Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  In the early summer of 1150—the exact date has not survived—Eleanor gave birth to a girl, who would be christened Alix. That day a few church bells chimed softly, but there were no public demonstrations to honor the new princess, no bonfires in the squares of the Île-de-France. The queen, that exasperating Poitevin, had failed again. The only demonstrations of joy were those made by Eleanor herself, in the privacy of her chamber with the bed curtains drawn, for she knew that, in failing, she had won.

  It is interesting to speculate what might have ensued had Eleanor borne a son. Certainly the history of Europe would have been vastly different, because a male child would have been an heir not only to the Frankish throne but to Eleanor’s dower land of Aquitaine as well, thereby creating a unified realm larger than any that had existed for the Franks since the time of Charlemagne. That had been the picture in Louis the Fat’s mind on the day he learned of Duke William IX’s death, that had been the vision that had sustained Abbot Suger these many years. As both of them understood, however, William’s generous bequest would only be a first step; technically, Eleanor’s dower lands could only be officially incorporated into the Frankish kingdom when she had borne a son and, moreover, when the son succeeded Louis on the throne.

  Just as Eleanor’s pregnancy had been a state affair, so now her incompetence in childbed became a national concern, and after she had proved her perversity a second time, the more uneasy members of Louis’s council began to voice fears that the queen might continue to produce princesses, that is, if she ever conceived again. Until this point Eleanor’s struggle for release from the bonds of marriage had been a private one, but after the birth of Alix she saw the emergence of barons who began urging Louis to divorce her. Of course these unwitting allies were utterly unconcerned with the queen’s personal wishes and, in point of fact, regarded her as no better than a cart that had failed to function properly.

  Louis, now thirty, looked older than his years. Certainly he no longer resembled the willowy blond youth who had appeared on the banks of the Garonne to claim his bride, and although by medieval standards he could be called neither young nor old, still he had been married fifteen years with nothing to show for it. Until now, fortune had always smiled upon the Capetians; every king since 987 had left a male heir to succeed him, and continuity of the dynasty never lay far from any Capetian’s mind. If luck failed, they were not averse to taking other measures, and it was recalled, as a matter of precedent, that in the late tenth century, Robert the Pious had been forced to set aside two wives in order to assure the succession.

  The one person in the kingdom who seemed least troubled by the unexpected appearance of Princess Alix was Abbot Suger. Optimistic, he pointed out that Eleanor and Louis, still young, might anticipate more offspring, hopefully one of them male. More importantly, it was unthinkable to speak of giving up Aquitaine, that rich dower that Louis the Fat had clutched with so much satisfaction on his deathbed. Those who pressed for annulment argued that Eleanor’s duchy, the most turbulent in Europe, had never added any substantial revenue to the crown. In truth, even had Louis been a stronger personality, he lacked the resources to subdue Aquitaine—even future masters with greater assets would be unable to do so—and in the mid twelfth century the Frankish monarchy was not psychologically ready to assimilate such a huge piece of property. Nevertheless. Suger’s will quietly prevailed, and the knotty problem of the succession was shelved for the time being. During the coming months it would be he who held the marriage together, for he alone in the kingdom had the foresight to understand that the real consequences of a divorce would be, not France’s loss of Aquitaine, but in the case of Eleanor’s remarriage the addition of her lands to some other lord, thereby lifting this unknown someone to a position of greater power than that of Louis. Precisely who this someone might be Suger had no way of knowing.

  By the end of the summer the Crusade, while not forgotten, had nonetheless begun to fade from people’s minds. What had happened could not be changed and even for Louis, architect of its failure, life had to go on. Upon his return the previous autumn, he had been carefully briefed by Suger on the various shifts in political alignment among his vassals during his absence. The name that arose most frequently in these conversations was Plantagenet, not a real surname but a nickname for the count of Anjou, whose habit was to wear in his helmet a yellow blossom from the broom plant, the planta genesta. Geoffrey Anjou might have been a prototype for the chivalrous medieval prince. Dashing, incredibly good looking, highly educated, he impressed his contemporaries with his charm, courage, and above all, cleverness. Like all the Angevins, Geoffrey was a great believer in self-help, a fact that had no doubt been responsible for the mammoth strides he and his family had made in recent years.

