homeless De la Chatre.
Meanwhile, the Count of Vermandois had abandoned his wife and children and was determined to marry Petronilla. Three tame bishops were found to pronounce an annulment and celebrate the wedding. The Countess of Vermandois took refuge with her brother, who fired off furious protests to Rome. The Pope excommunicated Vermandois and Petronilla and placed their lands under interdict. Louis sent an army to lay waste to Champagne, but when Theobald proved intractable, the King himself led a band of mercenaries to besiege the town of Vitry. Louis was not an effective military commander and the best that can be said of his choice of tactics is that it lacked foresight. The townspeople, terrifed by what they had heard of the previous French attacks, crowded into the wooden castle for protection. Louis’s bowmen shot burning arrows over the walls as the mercenaries stormed the town, and soon the whole edifice was in flames. Desperately, the survivors, at least a thousand people, rushed to the sanctuary of the cathedral, but it was too late: the fire was out of control and the cathedral was burned to the ground with the loss of every soul inside it.
It is notable that the first inquiry into the legality of Eleanor’s marriage to Louis took place in the aftermath of this horrific disgrace. The pretext for dissolving the marriage of the Count and Countess of Vermandois had been that they were related within the prohibited seven degrees. The influential cleric Bernard of Clairvaux asked how Louis dared to prosecute the annulment when he, too, was related to Eleanor within the degrees, as was demonstrated by a family tree drawn up by the Bishop of Laon. Subsequently, when the Count of Champagne sought to marry his daughters to two of Louis’s more powerful magnates, Louis forbade what would have been a threatening conglomeration of power on the grounds of consanguinity, an action that Bernard again denounced as hypocritical. After Vitry, Bernard had written to Louis, warning him: ‘Those who are urging you to repeat your former wrongdoings against an innocent person are seeking in this not your honour but their own convenience. They are clearly the enemies of your crown and the disturbers of your realm.’ It was a commonplace to criticise kings indirectly by putting the blame on ‘bad counsellors’, but in this instance Bernard seems to be pointing the finger firmly at Eleanor, her sister and Vermandois. Bernard’s chastisement, his raising of the consanguinity issue and the fact that Eleanor had not yet produced a child suggest that as early as 1143 there may have been doubts about her suitability as queen.
Eleanor and Louis were technically third cousins once removed, both being descended from King Robert II, but this had clearly not been considered relevant at the time of their betrothal since no dispensation had been sought from the Pope. Indeed, ‘there was a well-established century long tradition of Capetians entering into incestuous unions without having those marriages dissolved’.3 Childlessness was seen as a sign of God’s disapproval of an illegitimate marriage, so perhaps Louis’s attempts to make reparation for the Champagne wars - which included restoring Theobald’s lands, confirming De la Chatre as archbishop of Bourges and adopting monastic attire - extended to paying more zealous sexual attention to his wife. In any event, in 1145, Eleanor’s first child, Marie, was born. After Bernard of Clairvaux had reassured her that if she worked to restore relations between Louis and Theobald she would finally be blessed with a child, Eleanor had been active in promoting peace, and it therefore seemed that in the arrival of Marie she had been granted a miracle.
Modern writers on Eleanor have often made much of an assumed sexual incompatibility between her and Louis. Eleanor herself was later to imply that she had been sexually frustrated, but this could simply have been a post-hoc justification. The fact that she did not give birth until eight years into her marriage is less surprising in the light of the confusion about her date of birth. Many writers have accepted an error on the part of an early twentieth-century scholar which placed her birth in 1122. More reliable evidence from a late thirteenth-century genealogy produced at Limoges corrects this date to 1124. Eleanor was therefore thirteen when she married Louis, and it is quite possible that she had not yet reached puberty. Estimates of the average age of menarche for medieval girls range from fourteen to seventeen, so if Eleanor was at the later end of the spectrum, she may not have been capable of conceiving for some years.4 This is not to suggest that Louis was a less than attentive husband; it serves merely to illustrate that, as ever with Eleanor, the assumptions about her character have proved more persistent than the facts.
Now that she was a mother, Eleanor’s position was validated, but there is little real evidence from the first decade of her marriage as to whether or not she was content in it. With hindsight, some writers have argued that she was unhappy with the repetitive ceremonial role she was obliged to play, that she found the French court austere and unrefined and that she was thwarted in her attempts to introduce southern customs. She was criticised for being extravagant - Bernard of Clairvaux disapprovingly pictured the queen and her ladies with their arms ‘loaded’ with bracelets, their earrings, long linen headdresses draped over the left arm, fur-trimmed cloaks and delicate gowns - but beyond this image there is simply no detailed account of her participation in Louis’s court during this period. Nor does she appear in any of his charters, in contrast to her predecessors, who had been politically active. Perhaps she did try to exert influence over her husband in private, perhaps she did not. There is no record either way. To infer from this absence of information that ‘these changes in the fundamental role of the queen consort, which came about purely [the italics are this author’s] as a response to concern over Eleanor’s influence, set a precedent for future queens of France, who mostly found themselves without power or political influence’,5 seems an excessive and inaccurate attempt to aggrandise what is more accurately described as Eleanor’s non-influence. Similarly, the idea that Eleanor shrewdly tucked away the consanguinity argument to produce at a later date seems an idea informed more by a desire to cast her as the agent of events than to represent her eventual divorce as part of a broader political schema.
