In 1167, the Norman conquest of England was a century old. The wider empire of which Normandy and England were now part, on the other hand, had been in existence for less than a decade and a half. Henry had welded his disparate territories together through a characteristically overwhelming combination of brute force and sharp political judgement. He had overpowered a rebellion led by his own brother Geoffrey in Anjou, and extended his influence westward into the independent duchy of Brittany, as well as consolidating his power in England, Normandy and Aquitaine. He had set his government in order, so that in England, for example, the chaotic after-effects of civil war, played out in disputes over landholding and inheritance, could finally be put to rest in his law courts without the need for his constant presence. And he had gathered around himself a group of able advisers, of whom only one had proved anything less than an asset to the regime: Thomas Becket, once his closest friend, whom Henry had promoted to the see of Canterbury only to find that his new archbishop took his duties to the Church, rather than the crown, much more seriously than the king had anticipated.
By 1167 his breach with Becket over the relative powers of ecclesiastical and royal authority had become overt and irretrievable. The archbishop had escaped into exile in France where Louis, always delighted by any opportunity to make trouble for Henry, gave him sanctuary. But, despite this increasingly bitter and, for Henry, profoundly irritating dispute, there could be no mistaking that the king of England was now the most powerful man in western Europe. He ruled a great deal more land and commanded more men and money than his nearest rival, Louis of France. Louis had grown a little into his own authority since his desertion by his first wife and the deaths of his mentors, Abbot Suger and the venerated Bernard of Clairvaux, in the early 1150s. He had also, at last, after the births of two more daughters by his second wife, fathered a son by his third. But, as he lightheartedly remarked to Henry’s clerk Walter Map, ‘Your lord the king of England, who lacks nothing, has men, horses, gold, silk, jewels, fruits, game and everything else. We in France have nothing but bread and wine and gaiety …’ And, however much Louis’s political standing had developed, the joke remained too close to the truth for French comfort.
Having so comprehensively mastered the present, Henry was now confronted with the challenge of the future. How was his empire, bound together for the moment by the sheer force of his own dynamism, to be managed when he was gone? And how was his growing family of sons to be accommodated within the territories he had amassed? Henry sought to answer both questions at once in early 1169 when he concluded a comprehensive peace treaty with Louis at the border town of Montmirail, between his own city of Le Mans and the French king’s capital at Paris.
Henry’s lands would be divided, he declared, between three of his sons. The eldest of Henry and Eleanor’s children, William, had survived for only three years, dying in December 1156. But the rest of their large brood had proved as hardy as their unstoppable parents, and their second son, Henri, was now a strapping fourteen-year-old, tall, blond, charming and charismatic. In the usual manner of international diplomacy, the complex pre-history of the kings of France and England and the queen who had married each of them in turn had been swept to one side when the young prince’s marriage was arranged: at the age of just six, the son of Eleanor and Henry had made his vows to Marguerite, the toddler daughter of Louis of France by his second wife, Constanza of Castile. And at Montmirail, for the first time, King Henry confirmed what inheritance the now teenage couple would one day rule. Young Henri would shoulder his father’s mantle, taking over the territories that made up the king’s personal inheritance – the cross-Channel realm composed of the kingdom of England, the duchy of Normandy and the county of Anjou.
His mother’s duchy of Aquitaine, meanwhile, would go to his eleven-year-old brother Richard, who – as the junior partner in this double marriage alliance – was betrothed to Marguerite’s younger sister Alix. Aquitaine would therefore retain its independence from the kingdom of England, an arrangement explicitly confirmed by the fact that Richard would do homage for his duchy to his French father-in-law Louis, rather than to his own father or brother. And for ten-year-old Geoffrey, Henry and Eleanor’s third son, there was Brittany, where the exhausted and browbeaten duke, Conan IV, finally abandoned all attempts to hold off Angevin domination. Conan’s only daughter and heir, Constance, had already been betrothed to Geoffrey in yet another dynastic alliance forged in the nursery. Now it was confirmed that the young man would one day rule Brittany in the name of his wife, and that the duchy would be formally subjected to Angevin overlordship, since Geoffrey, it was agreed, would perform homage as duke to his elder brother Henri.