  Looking back to the eleventh century, there had been four important feudal empires in France, the most formidable being the house of Blois because of their family ties with the counts of Champagne, who controlled the commercial city of Troyes. Normandy, poor and badly situated, could not have been called a major power, while the house of Anjou, with its command of the rich Loire valley, showed potential, but the Angevins were undisciplined and its counts known to be unstable. Each of these houses, however, presented obstacles to the ascendancy of the Capets, the only ones who could boast of being anointed kings. Then in 1066 the whole power structure suddenly blew to pieces when William, duke of Normandy, successfully conquered England. All at once the Normans, those poor cousins, possessed newfound wealth, and worse in the eyes of the Capetians, they had wangled themselves a crown. In the shuffle, the balance of power shifted drastically, with the already insignificant Angevins shoved farther down the ladder. Certainly by the time Geoffrey was born in 1113, his family counted for relatively little. In fact, Geoffrey’s father, Fulk V, thought so little of his inherited fief that, at the age of forty, he abandoned it to marry Melisende, the heiress of Jerusalem, the title king of Jerusalem holding an infinitely greater appeal for Fulk than that of count of Anjou. From small beginnings, then, he was able to increase his heritage by marrying an heiress, a strategy of proven success that would not be overlooked by his descendants.

  The event most critical to the rise in Geoffrey Anjou’s fortunes took place in 1120, when he was only seven years old. At twilight on November 25, Henry I, youngest son of William the Conqueror, king of England and duke of Normandy, prepared to make a routine crossing of the English Channel. With him at Barfleur on the Norman coast were his entire household, including his seventeen-year-old son and heir, William, “a prince so pampered,” wrote Henry of Huntingdon, that he seemed “destined to be food for the fire.” The king embarked before dark, but the younger members of the royal entourage, “those rash youths who were flown with wine,” lingered to carouse on the shore. In any event, they felt no pressing need for haste, since they were sailing on the White Ship, the swiftest and most modern vessel in the royal fleet, and would easily be able to overtake the king. Loath to break up the party, they did not launch their vessel until after nightfall. It was a perfect evening for a crossing, with a gentle breeze and a sea as calm and flat as a pond, and they soon might have caught up with the king had not a drunken helmsman rammed the ship into a rock in the bay. Panic broke out. Attempts to push free with oars and boathooks failed, and the ship rapidly began to fill with water. Throwing a dinghy overboard, Prince William and a few companions abandoned ship, but at the last moment he went back to rescue his illegitimate sister, the countess of Perche. The small boat, “overcharged by the multitude that leapt into her, capsized and sank and buried all indiscriminately in the deep. One rustic alone, floating all night upon a mast, survived until morning to describe the dismal catastrophe.”

  The wreck of the White Ship was as enormous a calamity in the twelfth century as the loss of the Titanic in the twentieth, even more so perhaps because it would shake the fortunes of England for the next thirty years. Prince William was Henry’s only legitimate son, but “instead of wearing embroidered robe
s, he floated naked in the waves, and instead of ascending a lofty throne he found his grave in the bellies of fishes at the bottom of the sea.” Henry had fathered at least twenty bastards, but despite a hasty second marriage, he was never able to produce the needed male heir. Aside from the prince, he had one other legitimate child, his daughter, Matilda, the widow of the German emperor. Determined to pass on the crown to a member of his immediate family, the king recalled Matilda from Germany, and in January 1127 publicly recognized her as his successor and required his barons to swear fealty to her. It was an extraordinary decision, one that drew immediate criticism from all sides, but a few months later, before the shock waves had even begun to subside, he jolted the sensibilities of his barons anew by marrying his daughter to young Geoffrey of Anjou.