The romantic nonsense that trails Eleanor’s image is greatly inspired by her experiences on crusade. In December 1144, the Christian colony of Edessa had fallen to Imad al-Din Zengi, the Turkish ruler of Mosul and Aleppo. Along with the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch and the county of Tripoli, Edessa made up the kingdom of Outremer, established after the First Crusade between 1099 and 1109. The recently elected Pope, Eugenius III, issued a bull in response, calling on Christendom to defend the Holy Land against a newly militant Islam. The bull, ‘Quantum Praedecessores’, was actually addressed to Louis, but even before he could have received it the King declared at his Christmas court at Bourges that he intended to ‘take the Cross’. He received a rather lukewarm reception, but by Easter the next year France was alive with crusading fervour. This was largely due to the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was closely connected with Outremer and who worked authoritatively with the Pope to achieve maximum recruitment for the expedition. The bull was reissued in March, and Louis called an assembly of magnates at Vézélay to hear Bernard preach. It was a deeply emotional, if carefully stage-managed occasion, with Louis sitting next to Bernard, displaying the fabric cross which symbolised his pledge and Eleanor coming forward to kneel and promise the allegiance of her vassals. Bernard then set off on a whirlwind tour to call the faithful to defend Jerusalem, and he was so successful that ‘towns and castles are emptied, one may scarcely find one man among seven women, so many women are there widowed whilst their husbands are alive’.6
Evangelical zeal aside, the Church was offering an attractive package to crusaders: the remission of all confessed sins, immunity from civil lawsuits incurred after taking the Cross, exemption from interest on loans and the right to raise money by pledging land to churches or other Christians (a benefit that provided a cloak for a good deal of usury). These advantages, combined with Eleanor’s charm and energy in persuading her liegemen to join, encouraged some of the greatest lords of southern France to take part in the Second Crusade, along with a number of aristocratic women. As well as the Queen of France herself, the countesses of Toulouse and Flanders, Mamille of Roucy, Florine of Burgundy and Torqueri of Bouillon accompanied their husbands. There were also at least 300 women who offered to travel as nurses, plus the ladies’ attendants. The women and their baggage were later criticised as a frivolous distraction from the holy purpose of the crusade, not to mention a practical encumbrance, but as Eleanor sets off from Metz on 11 June 1147 on a silver-saddled horse, her flowing robe embroidered with the lilies of France, she is, for once, certainly captured as the epitome of the troubadour heroine: noble, pious, romantic and brave.
The crusade was a disaster for Christian Europe and for Eleanor’s reputation. In many ways, reaching the Holy Land at all was a momentous achievement, given the enormous scale of the operation in terms of numbers, geographical span and cost, but a combination of ‘bad timing, poor strategy, flawed diplomacy [and] catastrophic logistics’7 made success unlikely even before the French army arrived at Constantinople. They were preceded by the other main part of the crusader force, the German army led by the Emperor Conrad. As they travelled onward, the German contingent was attacked by Turkish forces near Dorylaeum, and suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of their mounted archers, so swift and lethal they were known as ‘winged death’.
The French entered Constantinople on 4 October, and were given a magnificent reception by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus, whose wife Irene had corresponded with Eleanor as the French forces progressed through Hungary. Louis enjoyed a private audience with the Emperor in the breathtaking splendour of the Boukoleon Palace, where he was granted the special privilege of being permitted to sit down, and was taken on a tour of the shrines and relics of the city, including the stone from Christ’s tomb and the lance that pierced His side. Manuel courteously organised a joint celebration of Louis’s personal saint, St Denis, where the Frenchmen marvelled at the singing of the Greek castrati, and treated his guests to a banquet which included frogs, caviare and artichokes (the French showed themselves rather provincial when they sniffed at these rose-strewn delicacies, suspicious of poison). They crossed the Bosphorus in mid-October, and it was as they left Nicaea on the twenty-sixth, ominously during a partial eclipse of the sun, that they learned of the German defeat. This was a devastating blow to morale, and as they crawled the 120 miles to Ephesus, a journey which took a month, the army began to splinter, wearied by changes in the route and dwindling supplies.
Eleanor was involved in one of the most dramatic of the five attacks the French army managed to repel during the next 200-mile stage to the port of Adalia. An examination of how she is portrayed as being responsible for this incident is a good example of the way in which her power has been overestimated and her influence manipulated into legend. In the conventional version of the story8 the French army was travelling across Mount Cadmos at Honaz Daghi, with the Queen’s party riding in the vanguard under the supervision of one of her own Aquitaine men, Geoffrey, Lord of Rançon. Ignoring the King’s instructions to make camp on the exposed plain, Geoffrey followed Eleanor’s advice and escorted the women through a pass to what seemed to be a protected valley. The Turks, who were lying in wait for the main body of the French force, allowed Eleanor’s party into the valley as a feint, and when the troops arrived, they fell upon them. Louis acquitted himself bravely, leading a charge of his immediate entourage of knights to safeguard the infantry and the large numbers of non-combatant pilgrims following behind. The attack is explained as one of the fundamental causes of the failure of the crusade, and that failure has its source in Eleanor, who ‘by her undisguised flirtations had spread confusion and dismay and discord in the noblest host that ever went to the East’.9
Neither of the two accounts of Cadmos, Odo de Deuil’s eyewitness description written up a month later, and William of Tyre’s, which postdated events by thirty years, mentions Eleanor at all. The Queen’s position at the head of the van and her influence over Geoffrey de Rançon in his flouting of Louis’s orders is an invention by Richard, a much later writer. Yet even though Eleanor has been acquitted of blame by a scholar writing as long ago as 1950, Richard’s version of events is still widely accepted. What is considered plausible in terms of Eleanor’s legend tells us a good deal about its hold over contemporary perceptions, and about the preoccupations of modern historians, but, as always with Eleanor, one has to look carefully for the truth.
