Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  From the earliest age, his head had been crammed full of tales about his illustrious ancestors: his great-great-great grandfather the legendary Fulk the Black, who had defeated an army of Bretons before the age of fourteen; his great-grandfather William the Conqueror, who had seized the throne of England after the battle of Hastings; his mother, who had escaped from beleaguered Oxford Castle by walking through Stephen’s lines in the dead of a snowy night. Inspired by these daring exploits, Henry himself had made an expedition to England when he was fourteen to snatch Stephen’s crown but, once there, realized that he had no money to pay his soldiers. In the end, Stephen had lent the young fighting cock the funds to return to Normandy.

  Although Henry thought troubadours and games of chivalry a waste of time, he was not, Eleanor discovered, without refined tastes. His mother had taught him how to behave like a gentleman, and he was capable of great gentleness, courtesy, and at times even delicacy. In later years, on a windy day, he was out riding with a distinguished clergyman Dom Reric, when a Cistercian monk stumbled and fell in front of his horse. The wind blew the Cistercian’s habit over his neck, exposing his backside. “Curse that religion that reveals the arse,” muttered Dom Reric. Henry, however, looked away in silence and pretended to see nothing. Matilda also passed along a brand of cynical wisdom peculiarly her own, and in Walter Map’s opinion, “to her teaching we may confidently impute all those traits which rendered him unpleasant.” In one of her parables, she impressed upon her son that “an untamed hawk, when raw flesh is often offered to it, and then withdraw or hidden, becometh more greedy and is more ready to obey and remain,” a policy of tantalization that Henry would put to good use in his relationships with family, friends, and enemies. Another piece of advice that Henry liked to repeat was Matilda’s admonition to be “free in bed, infrequent in business.” His freedom in bed Eleanor no doubt counted as a blessing, at least in the early stage of their marriage, and in this respect he must have provided a startling and delightful contrast to Louis Capet.

  In personal appearance, however, Henry was anything but heroic, and as Eleanor now had a chance to observe, he was slightly bowlegged, a characteristic that would become more pronounced as he aged, and he complained incessantly about ingrown toenails and blisters on his legs. Although fairly slender for a stocky person, he had a phobia about growing fat, saying, whether true or not, that he possessed a natural tendency to corpulence. As a result he was forever dieting, fasting, or wearing himself out physically through violent exercise.

  But his most remarkable characteristic, the one that amazed his contemporaries and must even have startled Eleanor, who herself possessed an abundance of vitality, was his demonic energy. In the twentieth century, he surely would have been diagnosed as a classic case of hyperactivity. Constantly in motion, he rose before cockcrow; seldom sat down except on horseback or at meals, which he ate quickly; and to the dismay of his subjects, he transacted all business standing up. While talking or listening, his eyes and hands were incessantly moving, touching birds, dogs, armor, hunting spears. Even during Mass, which he attended every day more out of duty than piety, he paid no attention to the service but could be seen talking business to his clerks, doodling, or looking at books. Never wasting a minute, he sometimes worked through the night and, wrote Ralph Niger, “shunned regular hours like poison.”

  To Eleanor, hearing him shout in his hoarse voice his favorite oath “By the eyes of God!” it must have seemed as though a tornado had descended on the Maubergeonne Tower. Had she ever been inclined to think of him as a raw, inexperienced youth whom she could dominate and advise, she would have realized her mistake during this period. Moreover, as distressing as it may have been to acknowledge, his behavior plainly indicated that he was not helplessly in love with her, or perhaps in fairness to Henry, he had bigger things on his mind at the moment. What need had he to tarry with a bride when there was an island to conquer, a throne to win? Eleanor, a realist, was also a romantic, and this realization must have hurt. Nevertheless, she understood that unforeseen circumstances had forced him to postpone his invasion of England several times. His father’s death had obliged him to visit Anjou in order to take possession of his heritage and assure the fidelity of his vassals. Growing impatient, his supporters in England had sent Earl Reginald of Cornwall to implore haste, and on April 6, after a meeting of Henry’s barons at Lisieux, preparations had moved forward, only to be canceled due to his wedding trip. Now he was in a fever to be off. Since we know that he was at Barfleur on the Normandy coast about the middle of June, he could not have stayed longer than two weeks with Eleanor, perhaps less, because nine days after the wedding, attending to business again, she granted a charter to the Abbey of Saint-Maixent.