The territorial settlement at Montmirail left many questions unanswered – not least in making no provision for the youngest of Henry and Eleanor’s sons, John, who was not yet three. There would be time enough later, it seemed, to consider the claims of the baby of the family, although the treaty meant that as he grew into boyhood he was already known as Jean Sans Terre – John Lackland – in sympathy for his limited prospects. But the Montmirail agreement did sketch out an understanding of what share of their father’s empire each of his elder brothers should expect to rule, and a basis on which the kings of France and England might find a way to act in co-operative tandem rather than at destructive loggerheads.
The accord was given ceremonial confirmation at Westminster Abbey eighteen months later, when young Henri was crowned king of England in his father’s presence – a calculated deployment of the same stratagem of coronation-in-advance with which the French kings had traditionally sought to guarantee their sons’ succession, and which Stephen had failed to secure for the ill-fated Eustace before Henry himself had taken the throne. Only the fact that the young man was anointed by the archbishop of York rather than the archbishop of Canterbury (Thomas Becket’s rift with his king being one of the few issues left unresolved and festering by the diplomacy at Montmirail) cast a pall over the lavish celebrations. But preceding all of these carefully calibrated dispositions – and laying the foundation for them, in fact – had been a telling change in the royal family’s political and domestic arrangements. In 1168, Eleanor had come home to Aquitaine.
It was not that, during the previous fifteen years, she had either been constantly at her husband’s side, or totally estranged from her native land. Far from it: the hours that Henry regularly spent in the saddle as he rode at punishing speed around his domains meant that the couple were frequently separated. Meanwhile, Eleanor’s more stately travels had taken her to Aquitaine’s cities of Poitiers and Bordeaux as well as to London and Oxford, Argentan and Angers. But her move in 1168 was qualitatively different. Between 1156 – when Henry did homage to Louis VII for his new wife’s duchy and received that of the Aquitainian barons in his turn – and 1167, not a single surviving charter produced by the ducal administration of Aquitaine had mentioned its duchess. Eleanor, it seems, had been too busy producing heirs, and too firmly sidelined by a husband intent on demonstrating the overriding force of his own will, to play more than a decorative role in the government of her people.
Now that was changing. Henry’s thoughts were turning to the possibility that the future of his empire might lie in delegation rather than centralisation. And, in the case of Aquitaine, his mind was concentrated by the particular challenges the duchy posed to its rulers – challenges that were multiplied many times over if those rulers came from beyond its northern frontier. Aquitaine was huge in size, covering an area larger than Normandy and Anjou put together, and, for northerners travelling south, its territories became ever more alien as their journey progressed, not only in language but in culture, customs and climate. It had to be said that Anglo-Normans and Angevins themselves were not the easiest of bedfellows, but the tensions between them were born of proximity and long experience, of similarity rather than difference. Aquitaine was another matter. For inhabitants of Normandy and Anjou alike, the peoples of the south could appear disconcertingly foreign, whether foppishly refined to the point of degeneracy, or disgustingly uncivilised in their habits and dress. Either way, clearly, they were not to be trusted.
Henry’s countrymen, therefore, whether in England, Normandy or Anjou, were all too likely to assume that Aquitaine was virtually ungovernable. The truth, however, seen through less prejudiced eyes, was more heartening. The duchy was a region not only of extraordinary cultural sophistication – its poetry and music matched by the exquisitely carved stonework of its churches – but of extraordinary wealth. Besides its agricultural riches, its golden fields and dark forests, coiling rivers and open coasts, Aquitaine plied a profitable export trade in two of twelfth-century Europe’s most valued commodities: salt, essential for food preservation, which was distilled from sea water all along the duchy’s Atlantic shore, and wine, produced to a superb standard in Bordeaux and Saintonge, and shipped to markets across Europe. That trade filled the duke of Aquitaine’s coffers with revenue from customs and tolls, and – although power was in essence a matter more of land and loyalty than of commercial transactions – ready cashflow would more than help to raise an army or keep it in the field.
From his cities of Poitiers, built on a great promontory overlooking streams surrounding it on three sides, and Bordeaux, the bustling port on the west bank of the Garonne where the river meanders to the sea, the duke therefore stood every chance of dominating vast tracts of his duchy. The regions from Poitiers west and southward down the coast to La Rochelle, Saintes and Bordeaux, and then east and south again to Agen, were prosperous and peaceful. But there was no denying that the lands of Poitou and the Limousin in the centre and east of the duchy – and particularly the castle-studded territories south of Poitiers belonging to the counts of Angoulême and the great Lusignan family – had the potential to be profoundly troublesome. Either of these vassals of the duke could use the strategically crucial location of their estates to disrupt communications between the key cities that owed allegiance to their overlord. The challenge of managing ambitious and aggressive men with such widespread scope to cause conflict had been a familiar one to Eleanor’s father and grandfather; and, if Henry needed a reminder to keep his eye on the region, he got it in 1168 when Geoffroi de Lusignan rose in rebellion against him.