King Louis was courageous and well trained in handling weapons when he had to, but he was no strategist. The army limped on for another twelve days, surviving on horse meat, the desperate rations of the starving soldier. After a month of bickering over ships and supplies in Adalia, he succumbed to pressure from his magnates to press on to the Holy Land, abandoning his infantry. There were simply not enough ships available to carry the troops. In theory the men were to proceed overland to Tarsus under the command of Thierry of Flanders and Archibald of Bourbon, but the officers jumped aboard the first vessel that came into port, leaving the infantrymen to the mercies of the Turks. Thousands were killed and thousands taken as slaves, an outcome which did nothing for Louis’s reputation. ‘Here the King left his people on foot and with his nobles went on board ship,’ recounts William of Tyre pointedly. Not only was Louis stupidly careless of the welfare of those who followed him, but the loss of his infantry was to prove a major handicap in the campaign for Damascus.
Finally, on 19 March 1148, Louis and Eleanor landed at St Symeon, ten miles downriver from the city of Antioch. They were met by a choir singing the ‘Te Deum and received by Eleanor’s uncle, Prince Raymond, the ruler of the province. Eleanor’s behaviour in Antioch provoked scandalous charges from four of the principal chroniclers of the crusade and gave rise to ever more elaborate tales of her sexual perfidy in the years to come. John of Salisbury recorded:
The most Christian King of the Franks reached Antioch, after the destruction of his armies in the east, and was nobly entertained there by Prince Raymond, brother of the late William, Count of Poitiers. He was as it happened the Queen’s uncle, and owed the King loyalty, affection and respect for many reasons. But . . . the attentions paid by the Prince to the Queen, and his constant, indeed almost continuous conversation with her, aroused the King’s suspicions. They were greatly strengthened when the Queen wished to remain behind, although the King was preparing to leave, and the Prince made every effort to keep her, if the King would give his consent. And when the King made haste to tear her away, she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related in the fourth and fifth degrees.
William of Tyre confirms that Raymond ‘resolved also to deprive him of his wife, either by force or secret intrigue. The Queen readily assented to this design, for she was a foolish woman. Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be, as we have said, far from circumspect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.’ Gervase of Canterbury and Richard of Devizes are more cautious, but hint strongly at the same story: that Eleanor was suspected of committing adultery with Raymond. Louis was clearly disturbed by her behaviour and by the possibility of the illegitimacy of their marriage, which she had raised, as he confided in Abbot Suger, who wrote back to advise him to restrain his angry feelings until he had returned to France.
Whether Eleanor technically’ committed adultery is a moot point (though it is worth remembering that to have done so while on the holy mission of crusade would have been a grave sin indeed). What matters is that her behaviour was sufficiently careless for those around her to believe she did. The hints from the chroniclers were undoubtedly affected by their knowledge of the subsequent royal divorce - none of them was writing less than fifteen years after the events they describe - and it may have been that Louis’s huffy removal from Antioch had less to do with Eleanor than with a disagreement over strategy. Raymond was pushing for a concerted attack on Aleppo, the power base of Nur al-Din, but most of the crusaders wished to fulfil their vows by making for Jerusalem. Eleanor appears to have tried to talk Louis round to Raymond’s view, which certainly made more sense from a military perspective, but Louis had two strong reasons to demur: his own sacred vow to lay the Oriflamme of France on the altar of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the more practical consideration that having left his infantry behind at Adalia, he had insufficient foot soldiers to mount an effective siege. Given that Louis’s decision to leave Antioch proved crucial in the failure of the crusade, the adultery story and the fables it spawned are interesting in the context of the anxieties about gender, sexuality and sovereignty that continually surfaced in medieval definitions of queenship’.10
In the thirteenth century Récits d’un Ménéstral de Reims and the fifteenth-century Chronique Normand, it is claimed that Eleanor had an affair with Saladin himself and attempted to elope with him by boat. Both accounts emphasise her wealth, its loss to France in her subsequent divorce and her lack of a son. Saladin, the celebrated Muslim general who took Jerusalem in 1187, would certainly loom large in Eleanor’s life, but these tales are patently fiction. What is important is the subtext: the linking of Eleanor’s subversive sexual desire to failures in kingship and hence to a weakening of the sacred tie between the anointed king and God which validated - or not - the Christian assumptions of the crusaders. The traditional queenly role of intercessor is here perverted into something dangerous and threatening. Eleanor becomes the symbol of the seductress who can displace nations through her sexual power over the king, as was later the case with her daughter-in-law Isabelle of Angoulême. Ménéstral and Chronique are only two of many accounts that portray Eleanor as lascivious and promiscuous, but, again, they are of less interest in relation to the facts of her life than in the way they manipulate her image to discuss or warn against the combination of sexual and political influence that was the unique prerogative of queens.
Louis got his sight of the Holy City, and then agreed with Emperor Conrad to attack Damascus, where the army assembled on 24 July. Four days later, the crusaders retreated after the city repelled a shambolic attack. The defeat was all the more humiliating in that the army ‘remained intact’.11Numerous theories were offered to justify this pathetic showing, the most acceptable being that the Christians had been betrayed, for a variety of complicated political reasons, by the barons of Jerusalem. A simpler explanation may be that they were afraid of becoming trapped between the city and the relief force sent out by Nur al-Din from Aleppo. Many commentators blamed the bungled expedition on the presence of women among the crusaders, while clerics, including Bernard of Clairvaux, saw it as a harsh lesson from God.
After Damascus, there could no longer be any doubt that the Second Crusade was a catastrophe. So great was the disaster of the army and so inexpressible the misery that those who took part bemoan it with tears to this very day,’ declared Otto of Freising.12 It had been a fruitless waste of life, and the majority of those who suffered were not great nobles, whose deaths were at least recorded for posterity with a degree of honour, but the nameless thousands who had pushed valiantly towards Jerusalem only to die anonymously in the dust. Nothing was left of the euphoria and nobility of purpose that had galvanised the crowds at Vézélay. Louis and Eleanor remained in the Holy Land until the following Easter, while the King attempted to recover some benefit by raising loans to defend the beleaguered kingdom of Jerusalem, then embarked for France in a fleet of ships hired from Sicily. Not only was Louis concerned about the collapse of his glorious mission and the consequent damage to his own reputation; now, as he returned to his kingdom, he had the state of his marriage to worry about.