  Meanwhile, the tidings of Eleanor’s marriage had exploded like a series of strategically placed bombshells in various cities of Europe. Among the disgruntled was Henry’s brother, Geoffrey, so lately thwarted in his own ambition to marry Eleanor and still smarting at the disappointingly small inheritance—three castles—he had received from his father. Henry of Champagne, betrothed to Eleanor’s seven-year-old daughter, Marie, and dreaming of acquiring Aquitaine in her name, saw his prospects melt away. And King Stephen’s son, Eustace, clinging to the hope of being crowned king of England someday, could only gnash his teeth when he learned that his rival pretender now owned half of France.

  The man most stunned, however, was Louis Capet. If he had considered the possibility of Eleanor’s remarriage, it would have been to some inconsequential baron of his own choosing, not to Henry Plantagenet. The conspiracy perpetrated by his former wife and her new husband, the scope of their perfidy, their contempt for every tenet of feudal custom and law, overwhelmed him. The bitter sting of humiliation lay, however, in the realization that Eleanor, his vassal, had married without his permission, that Henry only last year had sworn fealty and received the kiss of peace. But other aspects of the disaster simply confused him: Had Eleanor forgotten that a marriage between Henry and the Princess Marie had been declared unlawful? How could the woman who had nagged him with her scruples about consanguinity from Antioch to Beaugency have now married a man to whom she was even more closely related? Burning with hatred of the crafty Plantagenet who had “basely stolen” his wife and, for the first time, with an equally intense hatred of Eleanor, Louis huddled with his advisers in an effort to surmount these calamitous developments. Solutions—revocation of the annulment, excommunication—were suggested and discarded. When a letter ordering the appearance of the duke and duchess in the French court to answer charges of treason failed to bring a response, Louis settled on more practical means of dealing with the situation. Provoked beyond endurance, he acted quickly for once and formed a coalition of all those who had a grievance against Henry. Backed by his brother Robert, Theobald of Blois, Henry of Champagne, Eustace, and Geoffrey Plantagenet, Louis decided against attacking Aquitaine, which the coalition had resolved to divide among themselves, but instead charged into Normandy to confront Henry directly. Immediately it became apparent that he had chosen the wrong tactic.

  At a furious rate, Henry bore down from Barfleur to the Norman-French frontier, and so rapidly did he move his forces that, it was said, several horses fell dead on the road. He ignored Louis’s troops and, like a whirlwind, began to ravage the Vexin and the lands belonging to Robert of Dreux before turning west to Touraine, where he deftly relieved his brother of those three castles that had comprised his miserly inheritance. Attacking here, counterattacking there, within six weeks he had routed each of his opponents. To Louis, it must have seemed that he could do nothing right. Bereft of hope, bewildered, he came down with another fever and retired to the Île-de-France to brood upon the irretrievable loss of Aquitaine, which, in his opinion, should have been the lawful inheritance of Marie and Alix.

  These were anxious weeks for Eleanor as she waited for the attack that never came, but as news of Henry’s successes filtered back to Poitiers, she must have been reliev
ed at this confirmation of his abilities as a soldier. At the same time, however, she had reason for continued apprehension. By the end of June she had been forced to accept the disheartening fact that she had not conceived. Even though Henry desired sons with no less passion than Louis, he had married her despite her poor record as a breeder. Somehow she must have convinced him that those two lone pregnancies in fifteen years had been due to Louis’s lack of libido, but now, desperately anxious to prove her fertility and give him an heir, she realized that conception might be equally difficult with Henry, for entirely different reasons. If Louis had rarely made use of his conjugal privileges, Henry simply was not present to share her bed. Under the circumstances, it was unclear when she might see him next, for once he reached England there was no way of telling how long he would remain. For the moment, all she could reasonably do, however, was live her own life as duchess.