The threat was manifest: the Lusignans were bullish and intransigent, and support from Louis of France would always be forthcoming for those in Aquitaine who sought to throw off his rival’s yoke. And the violence had alarming consequences. The earl of Salisbury, an experienced soldier despatched with Queen Eleanor to hold Poitou while Henry was engaged in urgent diplomacy with Louis, was killed in action: an unfortunate casualty of unlucky fate, said the Lusignans; stabbed in the back while unarmed and defenceless, protested the earl’s outraged men. Either way, the killing – rather than the more usual imprisonment and ransom – of a trusted noble lieutenant was, for Henry, both shocking and sobering.
The Lusignans’ revolt was suppressed by a combination of the treaty agreed with Louis at Montmirail in the following year and a virulent campaign of repression waged by Henry in its wake. But the need to find a long-term strategy for the rule of Aquitaine, and Poitou in particular, was left in stark relief. And that circumstance lent a great weight of significance to Eleanor’s return to the turreted palace at Poitiers in which she had spent so much of her childhood. She was the hereditary duchess of Aquitaine, freed now from the labours of childbearing to take up the reins of government among her vassals, who had sworn allegiance to her long before they had bowed the knee to the second of her husbands. For Henry, who had learned much from his gifted mother, this was a deliberate decision to deploy the skills and charisma of his equally, if very differently, gifted wife – Eleanor’s fearlessness marking a counterpoint to Matilda’s shrewd caution. For Aquitaine, it was the restoration of a measure of native rule (which, however tempestuous the politics of the duchy under Eleanor’s father and grandfather, remained infinitely preferable to domination from the north). And, for Eleanor, it was not only a home-coming but, at the age of forty-four, her first clear chance at sustained political autonomy on a public stage.
Her new role as Aquitaine’s duchess was founded on her own hereditary rights, but it was reinforced and amplified by her functions as wife and mother. She was her husband’s lieutenant in this part of his empire, even if his right to rule there originated with her. She was also serving as guardian of the duchy during the adolescence of her son Richard, who had been named as Aquitaine’s future duke in the settlement of 1169. Richard was an exceptionally able boy and, it emerged, his mother’s favourite – a bond that was established decisively in these years when he was immersed, with her, in the culture and landscape of her own girlhood. And, just as his older brother Henri’s position as heir to England and Normandy had been ritually confirmed by his coronation at Westminster two years earlier, in June 1172 fourteen-year-old Richard was formally enthroned as duke of Aquitaine.
In the cool interior of the Romanesque church of St Hilaire at Poitiers, watched by the painted gallery of bishops, martyrs and saints on the richly coloured walls, Richard sat in the abbot’s chair – by tradition, an honorific right of the counts of Poitou – to take possession of the sacred lance and banner that symbolised the authority of the dukes of Aquitaine. Because that authority reached further than Poitou, the ceremony was then repeated seventy-five miles to the south-east at Limoges, chief city of the Limousin. There Richard received the ring of St Valérie, a virgin martyr of the early Church whose rapidly developing twelfth-century cult identified her as the symbolic embodiment of Aquitaine itself. It was the young duke who wore the saint’s ring, but the ritual personification of the duchy as a woman could not help but focus attention on the woman who ruled with and for him.
We cannot now reconstruct many of the details of Eleanor’s government in Aquitaine, but the fact of her role is unmistakable. In 1168 and 1171 she held great Christmas courts of her own, as she had never done before, gathering her vassals around her in Aquitaine in the absence of her husband, but with her young son by her side. And, after a decade in which she had appeared in not a single extant ducal charter, in five years she now issued fifteen surviving charters in her own right and on her own authority, sometimes in association with her husband or son – ‘I and Richard my son’, some acts began, while others were addressed by the queen-duchess to ‘the king’s faithful followers and hers’ – but never dependent on them. Meanwhile, Henry neither issued any charters of his own for Aquitaine during these years, nor saw any need to confirm or otherwise validate those of his wife.