John of Salisbury reports that Eleanor had raised the prospect of divorce at Antioch in 1148. Louis was apparently prepared to consider the proposal on the grounds of their consanguinity, but was advised against proceeding as it would be too shameful, on top of the ruinous crusade, if the King was said to have been despoiled of his wife or to have been abandoned by her’.13 Since in 1148 the initiative lay with Eleanor, it has been frequently argued that the couple’s eventual divorce in 1152 was the outcome of a long-term plan of hers; that she ‘fashioned her marital situation to meet her own ends’.14 Eleanor, it is claimed, manipulated her husband’s conscience to gain her freedom. There are good reasons to doubt this theory, the first of which is that when the King explained the situation to the Pope, Eugenius, with whom he and Eleanor had a meeting at Tusculum on their return journey, he forbade them even to consider such a step. Eugenius threatened anathema on anyone who objected to their union and declared that it could not be dissolved on any pretext whatsoever. The Pontiff also offered some more intimate marriage counselling. He made them sleep in the same bed, which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by kindly converse to restore love between them’.15 Louis accepted the Pope’s judgement enthusiastically as, at this stage, according to John of Salisbury, he was still very much in love with his wife, and the birth of a second daughter, Alix, in 1150 shows that Eleanor had (whether graciously or not) submitted to her duty. It was the gender of this second child, rather than any protracted strategy of Eleanor’s, that pushed Louis towards divorce in 1152. It is important to understand that the desire to present Eleanor as an autonomous heroine has neglected to take into account the legal and customary background of the ending of her first marriage. Eleanor and Louis had now been together for fifteen years, and she had not produced a son.
One of the factors contributing to the lasting success of the Capetian dynasty was the handing down of the crown from father to son from the tenth century until the beginning of the fourteenth. In a culture that did not sanction divorce, the Capetians were skilled at manipulating the canon laws on consanguinity to their own ends, either to remain in marriages the Church considered illegitimate or to dissolve others that had not supplied the requisite male child. Consanguinity was a marvellous excuse for cynics’.16 The miracle capetien, this unbroken line of succession spanning hundreds of years, looks less of a miracle, and the ‘scandal’ of Eleanor’s divorce less scandalous, when it is considered that every French king from Philip I (1060-1108) to Philip II (1180-1223) was divorced at least once. Both Louis’s father and grandfather had had their first marriages dissolved on the basis of the prohibited degrees and had gone on to produce heirs with new wives. After Alix’s birth, Louis was concerned that Eleanor might not give him a boy. Any suggestion that the King and Queen of France separated because of Louis’s concern for his soul is contradicted by the fact that first, he had full papal dispensation to continue the marriage and secondly, when he remarried, he did so to a woman even more closely related to him, Constance of Castile. Eleanor’s second husband was also related to her in the same degree.
The conservative Abbot Suger died in 1151, and it may have been the absence of his restraining influence that finally pushed Louis to move for an annulment. The archbishop of Sens was appointed to lead a council consisting of various barons, clerics and the bishops of Reims, Bordeaux and Rouen, which met at Beaugency in the county of Blois in March 1152. After three days of deliberation, the council predictably decided in favour of the King’s wishes. No adultery claim was produced, and the consanguinity argument was unchallenged by either Eleanor or Louis. Marie and Alix were declared legitimate, since the marriage had been undertaken in good faith, and both parties were permitted to retain their lands intact. Eleanor and Louis had kept Christmas at Limoges after a tour of Eleanor’s territories in the south and they were together at Bordeaux in January 1152, but the next month Louis left Eleanor alone at Poitiers, in anticipation of the council’s ruling.
Eleanor had no means of independently instigating a separation from Louis, but she made it clear that the annulment was agreeable to her. After the crusade, William of Newburgh notes, she was ‘greatly offended with the King’s conduct, even pleading she had married a monk, not a king’. This allusion to Louis’s supposed lack of virility has again been taken at face value, as a rationale for Eleanor’s choice of second husband. The implication is that she was frustrated and needed a real man’. Perhaps she was, and perhaps she did, but all we can know for certain of her motivations relates to her political position as both an immensely powerful landowner and a relatively vulnerable woman rather than to a heroine of chivalry who married for love.
It has been suggested that Eleanor had come to a secret understanding with the man who would become Henry II of England when, in 1151, as Duke of Normandy, he accompanied his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, to Paris to pay homage to Louis: ‘It is said that while she was still married to the King of the Franks, she had aspired to marriage with the Norman Duke . . . and for this reason she desired and procured a divorce’.17 In the summer of 1151, the French were at war with the Angevins in Normandy, and according to this argument, Geoffrey of Anjou, knowing of the clandestine arrangement, made the otherwise surprising decision to cede part of the Vexin to Louis. Leaving aside the fact that any secret understanding’ could only have been reached in Paris when Geoffrey and Henry were there - that is, after they had agreed to the Vexin annexation, the confirmation of which was part of the reason for their trip to the French capital - a look at the situation in Normandy at the time shows that there were good tactical reasons for Geoffrey’s concession at this point which had nothing to do with Eleanor.