  About this time she had a seal made, which gives us a fairly good impression of her majestic beauty. On one side is the full-length figure of an extremely slender woman, bare-headed, arms outstretched, holding in one hand a falcon and in the other a fleur-de-lis; the inscription reads, “Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine.” On the seal’s obverse side, inscribed with her newly acquired titles—duchess of Normandy, countess of Anjou—she wears a form-fitting gown with tight sleeves and, over her head, a veil that falls to the ground. Her charters and official proclamations in the early days of June 1152 convey a sense of her authority as well as pride in her new marital status: “I, Eleanor, by the grace of God, duchess of Aquitaine and Normandy, united with the duke of Normandy, Henry, count of Anjou ... ” Unlike most charters, these are strongly colored by emotions, positive as well as negative. To the Abbey of Montierneuf, for example, she reextended all the privileges granted by her great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, but she made no mention of her ex-husband, who had also accorded benefits to the monks. At the Abbey of Saint-Maixent, however, acknowledging the fact that she had taken back the woods that Louis had donated to the abbey, she renewed their rights to the lands “with a glad heart” now that she was joined in wedlock to the duke of Normandy. It was at Fontevrault, though, that her exhilaration shines through most clearly. To this abbey, which had meant so much to her grandmother Philippa and which would have enormous significance in her own life, she confirmed “with heartfelt emotion” all their existing privileges and added a personal donation of five hundred sous. In this particular charter, in which she mentioned her divorce and recent marriage to “my very noble lord Henry,” she expressed her feeling that she had come to Fontevrault “guided by God,” and certainly the deep impression made upon her that day would be confirmed by her continuing preference for Fontevrault above all other religious establishments.

  While Eleanor had always been popular in Aquitaine, her vassals had never taken kindly to her first marriage. Whatever threats Louis had posed to their independence were nothing, however, compared to the ominous prospects of being ruled by Henry Plantagenet. When Eleanor had presented her new husband to her barons at the time of the marriage, they had given him a cool reception, and over the summer she had been forced to acknowledge a disquieting truth: If rumor could be believed, many of her vassals were saying that Henry had no claim on their loyalty, other than as the husband of their duchess, of course. Understandable was the deep misgiving with which they contemplated the possibility of Henry’s ascension to the throne of England, since it presented to them the distasteful prospect of a ruler whose authority would be backed by massive resources. For a people intolerant of any authority but their own, Eleanor’s new marriage came as an unwelcome surprise, which they did not intend to accept with good grace. At this time, however, Eleanor, perhaps sensibly, perhaps stupidly, seems to have given little thought to this problem, feeling no doubt that her vassals’ hostility to Henry would dissolve in time, and in any case, they had no choice but to eventually accept him.

  In late August. Louis Capet’s threat to Plantagenet security over, Henry unexpectedly returned to Poitiers. Eager to take advantage of this opportunity to introduce a wider range of her vassals to their new duke, as well as to acquaint Henry with her ancestral possessions, Eleanor quickly arranged an extensive tour that would take them to every corner of the duchy. That autumn was, in retrospect, a joyous period, probably the most idyllic she would ever spend with Henry, because, for one thing, she had him to herself for four unbroken months. If, as far as Henry was concerned, the progress represented more or less a tour of newly acquired property, it was for Eleanor both a holiday and a homecoming, the first extended period she had spent among her own people since the divorce. Followed by mule trains and cartloads of baggage, they leisurely pursued the trails southward through Poitou, into the Limousin, down past the salt marshes of Saintonge, as far south as the rugged country of Gascony, all the while meeting old friends, sipping the hearty Bordeaux wines, loosing their falcons against the deep blue autumn skies. And everywhere that Eleanor traveled, she was followed by song and loud laughter, by boisterous crowds of knights, ladies, poets, and hangers-on. Every night there were banquets in great halls blazing with candles and the best plate: musicians to sing war songs, crusading songs, love songs, and, most assuredly, the bawdy songs of William the Troubadour; gossip of the latest seductions, marriages, and political feuds. There was talk of Byzantium and the Holy Land, with audiences eager for Eleanor’s tales of her travels. Henry, affable and relaxed most of the time, seemed to find her duchy to his taste, particularly when he could indulge his love of hunting and falconry. At other times, sensing the hostility of Eleanor’s vassals, he just barely managed to curb his temper, and on one occasion, he was unable to do so.