It seemed, therefore, as though the delegation of power within Henry’s empire, of which Eleanor’s rule in Aquitaine formed a key part, was working. Certainly, it survived two major shocks in 1170. That summer, the unthinkable happened when Henry, the thirty-seven-year-old king whose superhuman vigour was the stuff of legend, fell so seriously ill that rumours of his death flew around France. He recovered, slowly, but the will he had drawn up when he believed he would not survive confirmed his commitment to the distribution of his lands between his sons (and, in practice, his wife) that had been agreed at Montmirail. And then, once restored to health, both Henry and his regime proved able to ride out the international storm unleashed at the end of the year by the murder of Thomas Becket, hacked to death in his own cathedral by knights who believed they were acting on their king’s orders.
It took almost two years to emerge from the tempest of outrage and recrimination, but by the summer of 1172 Henry had done public penance for his part in the killing and had at last been freed from the threat of excommunication. The clouds, it seemed, were lifting; and the division of power among Henry’s family appeared not simply to be functioning but to be reaching maturity, with the investiture of Richard as duke of Aquitaine in June and yet another English coronation for his brother Henri in August, this time at Winchester with his young French wife at his side.
Appearances, however, could be deceptive. What Henry had declared his intention to do, and what he had actually done, were two very different things. Perhaps the clerk Walter Map had been right after all to suggest that the king set too much store by his mother Matilda’s advice that an unruly hawk might be brought under close control by the proffer of a juicy piece of meat, but only if it were snatched away at the last moment. By the beginning of 1173 Henry’s eldest son, now seventeen, and Richard, fifteen, had heard many fine words describing their rights as king and duke, spoken in reverent tones amid a haze of incense in hushed cathedrals. Of the reality of royal and ducal authority, they had seen very little. Perhaps it should not have been surprising that their tirelessly controlling father should find it difficult to hand over the fundamentals, as opposed to the accoutrements, of power. Conflict between fathers and sons had, after all, been a perennial side-effect for the Capetians too when they had tried to secure the succession to the French throne by this same method of preemptive enthronement. But the thwarted hopes of Henry’s sons were mingled with the driving ambition and fiery temper they had inherited from their implacable father. It was a toxic mixture.
The situation began to unravel in February 1173 at what had promised to be a moment of triumph for Henry. He was in the process of agreeing a peace intended to secure the south-eastern frontier of his territories, of which the centrepiece was a proposed marriage between his youngest son, six-year-old John, and the daughter and heiress of Count Humbert of Maurienne, a territory that lay east of Provence in the Savoyard Alps. The settlement was proclaimed at a magnificent meeting of Henry’s court at Limoges, attended not only by the count of Maurienne but also by the rival southern powers of the king of Aragon-Barcelona, the king of Navarre, and Count Ramon of Toulouse, against whom Henry had undertaken an imposing but largely unsuccessful military campaign in 1159. On 25 February, Count Ramon gave ceremonial expression to the concord he had now concluded with his former enemy by doing homage for Toulouse first to Henry, and then to his eldest son. Young Henri, it seemed, whatever his simmering resentments, had been accorded all due recognition in this gathering of potentates.
But then Count Humbert asked the king what lands the child John would bring to the marriage, to match the riches of his own daughter’s inheritance. Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau, came the reply: the three castles in Anjou that had been the focus of Henry’s conflict with his brother Geoffrey nearly two decades earlier. At this, young Henri exploded in fury. He had been crowned king of England – twice – and invested as duke of Normandy and count of Anjou. He had just turned eighteen, already two years older than the age at which his father had taken command of the duchy of Normandy. And yet his father had not handed into his control any of the lands of his inheritance, to which his right had been so publicly and repeatedly proclaimed. Now, the final insult, three of his castles were to be given away to his baby brother. He did not agree. He would not agree. And his father would have to do something about it.
The king was not minded to capitulate in the face of this petulant outburst. Whatever the merits of his son’s case, they were outweighed not only by Henry’s own reluctance to cede control in any fundamental sense, but also by the fact that young Henri had so far spectacularly failed to prove that he was ready for the responsibility. Quite apart from the questionable judgement revealed by this public foot-stamping, the Young King, as he had come to be known, was engulfed in debt. Though he could, with some measure of justification, argue that this was unavoidable given that he had no lands with which to support his household, such reasoning was badly compromised by the profligacy of his spending on tournaments and banqueting. Two months earlier, according to the chronicler Robert of Torigni, he had held a Christmas feast so extravagant in its conceit and lavish in its execution that one room alone had been filled with 110 knights all named William.