England was in the last stages of the civil war that would see Henry FitzEmpress crowned as the heir to the Empress Matilda. In 1151, Louis was allied with King Stephen of England against the Angevins, and was campaigning in Upper Normandy with Eustace of England, the husband of his sister Constance. Geoffrey of Anjou was fighting in the south, but was saved from a full assault by the French when Louis fell ill in Paris and was unable to join the army mustered in the Mantois. Louis had already lost Montreuil-Bellay to the Angevins, which had been the primary motivation for his offensive, and the Angevins were keen to reach a truce as they aimed to take the conflict out of Normandy and back to England. The stall in Louis’s alliance with Stephen caused by his illness meant a peace was acceptable to both sides, and Geoffrey and Henry left Paris in the belief that Louis was temporarily mollified and planning to launch a new invasion across the Channel. Geoffrey’s ‘otherwise inexplicable’18 change of heart is thus explained. Further, in 1151, however much Eleanor may have desired a divorce, she was hardly in a position to plot a new marriage unless she knew for certain that the annulment would proceed. Since she was still living with Louis until early the following year, this was prospective, not definite.
Still, Aquitaine was too precious to be left to the mercy of fortune-hunters, and Eleanor does seem to have decided very quickly what she needed to do. After saying her farewells to Louis at Poitiers in February, she appears to have withdrawn to Fontevrault, from where she set off for her own capital once the annulment was announced. On the very first night of her freedom, 21 March 1152, Theobald of Blois attempted to seize her on her southward journey. She escaped by travelling by water to Tours, but when she tried to cross the River Creuse at Port des Piles, she was warned of another ambush, this one set by Henry’s younger brother, the junior Geoffrey of Anjou. She had to rush to the safety of Poitiers by back roads and once she arrived there she lost no time in sending to Henry in Normandy, asking him to come immediately to marry her. The speed of this development does suggest the existence of some kind of understanding between them, as by 18 May Henry was in Poitiers, where he and Eleanor were married discreetly at the cathedral of St Pierre. Misguided extrapolations from the political situation in Normandy do nothing to explain the alliance. A more measured account of Eleanor’s career proposes simply that physical attraction and love of power seem to have drawn Eleanor and Henry together’.19 That they met in Paris and that Eleanor kept Henry in mind in the event of achieving her freedom is perhaps the most that can be said of what transpired between February and May.
Eleanor’s divorce meant that in principle, Aquitaine would now be released from French overlordship. After her marriage to Henry, the recovery of her beloved duchy was Eleanor’s first priority. Her first independent charter as Duchess after her marriage is a reconfirmation of the rights of the abbey of St Jean Montierneuf in Poitiers, dated 26 May 1152. This was a standard act for any new lord coming into his lands, and Eleanor used it as a gesture to emphasise that she had regained sole control, stressing that her benefactions to the house followed in the tradition of her greatgrandfather, grandfather and father. The next day, she revoked a grant of the forest of La Sèvre to the abbey of Saint-Maixent, which she had co-signed with Louis in 1146, then regranted it in her own right. These two acts are largely symbolic, indicating Eleanor’s determination to govern her inheritance herself, but if she hoped to enjoy a degree of autonomy in Aquitaine with her new husband, that hope was short-lived. Louis, concerned for the rights of Marie and Alix, refused initially to relinquish his claim on Aquitaine and continued to use his ducal title until 1154,even though Henry assumed it in 1153. Eleanor continued to be a figure of power in the duchy, but by 1156, at which point Henry had settled his dispute with Louis and sworn fealty to him for his Continental possessions, Eleanor’s position of independence had been eroded between the contending demands of both of the men who claimed the right to act on her behalf. At their Christmas court at Bordeaux, Henry accepted homage from Eleanor’s Aquitainian vassals, and for the period 1151-61, she is not mentioned in any of the duchy’s charters.
It was the same story in England. After the death of Eustace of Blois in August 1153 and the signing of the treaty of Winchester in November, Henry was finally poised to achieve his mother’s thwarted ambition and inherit the English crown. In 1154 he andEleanor travelled to Normandy to wait for news from England. On 25 October King Stephen died, and the new King set sail from Barfleur on 7 December. Eleanor was crowned at his side on 19 December at Westminster. After that, until 1168, she appears in the sources as little more than an ornament. Her reputation as a great queen stems from her later activities in Aquitaine and in the government of her sons. By contrast, the period she spent by her husband’s side as queen of England is one of virtual invisibility. True, she did act as regent of the kingdom in Henry’s absence until 1163, issuing writs and documents and presiding over at least one court at Westminster, as well as in Normandy, but in comparison with her predecessors Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Boulogne, who exercised all the prerogatives of sovereignty’,20 evidence of Eleanor governing and managing her household and lands is scant. Her role was ceremonial and, in these years, reproductive: Summer and winter, crossing and re-crossing the Channel, almost always expecting another child; here she is, severely reduced to the strictest obligations of a feudal queen: other than the duty to produce numerous offspring for her husband, she must be present everywhere, at every moment, showing herself to the vassals at the plenary courts of Christmas or Easter, riding, sailing, riding again.’21 This picture of Eleanor in the first phase of her English queenship highlights its two dominant demands: travel and childbirth. Eleanor and Henry had eight children between 1153 and 1166. William, their first son, died aged three in 1156, but Henry, Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Leonor, Joanna and John all survived to marry.