  These unusual arrangements satisfied no one but the king himself. Most appalled was Matilda, “a young woman of clear understanding and masculine firmness,” who had been dragged home from Germany much against her own inclinations. She was twenty-five, the daughter of a king and the widow of an emperor; Geoffrey was fourteen and the son of a count. But Henry would hear of no objections; he wished her wed to Geoffrey, an alliance of political importance, he said, and he would have his way. From every angle, Henry’s barons found his schemes repugnant. Matilda was a stranger to them, and from what little they knew of her they had formed a patently unfavorable impression. Strikingly handsome but haughty and domineering, she had been sent to Germany at the age of eight, where she had been groomed in a rigid court etiquette alien to Norman tradition, though of course her greatest handicap was her sex. The Normans knew of no precedent for the rule of a woman. As for Matilda’s marriage to Geoffrey, the idea was totally distasteful. The Normans believed the Angevins to be barbarians who desecrated churches and ate like beasts. According to a widely accepted tale, their ruling family had descended from demons and were shameless enough to tell this story on themselves. Worse, they laughed about it. In no way did Geoffrey, a beautiful adolescent boy, resemble a demon, but blood would tell, and the Normans feared that Geoffrey would rule for Matilda. The idea of an Angevin on the throne of England was intolerable.

  Predictably, the unlikely liaison of Matilda and Geoffrey turned out to be miserable for both of them. There was no denying Geoffrey’s learning and charm, but as Matilda soon discovered, the charm was shallow and his cleverness devoted to the promotion of Geoffrey. He made no secret of the fact that he had married Matilda only to gain control of Normandy—evidently he realized that he would never be accepted as king of England—or that he impatiently awaited the death of her father. Or that he disliked her. She was, he complained, rude, arrogant, and unfeminine, and once, in a temper, he sent her back to England. For these reasons, it took the couple seven years to have their first child, a son who would be known as Henry FitzEmpress, after his mother.

  Two years after the birth of his grandson and namesake, King Henry returned from a day of hunting in Normandy and, ravenous, wolfed down a dish of lampreys, “a fish which he was very fond of, though they always disagreed with him and the physicians had often cautioned him against eating them, but he would not listen to their advice.” A few hours later he was dead. Now that the moment had arrived for Matilda to claim her throne, it became clear that Henry had grossly misjudged his people. When his nephew Stephen of Blois heard of the death, he raced across the Channel from France and claimed the throne for himself. That he had been one of those who had pledged allegiance to Matilda was irrelevant, although Stephen did have the grace to excuse his defection by saying that he had vowed homage to the empress under coercion. No excuses were really necessary “All the bishops, earls, and barons who had sworn fealty to the king’s daughter and her heirs gave their adherence to King Stephen, saying that it would be a shame for so many nobles to submit themselves to a woman.” Such a turn of events, as Henry should have known, was inevitable.

  Stephen of Blois, like Louis Capet, lacked the necessary qualities for kingship. “He was,” wrote Walter Map, “a man of great renown in the practice of arms, but for the rest almost an incompetent, except that he was rather inclined to evil.” A weak man, soft and indecisive, he began many things but never finished them, and though he reigned for “nineteen long winters,” he left little behind except a chapel at Westminster and the memory of anarchy. Not until 1139 did Matilda invade England, and for the next eight years the country reeled with civil war. Stephen’s claim to the throne was, some thought, as good as Matilda’s, but what rankled the empress most strongly were those Norman barons who had blithely disregarded their oaths of fealty. Not completely devoid of insight into the realities of her situation, she made it clear that she did not want the throne for herself but for her son, Henry; even so, she managed to immediately justify the worst fears of those reluctant to accept her claims. Headstrong, intolerant, unbelievably tactless, she was “always breathing a spirit of unbending haughtiness.” In 1141 her battle almost appeared to be won when she succeeded in taking King Stephen a prisoner, but then she ruined it—and lost any goodwill she might have gained from the English—by keeping Stephen in chains at Bristol Castle. In her efforts to claim her crown, she had no help from her husband, who seemed to regard her actions as none of his business. When once she begged him for help in 1142, he ignored her request for reinforcements and instead sent to England their nine-year-old son as a morale booster for her partisans. It was neither callousness nor political naivete but his intense dislike for his wife that directed Geoffrey’s attitude. Never happier than when parted from Matilda, he took every opportunity to erase her from his mind. Moreover, during these years he was involved in a conflict of his own; in Matilda’s name, he had the satisfaction of waging war against his family’s traditional enemy, Normandy, and by 1144 he would win for himself the title of duke of Normandy. What happened to Matilda, or for that matter England, did not concern him.