But the bruised amour propre of a vain adolescent took on a more threatening slant in the light of the probability that the Young King’s father-in-law, Louis of France, had encouraged or even instigated his demands, and the certainty that he would support them. And the alarm of the Old King – ‘old’ only in relative terms, since Henry was still a few days short of his fortieth birthday, and as remorselessly energetic as ever – was immediately compounded by a private warning from Ramon of Toulouse that Henry’s younger sons, Richard and Geoffrey, were conspiring with their brother against him.
Henry responded with characteristic swiftness. On the plausible pretext that he was going hunting, he left Limoges at speed, giving covert orders that his castles in Aquitaine should be put on a war footing. Richard and Geoffrey remained behind in the custody of their mother, while Henry decided that the Young King should travel with him, under close supervision, on his journey north. But when the royal party paused to spend the night at the massive fortress of Chinon, one of the castles in the Loire that had precipitated the confrontation at Limoges, young Henri made his escape silently under cover of darkness in the brief hours while his father slept, and rode furiously for Paris.
It had been entirely foreseeable that Henri would seek to defect to his father-in-law’s court, and the Old King’s immediate frustration lay not in the fact of his desertion but in his own failure to pre-empt his son’s flight. It was a much more brutal shock, however, to learn a few days later that Henri’s younger brothers had also made the hurried journey north to join him under Louis’s protection. Richard and Geoffrey, at fifteen and fourteen, were still too young to be acting entirely on the basis of independent political calculation, and they had been left in the apparent security of their mother’s keeping. There was only one conclusion to be drawn, and it was the most shocking of all: Eleanor too was now in open revolt against her husband and king.
One Limousin chronicler, Geoffroi of Vigeois, reports that Eleanor’s name had been included with those of her younger sons in Ramon of Toulouse’s warning to Henry about the treachery he now faced. If Vigeois is correct, then – given that Henry had left Richard and Geoffrey in Eleanor’s care – either the king had not believed the count’s warning, or he had calculated that Eleanor would not risk pursuing the conspiracy once its existence had been exposed. Either way, he was profoundly mistaken.
Henry’s difficulty in giving credence to his wife’s betrayal is mirrored by that of historians in attempting to explain it. Eleanor herself, of course, left no account of her own motives, nor did contemporary chroniclers, who tended to keep themselves at arm’s length even from their own narratives of her involvement in the rebellion, shielding themselves behind allusions to hearsay from persons unknown with a constant refrain of ‘so it is said …’. The vacuum of information has been filled, as so often in Eleanor’s life, with speculation focusing on her emotional experiences. Just as her personal incompatibility with Louis played a part in the ending of her first marriage, so it has been argued that the private dynamics of her second – which was, after all, a much more potent partnership between two extraordinarily forceful people – lay behind the breach between Eleanor and Henry in 1173. And, as so often with Eleanor, centuries of conjecture have borne fruit in legends of remarkable complexity and persistence. She was violently incensed, so the story goes, by Henry’s passion for a beautiful young woman named Rosamund Clifford, ‘Fair Rosamund’, the ‘rose of the world’. In her jealousy and anger, the queen roused her sons to rebellion against her unfaithful husband, before (in a plot-twist worthy of this granddaughter of a troubadour) procuring the death by poison of her hated rival for the king’s love.
The absence of a single shred of evidence to support this tale – beyond the fact of Henry’s liaison with Rosamund Clifford, who died in 1176 and was buried at the king’s command in a magnificent tomb at the Oxfordshire abbey of Godstow – need not prevent us from taking it seriously, in essence if not in detail: it is not the first or last event in Eleanor’s life of which that is true. But a lack of basic plausibility might. Whatever the reality of Eleanor’s relationship with her husband – which is impossible now to recover, any more than we can know what really happened between Eleanor and her uncle Ramon of Antioch twenty-five years earlier – there is a banality to the fact that kings had mistresses, and Eleanor was certainly worldly-wise enough to know it. There is no incontrovertible evidence that she and Henry had even seen each other for two years between 1170 and the Christmas court they held together at Chinon in 1172. Instead, Eleanor had been spending her time engaged in a project which offers much more fertile ground in explaining her alienation from her husband in the spring of 1173: the rule of her beloved Aquitaine.