After William’s death, Henry II focused his aspirations on his second son, known as the ‘Young King’ to distinguish him from his father. Young Henry underwent two coronation ceremonies in his father’s lifetime, the French-style confirmations of inheritance that Matilda of Boulogne had failed to obtain for her son Eustace. In 1159, Henry married two-year-old Marguerite of France, King Louis’s daughter by Eleanor’s replacement, Constance of Castile. Despite a stipulation in the 1158 betrothal agreement that Marguerite would not be brought up by Eleanor of Aquitaine, the little girl entered Eleanor’s household after her marriage. After Constance died giving birth to another daughter, Alys, who was betrothed to Eleanor’s son Richard, Louis took a third wife, Adela of Blois. In 1165 she presented him with his yearned-for son, Philip Augustus. Like her sister, the Young Queen, Alys came to live with her new family. The previous year, Eleanor’s daughters by Louis, Marie and Alix, had been married to two brothers, Henry and Theobald of Champagne, and though Eleanor had no part in these arrangements, she convened a council with the archbishop of Cologne at Westminster in 1165 to confirm the marriage of her daughter Matilda to Henry of Saxony. The next year mother and daughter travelled together to Dover, where Matilda embarked for her new life in Germany, and around the same time her brother Geoffrey was betrothed to Constance, the heiress to Brittany. Eleanor’s involvement in her husband’s marital strategies for their offspring, as well as the birth of her last child, John, in 1166, suggests that relations between them were at least functional at this juncture, but romance was about to distort her reputation once again.
In 1165, Henry II fell in love with Rosamund de Clifford, the daughter of a minor Norman knight. Their affair lasted a decade, and although Henry was only in England for three years or so during this period, it provided ample and enduring raw material for the weavers of Eleanor legend. From September 1165 to March 1166, the King stayed mainly at Woodstock, uncharacteristically for such an habitually peripatetic man, and failed to keep Christmas with his wife. He later built a garden at Everswell, near the royal palace, featuring ponds and bowers. The chroniclers were off. The besotted King had reputedly constructed a fantastic maze of Daedalus work’ for his beloved (a description that appears for the first time in Higden’s fourteenth-century Polychronicon) and the neglected Queen was murderously enraged. The rivalry between the two women was immortalised in stories and songs such as ‘The Ballad of Fair Rosamond’, though very little indeed is known of the real Rosamund and there is no evidence that the fantastic maze was ever built or that the Everswell garden had anything to do with her. In appropriately melodramatic style, Eleanor is supposed to have poisoned her rival, a tale that has received an unreasonable degree of attention given that Rosamund lived until 1176, by which time Eleanor had been in prison for three years.
The Rosamund episode has been used as an explanation for the fact that, by 1168, Henry and Eleanor had effectively separated but, once again, there was a simple, practical rationale behind an apparently emotional act. Eleanor’s childbearing years were now over and it made perfect sense for her to relocate to Aquitaine to manage her perennially unruly vassals, leaving Henry with greater freedom to concentrate on his other lands. Eleanor may well have welcomed the chance of autonomy, not to mention a more gracious mode of living than that experienced by Henry’s entourage, whose accommodation more often resembled a campsite than a court, but their marriage had always been based on business, and it was business that provided the primary reason for Eleanor’s removal from England. That the Plantagenets were a spectacularly unhappy family would be proved time and time again on the battlefield in years to come, but Eleanor’s presence in Aquitaine in 1168 was part of the loose administrative strategy through which Henry tried to govern his geographically and culturally disparate dominions. His territories - England, Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, which extended from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees - were collectively known as the Angevin empire, though they were never subject to imperial-style government. None of the Angevin kings called himself an emperor, all preferring to style themselves ‘King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Count of Anjou’, and while Henry did introduce similar administrative structures to this odd conglomeration of diverse powers’,22 he himself seems to have thought of, and intended to pass on, his lands as federated regional states rather than a single, centrally governed bloc. Royal authority varied greatly between the tightly controlled Anglo-Norman realm and the disparate, fluid and often mercurial loyalties of the south. Henry’s decision that Eleanor should return to Aquitaine was an attempt to increase his hold on those southern aristocrats who were inclined to disregard their overlord when he was not facing them with an army; in short ‘to calm and contain the Aquitainians, Henry gave them back their duchess’.23
In December 1168, then, Eleanor held her first independent Christmas court at Poitiers. This marked the beginning of the productive period during which she operated as governor of Aquitaine. Based at Poitiers, where she had refurbished the Maubergeonne Tower, the former lodgings of her grandfather’s mistress Dangerosa, and surrounded by Poitevin, rather than Anglo-Norman counsellors, Eleanor was free to involve herself in the day-to-day management of her lands as she had never previously been able to do. Initially she was very much Henry’s regent, but after the investiture of her son Richard as Duke of Aquitaine in 1170 she associated two-thirds of her known acts with him. Assisted by her seneschal, Raoul de Faye, and her two clerks, Jordan and Peter, Eleanor busied herself with granting and confirming donations to religious houses, directing taxes, tolls and rights over customs and commodities such as wheat, salt and wine and confirming the loyalty of her lords by receiving their homage at Niort, Limoges and Bayonne.
Eleanor was also able to cement what was to become a sixty-year patronage of the abbey of Fontevrault, which she had first visited in 1152. The house, whose links with the dukes of Aquitaine dated back to the time of William IX, was notable for accommodating men and women, with the monks providing the manual labour and the nuns fulfilling a contemplative role, as specified by its founder, Robert d’Arbrissel. Both orders were governed by an abbess who, it was stipulated, must be a widow rather than a virgin who had never known the world. Henry, too, had ancestral ties with Fontevrault: the couple had founded Fontevrauldine cells in England, at Eaton, Westwood and Amesbury. In 1170 Eleanor granted lands, timber and firewood to the abbey and she went on to build the huge octagonal kitchen, with its five fireplaces, that may still be seen there today. Positioned where Eleanor’s natal territories bordered Henry’s, Fontevrault was to become both power base and retreat for her in later years, as well as - at Eleanor’s designation, it has been convincingly argued24 - the great dynastic memorial to the Angevin line.