  In England, the barons were torn between two sovereigns claiming their allegiance, with the result that some threw in their lot with Stephen, then switched to Matilda, and finally went back to Stephen. After seventy years of strong monarchical rule and royal justice, they were now forced to live with the chaos of private wars so familiar on the Continent but almost forgotten in England. “Men said,” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mournfully relates, “that Christ and his angels slept.” In the north country, hordes from Scotland and Wales, “that execrable army more atrocious than the whole race of pagans,” marched into the Yorkshire valleys, massacring the villagers and taking away the women, roped together naked, as slaves. In the Isle of Ely, foreign mercenaries held men for ransom, hanging them over bonfires by their feet, casting them in dungeons crawling with snakes. The best description of the universal turmoil during Stephen’s reign is offered by Henry of Huntingdon:Food being scarce, for there was a dreadful famine throughout England, some of the people disgustingly devoured the flesh of dogs and horses, others appeased their insatiable hunger with the garbage of uncooked herbs and roots. There were seen famous cities deserted and depopulated by the death of the inhabitants of every age and sex, and fields white with the harvest but none to gather it, all having been struck down by the famines. Thus the whole aspect of England presented a scene of calamity and sorrow, misery and oppression.

  Out of the disorder eventually grew a great longing for peace, and despite Matilda, eyes slowly began to turn toward the young Henry Plantagenet. The demons from which he had supposedly descended could not have been any worse than those presently ravaging England.

  The Plantagenets were certainly not strangers to Eleanor. Nor to Louis, for Geoffrey, a familiar figure at court, had once held the post of seneschal of France. Although the two men had been on fairly good terms, Geoffrey had declined to accompany Louis on the Crusade, despite the fact that his half brother was the boy-king Baldwin of Jerusalem. Geoffrey, always looking to his own interests first, had recently overpowered Normandy and wished to keep a watchful eye on his newly acquired property. In contrast, any pos
sible glory to be won on the battlefields of Palestine paled into insignificance.

  Neither was Henry Plantagent a totally unknown quantity to the king and queen. In those hurried days before the departure of the Crusade there had been talk of a betrothal between Henry and the Capet’s infant daughter, Marie. Judging from a letter that Abbot Bernard wrote to Louis about that time, it was Geoffrey who had proposed the marriage, possibly anticipating a day when Aquitaine, or some substantial portion of it, would fall into Plantagenet hands as Marie’s dowry. “I have heard,” wrote Bernard, “that the Count of Anjou is pressing to bind you under oath respecting the proposed marriage between his son and your daughter. This is something not merely inadvisable but also unlawful because, apart from other reasons, it is barred by the impediment of consanguinity. I have learned on trustworthy evidence that the mother of the queen and this boy, the son of the Count of Anjou, are related in the third degree.” Accordingly Bernard warned Louis “to have nothing whatever to do with the matter,” and the idea had been dropped. For whatever reasons, Bernard distrusted both Geoffrey and his son. Once, he had met Henry as a boy and, after studying his face closely, predicted that he would come to a bad end. If Henry had come to Paris with his father during the betrothal negotiations, Eleanor surely would have met him, but even so it is unlikely that much converse passed between the queen and a thirteen-year-old youth who was being inspected as a potential son-in-law. At that particular period she was much too engrossed in preparations for the Crusade to be interested in a barely pubescent boy.