There are indications – fleeting, but suggestive nonetheless – that Eleanor had been seeking to intensify her independence as de facto ruler of her duchy in the year before the crisis of 1173 began to unfold. In June 1172 she had received diplomatic visits from the kings of Navarre and of Aragon-Barcelona; the complex process of attempting to stabilise the geopolitics of southern France, in other words, was one in which she, as well as Henry, had been personally involved. During 1172 she had also addressed three charters not ‘to the king’s faithful followers and hers’, as she had always done previously, but ‘to her own faithful followers’ alone. In interpreting such faint traces of political activity we are reading crumbling runes rather than a clearly incised script, but even this tentative impression of Eleanor’s increasing self-assertion is significant in a context where – for all her apparent authority in her own duchy – her practical powers were constrained by the fact that she controlled neither the bulk of Aquitaine’s revenues, which clinked instead into her husband’s coffers, nor the military resources needed to impose order there. In 1171, when the monks of St Martial’s Abbey in Limoges faced a revolt at their nearby town of La Souterraine, it was to Henry – rather than Eleanor, the duchess on their doorstep – that they appealed for help; and it was Henry, not Eleanor, who sent soldiers to their aid.
The overriding political circumstance, therefore, that shaped Eleanor’s actions in 1173 was the fact that she, no less than her sons, had been promised power by her husband and then denied it in practice. Or, at the very least, she had achieved some measure of authority in her own duchy, only to find that the fundamentals of political control still lay beyond her grasp. If her son Henri was brimming with resentment at his father’s refusal to relinquish the rights he believed were his due, then Eleanor had no less cause for frustration – and, in fact, much more, since the elaborate diplomacy at Limoges in February 1173, which for a brief instant had seemed such a triumph for Henry, had also represented a dramatic affront to Eleanor’s territorial ambitions.
Henry’s goals in tackling the intractable rivalries of southern French politics had always been to guarantee the frontiers of his empire, to extend his influence beyond them, and to protect access from the Atlantic port of Bordeaux via Toulouse to the lucrative trade routes of the Mediterranean. In 1159, that had meant waging war on Count Ramon of Toulouse; in 1173, it meant receiving his homage. For Henry, with his steely pragmatism and his absolute capacity to inhabit the present moment, it was a political recalculation so obvious that it did not warrant a second thought. Eleanor, however, did not find it so easy to take this strategic about-turn in her stride. When Henry had led his formidable army against the city of Toulouse in the midsummer heat of 1159, he had done so in the name of his wife’s claim to be the rightful heir to the comté. Eleanor’s grandmother Philippa, the long-suffering wife of Aquitaine’s troubadour duke, had been the only child of Guilhem IV, count of Toulouse, but – in a scenario that would have been instantly familiar to Henry’s mother Matilda – she had not been accepted as her father’s successor. The Toulousain inheritance had passed instead in the male line to Guilhem’s younger brother, Ramon IV, whose grandson, Ramon V, now held the title. But the dukes of Aquitaine had never conceded the legitimacy of this succession, and Eleanor’s counterclaim had been pressed at sword-point first by Louis of France in 1141, and then by Henry in 1159.
Neither campaign had been successful, and by the end of 1172 Henry had concluded that his interests were better served by cultivating Ramon’s friendship than by renewing the attempt to bludgeon the count into submission. In February 1173, Eleanor was therefore forced to stand by in impotent silence while the husband she had scarcely seen for two years stormed at his customary speed into her city of Limoges in order to contract a peace with the man who had usurped her right to her grandmother’s territories. Henry, meanwhile, gave no hint of doubt or hesitation about the propriety of his actions; he seems to have suspected nothing awry as Eleanor watched Ramon kneel before him amid the splendour of his court to be publicly confirmed in possession of Toulouse.