At first, Eleanor in Aquitaine continued her policy of support of and co-operation with her husband. In 1169, Henry the Young King and Richard met Louis VII at Montmirail and agreed upon a treaty which would give Normandy, Anjou and England to the Young King, Brittany to Geoffrey, in right of his betrothal to Constance, and Aquitaine to Richard, the latter two grants to be held in vassalage to Louis. It was also confirmed that Richard would marry Alys, the sister of the Young King’s wife and Louis’s second daughter by Constance of Castile. Richard was invested as Duke in 1170, a very satisfying development for Eleanor, who used the occasion to demonstrate her own power and augment it by her association with the future duke. At the cathedral of St Hilaire on 31 May, Eleanor wore the coronet of Aquitaine over a silk mantle and a scarlet cloak embroidered with the three leopards of Anjou. In her hand was the sceptre she had carried at her coronation as queen of England. The coronet was placed briefly on Richard’s head, then substituted with a plainer silver circlet: Eleanor was making it clear that she was still in control. Richard was by her side at her Christmas court of 1171, and the next year they received King Alfonso of Aragon and King Sancho VI of Navarre on a diplomatic visit to discuss the county of Toulouse and the conditions of the Gascon-Pyrenean borders. Significantly, in three acts issued at Poitiers in 1172, Eleanor alters her previous form of address ‘to the king’s faithful followers and hers’ - fidelibus regis et suis - to ‘her faithful followers’ - fidelibus suis. In theory, her power in the duchy still devolved from Henry, and she was certainly limited geographically to a relatively small area around Poitiers, and economically by the fact that Aquitaine had no chancery of its own, but it does appear that during this period Eleanor was dissociating herself from Henry and reasserting her status as duchess in a manner whose significance would be revealed when the Angevin empire erupted in revolt the following year.
On the evening of 5 March 1173, the Young King crept out of the bedroom he was sharing with his father at Chinon and rode for Paris. From the Norman border, Henry II sent an envoy of bishops to ask Louis of France to return his son. ‘Who is it that sends this message to me?’ asked Louis, feigning bewilderment.
‘The King of England,’ they replied.
‘Not so,’ answered Louis. ‘The King of England is here.’
It was a declaration of war. For years, Henry and Eleanor’s beautiful son and heir had been chafing against what he saw as the unreasonable constraints placed upon him by his father. He might have been crowned twice, but all he had to live on were promises. Even his younger brother Richard had more power than he, while his father had cavalierly granted away his promised castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau as part of a planned marriage settlement for John without even asking his permission. Spoiled, lazy and greedy, the Young King refused to understand the exigencies under which his father was operating, and, encouraged by an opportunistic Louis, he was determined to fight for his rights. He was supported not only by the treachery of his brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, but by Eleanor, who chose to ally herself with her ex-husband against the father of her sons.
What were Eleanor’s motivations for this extraordinary step? Some writers have claimed that the assassination in 1170 of the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, provoked her beyond endurance, but this has been dismissed by others as a ‘post-hoc contrivance’.25 Eleanor had actively supported Henry in his struggle against Becket, with whom she had had a distant personal relationship, and though she would have been as shocked as any conventionally pious person by his murder, she was nothing ifnot a pragmatist. Becket was set for sainthood, but she could make little political use of that. Another theory is that Eleanor wanted to assert herself against Henry as a consequence of the frustrations of her marriage, in particular her resentment at being overshadowed by his mother, Empress Matilda. Again, this is implausible, because Eleanor had been living independently since 1168, a year after Matilda’s death. These factors could well have informed her attitude to Henry, but why would she have waited five years to extract her ‘revenge’? A popular charge is that Eleanor was so jealous of Rosamund de Clifford that she raised Poitou for spite, which is as absurdly melodramatic as suggesting that she murdered Henry’s mistress. A likelier explanation is more prosaic: power. Eleanor loved Aquitaine and she wanted to ensure that it would pass intact to Richard. Her elder sons were respectively fourteen, fifteen and twenty, still young and in need of guidance. If Henry were to be defeated, Aquitaine, freed from his interference, would be much more governable, and Eleanor would have a considerably wider stage on which to exercise her control.
How far was Eleanor directly involved in the rebellion? William of Newburgh, Ralph Diceto and Roger of Howden all agree that she advised Richard and Geoffrey to ally themselves with the Young King and sent them to Paris to join him. Richard FitzNigel, too, asserts that Eleanor used her influence on the younger boys. A letter written to Eleanor by the archbishop of Rouen on Henry’s instructions confirms that the English king believed his wife was responsible for turning his sons against him - ‘the fact that you should have made the fruits of your union with our Lord King rise up against their father . . .’ - and acknowledges her capacity to sway them: ‘Before events carry us to a dreadful conclusion, return with your sons to the husband whom you must obey and with whom it is your duty to live . . . Bid your sons, we beg you, to be obedient and devoted to their father.’
Eleanor was threatened with the full anger of the Church if she did not obey, but she paid no mind to the archbishop. She was determined to see the struggle through. She was not, however, acting alone. Although Gervase of Canterbury presents the whole rebellion as being planned and carried out by Eleanor, Louis and, it was claimed, Eleanor’s seneschal, Raoul de Faye, were also deeply involved. What Eleanor did was to skilfully manipulate a varied set of regional grievances against Henry into a concentrated movement, using the ambitions of the French King and the ever-turbulent lords of the south to bolster the strength of her sons. This was not revenge, but an exceptionally cold-blooded political gamble. Eleanor’s readiness to make use of Louis, and to be of use to him, suggests that she did not permit emotion to play much of a part in her strategies. She could put aside whatever feelings she still had for Henry after twenty years together if disloyalty would get her what she wanted. The scandalous events of Eleanor’s life have often led to her being depicted as a creature of emotion rather than reason, a portrayal that emphasises her ‘feminine’ willingness to allow her heart to rule her head. Nowhere is this more untrue than in her promotion of the 1173 rebellion. Eleanor was not jealous, or peeved, or frustrated: she was ruthless.