The form of that ceremony too, had Henry but recognised it, supplied yet more grist to the mill of his wife’s grievances. Even if Eleanor could have been persuaded that Ramon was rightfully the count of Toulouse, there could be no doubt of the duke of Aquitaine’s claim to the overlordship of the comté. In that sense, at least, Ramon’s homage to Henry was unexceptionable, since the king was also duke of Aquitaine in his role as Eleanor’s husband. But the homage that Ramon performed that day to Henry and Eleanor’s son, the Young King Henri, was a different matter. True, Henri had been named heir to England, Normandy and Anjou, but he had no claim to Aquitaine, which had been apportioned as the inheritance of his brother Richard. For Count Ramon to do homage to Henri, in other words, forcefully suggested that Aquitaine was no longer an independent part of Henry’s empire but a dependent one, subsumed under the overarching authority of the Anglo-Norman crown. That would have been anathema to Eleanor’s ancestors; it was unacceptable to many of her Aquitainian vassals; and there is no reason to think that it was any more tolerable to Eleanor herself.
For all that the devastating rupture of 1173 was precipitated by her son Henri’s adolescent posturing, it was Eleanor’s grievances that constituted a coherent critique of her husband’s strategy over the previous few years. It is understandable, perhaps, that the story of this most charismatic and unconventional of queens has been clouded by an enveloping aura of romance and myth, but if we jettison the presupposition that her estrangement from her husband must have been rooted in emotion, we can find ample grounds for the alienation of a focused political mind. Henry had not delivered the measure of political autonomy he had promised Eleanor or her sons. He had abandoned her claim to Toulouse, a cause for which he, and her first husband before him, had previously been willing to fight. And, in doing so, he had appeared to threaten the autonomy of Aquitaine itself. The triumphant ceremonial at Limoges in February 1173 – an unwelcome political ritual performed at the heart of one of Eleanor’s own cities – could not have been a more stark reminder of the gulf between her hopes for the duchy and her husband’s obliviousness to the aspirations he himself had done so much to foster.
That is not to say that Eleanor’s response was either predictable or well-judged. Rebellion against one’s king – and particularly a king as near-impossible to resist as Henry had proved himself to be – was an intensely dangerous path. But Eleanor had already shown herself to be capable of the apparently unachievable: her almost seamless translation from the crown of France to the crown of England was demonstration enough of that. She had engineered her own escape from one unacceptable royal marriage, and she had proved more than once that she would not be constrained by fear of the consequences of her actions. It might seem scarcely credible that she should send her teenage sons to conspire with her ex-husband against their father, but it is clear nevertheless that that is what she did. Neither Richard and Geoffrey, who were still too young to act with any significant degree of independence, nor the Young King, more of a strutting peacock than a political thinker, were capable of co-ordinating such a threatening coalition between the heirs to Henry’s empire and the king of France. Eleanor was. And it soon became clear quite how much she was putting at risk in doing so.
There could be no surprise, of course, that Louis of France – never the wiliest of politicians, but acquiring some greater worldliness with the advancing years – would take any opportunity to discomfit his rival and destabilise Henry’s empire. But the spectacle of a ruling family imploding into treachery and recrimination caused horror, among Anglo-Norman commentators at least. It was a ‘deplorable betrayal’, one chronicler said, and it served only to feed the sinister (and deliciously scandalous) tale that Henry’s Angevin dynasty was the ‘Devil’s Brood’, descended from Melusine, daughter of Satan himself.
Whatever the outrage it provoked, however, the story of hot-headed young men resorting to violence and treachery in their unseemly haste to seize their inheritance was a familiar one to contemporary observers. It was a cause for sorrow, regret and anger, but it was far from unprecedented. Louis of France’s ill-fated elder brother Philippe had done little else but provoke their father with his insolence between his coronation at thirteen and his death two years later. A closer parallel still was provided by the travails of Robert II, king of France a century and a half earlier, who had spent the last six years of his life embroiled in a bitter war with his three sons, in which the eldest, the young king Hugues, had died at the age of just eighteen. And there was a ready biblical identification against which clerical chroniclers could measure Henry’s misfortune, in the rebellion of the unhappy Absalom against his father, King David.
The monastic historian William of Newburgh, for example, was in no doubt that young Henri was an ‘ungrateful son’ whose disobedience to his father had ‘violated the law of nature’. Even so, the very fact that his disloyalty could be fitted into the archetype of ‘the accursed Absalom’ meant that the impulses behind it were culturally understood; while the qualities that provoked it – ambition, aggression, unbridled self-assertion – were those which, differently directed, could be seen as proper to a king.
The same could not be said of Eleanor. There were no obvious historical precedents nor cultural archetypes to frame her rebellion. When the contemporary chronicler Ralph of Diceto, dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and a learned historian, scoured the annals for past parallels against which to compare the revolt, he compiled more than thirty instances of sons rebelling against their fathers, but not a single case of a queen taking up arms against her husband. Not only that, but the traits Eleanor displayed in resisting Henry were the antithesis of those understood as queenly. A queen was a consort, a helpmeet, an intercessor in the cause of peace and justice. Above all, perhaps, she was doubly bound by a sacred duty to obey her husband – once as a subject, and again as his wife. Eleanor’s son Henri, William of Newburgh believed, ‘had sullied his early years by an indelible stain’, but Eleanor’s behaviour threatened the very fabric of society itself. ‘Man is the head of woman,’ the archbishop of Rouen reminded her in some alarm, quoting St Paul, in a public letter composed on his behalf by the scholar and stylist Peter of Blois. ‘We know that unless you return to your husband you will be the cause of a general ruin.’
But Eleanor had not been cowed by scurrilous rumour in Antioch; she had not acquiesced in the face of a papal prohibition on divorcing her first husband; and she would not back down now. With her sons safely in Paris under the wing of her jubilant ex-husband, she set about mustering military support in Aquitaine, which was readily forthcoming from those lords – Poitevins for the most part – who had always resisted the imposition of central control in the duchy and who had tangled with Henry before: the counts of Angoulême, their allies the Lusignan family and the Lusignans’ cousin Geoffroi de Rancon, at whose side Eleanor had braved the ill-fated ascent of Mount Cadmus a quarter of a century earlier. As she did so, Louis was assembling an intimidating coalition of allies in support of her sons in Paris. There was Mathieu, count of Boulogne, who had acquired his title by marrying the daughter of King Stephen and his queen Mathilde of Boulogne; the count’s elder brother Philippe, count of Flanders; Stephen’s nephew Thibaud of Blois; and William, the king of Scots. All saw the unmissable opportunity – together with other defectors in England, Normandy, Brittany and Anjou – to lay their eager hands on lands they had either forfeited, or never stood a chance of acquiring, under Henry’s uncompromising rule.
As her sons prepared to take up arms at the head of this great noble alliance against their father, Eleanor made ready to return for the first time in twenty years to the French court in Paris. It is impossible to know whether she had made a calculated decision to play the odds of this nerve-wracking game, or whether her fearlessness was born of an inability to contemplate the risk of failure. Either way, she was to find that – yet again – she had met her match in Henry. For once, this was a challenge from which she would not emerge unscathed. Before she could reach Paris, at some place and time unknown on the road north from Poitiers, she was captured by her husband’s forces – and found to be disguised for her journey in men’s clothing, according to the chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury. The story could well be the sensationalised elaboration of a disapproving monk, but at the very least it remains tantalisingly allusive, given that she had figuratively (if not literally) adopted the guise of a man from the moment she rejected her husband’s authority.
No tunic and hose, however, could now save her from her fate. By the end of 1173 it was apparent that Henry’s military genius, his cool head in a crisis and his hastily assembled army of ruthlessly professional mercenaries were holding firm against the onslaught of his sons and their allies. That autumn, with the rebel campaign faltering, Henry offered them terms for peace that were financially rewarding but conceded nothing of the power they craved. Encouraged by Louis, the boys fought on, with sixteen-year-old Richard mounting an impressively stubborn defence of his mother’s county of Poitou. By the autumn of 1174, however, it was clear that there was no alternative but to throw themselves on their father’s mercy. Henry loved his sons with ‘an inordinate love’, William of Newburgh believed, and certainly the king was generous in his victory. He exchanged the kiss of peace with his prodigal offspring, and gave them money and noble (if deliberately unfortified) residences in the territories they had claimed, to salve their battered egos. There would be no concession of jurisdiction, but this time they were in no position to argue. Others might accuse them of breaking nature’s law, but Henry was prepared to be magnanimous: the treaty agreed at the pretty town of Montlouis in the Loire at the end of September offered not simply reconciliation, but reconciliation with honour. Not, however, to Eleanor.
For Henry’s captured queen there would be no forgiveness. Her name was not spoken at Montlouis. By then, she was far away in England, where she had already endured months of an imprisonment that would last as long as her husband lived. Revolt had brought her sons chastening experience, and a fresh start with their father. For Eleanor, on the other hand, the rest was impenetrable silence.