In May, she decided to join her sons at Louis’s court, changing into men’s clothes on her journey the better to avoid capture. Gervase of Canterbury mentions her arrest almost as an aside to his expressions of disgust at this transgression, the fact that Eleanor was prepared to adopt such a sinful disguise being yet more evidence of the lengths to which she would go to snatch power. It is not known where Eleanor was taken, but since four Aquitaine men, William Maingot, Porteclie de Mauzé, Hervé le Panetier and Foulques de Matha, all received grants of land from Henry, it is suspected that she was betrayed by people who were close to her, who could have fed information to Henry and informed him of her itinerary. Maingot and De Mauzé were ducal castellans who between them had witnessed seven of Eleanor’s charters during her period in government of Aquitaine from 1168 to 1173. De Maingot was appointed to Le Faye’s former post of Seneschal in 1174. If they were the traitors, Eleanor was hardly in a position to blame them.
It is intriguing to speculate how events might have gone had Henry not captured his queen so early in the game. The Young King and Louis had assembled an impressive force, including the counts of Flanders, Champagne, Boulogne and Blois, a number of lords from Anjou and Maine who had renounced their homage to Henry and a group of English barons. The Young King had made an unpleasant little deal with the King of Scotland, rashly promising him Northumbria in return for an attack from the north and, by September, the Count of Angoulême, Eleanor’s crusading companion Geoffrey de Rançon and the powerful Poitevin lords Guy and Geoffrey de Lusignan had also joined the rebels. Henry was attacked by a hydra-headed enemy, facing over the course of eighteen months fronts in Normandy, the Vexin, the south-east of England and its northern marches, Poitou and the Atlantic coast of Aquitaine. He had the advantage of his swift army of Brabantine mercenaries, the loyalty and military skill of his bastard son Geoffrey and the tactical inadequacy of Louis, in command of the disparate rebel forces, who, though personally brave, was no general. Recalling Eleanor’s complaints about Louis’s monklike tendencies, would she have advised the Young King differently had she been free?
By the end of September 1174 it was all over. The uprising had mostly consisted of sieges and castle-taking, and as usual the real victims were the peasants and townspeople, with Normandy being hit particularly hard. Henry’s settlement with his sons, decided at Montlouis near Tours, was a combination of generosity and viciously brilliant diplomacy. He forced the King of Scotland to pay homage to him as a vassal and to surrender five important castles, gave half the revenues of Poitou and Brittany to Richard and Geoffrey respectively and granted the Young King a more substantial allowance and two castles in Normandy - but none of the power he craved. Richard was given the task of subduing the rebels in Aquitaine, where he began to acquire his magnificent martial reputation. Henry was magnanimous, however unwisely. It was only Eleanor who remained unforgiven.
That Henry had trusted Eleanor right up to the moment she betrayed him decisively by making for Paris is demonstrated by the fact that when he disbanded her court at Poitiers in May 1174, some of the most important young women in the Angevin realm had been staying there in her charge. Marguerite, the next queen of England; her sister Alys, Richard’s betrothed; Geoffrey’s fiancée, Constance of Brittany; John’s prospective bride, Alice of Maurienne; Henry’s illegitimate sister Emma of Anjou and Joanna, his daughter with Eleanor, had all been in her entourage. They all, along with Eleanor, sailed with Henry to England from Barfleur in July. Marguerite, Alys of France and Constance were sent to the castle at Devizes (probably along with Alice of Maurienne, who died shortly afterwards), while Emma was swiftly disposed of in marriage to a Welsh prince. Eleanor, who spent the first period of her captivity in an unknown castle, possibly Rouen, Chinon or Falaise, was isolated, and was to remain so for the next fourteen years.
The extent of her exclusion from court and political life is reflected in the sparse record evidence for this period. In Aquitaine, where she had been active until the rebellion, Eleanor is mentioned only twice. The English Pipe Rolls indicate that she lived at Winchester and Sarum, making brief visits to a limited number of other houses in the charge of Ranulf Glanville, a former Yorkshire sheriff and Ralph FitzStephen, a chamberlain in Henry’s household. She was permitted two chamberlains of her own after 1180, but the only other named member of her staff is her maid, Amaria. An 1176 entry in the Pipe Rolls notes a payment of £28 13s 7d for two scarlet capes, two furs and a bedcover for ‘the use of the Queen and her servant’, suggesting that though Eleanor’s living conditions were reasonable, they were not commensurate with her status, as her clothes were no finer than a servant girl’s and apparently she and Amaria had to share the same bed. As far as the English were concerned, Eleanor no longer existed. It was left to one of her Poitevin poets, Richard, to mourn her imprisonment in the style to which her reputation has become accustomed:
Daughter of Aquitaine, fair, fruitful vine! Tell me, eagle with two heads, tell me, where were you when your eaglets, flying from their nest, dared to raise their talons against the King of the North Wind? . . . Your harp has changed into the voice of mourning, your flute sounds the note of affliction and your songs are turned into sounds of lamentation. Reared with abundance of all delights, you had a taste for luxury and refinement and enjoyed a royal liberty. You lived richly in your own inheritance, you took pleasure in the pastimes of your women, you delighted in the melodies of flute and drum . . . You abounded in riches of every kind. . . . Eagle of the broken alliance, you cry out unanswered because it is the King of the North Wind who holds you in captivity. But cry out and cease not to cry, do not weary, raise your voice like a trumpet so that it may reach the ears of your sons. For the day is approaching when they shall deliver you and then you shall come again to dwell in your native land.
Eleanor was to spend the remainder of her days as Queen of England under house arrest, but the end of her reign by no means marked the end of her power. In widowhood, she continued to dominate the fortunes of the English crown until her death, in her eightieth year, and beyond. Her political influence cast its shadow across the fifteenth century, and the legend of her life ultimately outlasted even that.