  Henry and Eleanor had pitched their tents outside Limoges; despite the royal welcome extended by the townspeople, at mealtime Eleanor’s cook complained that the town had failed to send the customary provisions to the ducal kitchen tent. When Henry demanded explanations for this oversight, the abbot of Saint Martial’s informed him that the town was only obliged to provide victuals when Henry lodged within the city walls. This was putting altogether too fine a point on feudal obligations to suit Henry, and indeed the Limousins could not have made their low opinion of the duke more obvious.

  There at Limoges, Eleanor had first witnessed one of Henry’s temper tantrums. The Angevin reputation for “black bile,” even her own fire-breathing father’s outbursts, had not prepared her for the sight of Henry in the grip of rage. Losing every vestige of self-control, he rolled on the ground, shrieking, writhing, and kicking. With spittle leaking from his mouth, he bit blankets, gnawed on straw, smashed furniture, and lashed out with hand or sword at anyone foolish enough to remain in the vicinity.

  In the midst of just such a fit, Eleanor had stood by while Henry ordered the newly built walls of Limoges to be razed and their bridge destroyed so that, in future, no abbot could use them as an excuse to withhold from their duke his just and reasonable dues. If she received a rude shock from both her husband’s behavior as well as his order to tear down the town walls, she did not interfere because, as distressing as the command may have been, the insult reflected on herself as well and could not be tolerated.

  Nevertheless, the southerners adored their duchess and delighted in making much of her, but if the limelight fell continually on Eleanor and rarely on Henry, he made no complaint. Even though the days seemed to pass in almost aimless fashion, appearances were deceptive. Like a businessman whose uppermost thoughts are always occupied by self-interest, Henry’s seemingly lackadaisical behavior covered a shrewd analysis of his wife’s resources. Taking advantage of all and any opportunities to further his invasion plans, he was quick to reconnoiter the harbor towns, where he made arrangements to hire ships; in Gascony he was able to recruit additions to his infantry. All in all, it was a productive trip.

  By December the ducal chevauchée disbanded; Eleanor returned to Poitiers, while Henry went on to Normandy, where he visited his mother in Rouen and, perhaps more im
portant, availed himself of the services of a moneylender. A man who “detested delay above all things,” he set sail in a severe winter gale with a fleet of 36 ships, 140 knights, and 3,000 men-at-arms. On January 6, 1153, he landed at Bristol, but desire not always being destiny, his future was by no means a certainty.

  Never the type of woman to depend upon the presence of a man to keep her occupied, Eleanor saw no point in playing the abandoned wife. Another woman, even now, might have retired to her quarters and resigned herself to sitting out the war, killing time as best she could until her spouse’s return. Such meek behavior, however, required a less ambitious temperament than Eleanor possessed, and moreover, it did not, evidently, jibe with what Henry seemed to expect of her. He was not a man who scorned female intelligence, his mother having been the equal of any man and indeed, some said cuttingly, masculine enough in her thinking as to suggest that she might be the superior of most men. Growing up in the company of a mother such as Matilda, Henry emerged with a healthy admiration for high-spirited, assertive women, a factor that no doubt played an important part in his attraction to Eleanor. While by no means liberated from the masculine prejudices against women that were rife in his age, he nonetheless recognized administrative competence when he encountered it. If it occurred within his own family, so much the better, since he tended to distrust outsiders. If the capable person happened to be female, he was not so foolish as to reject her for that minor disability. Therefore, when he departed for England, he left Normandy in the care of his mother, while delegating Eleanor to rule over Anjou as well as her own estates. From a practical standpoint, it suited his purposes admirably to use Eleanor, now and in years to come, as a sort of stand-in for himself. Superficially it would appear, and may initially have seemed to Eleanor herself, that he was offering a position of corulership, an equal partnership in his government, but his magnanamity would turn out to be highly deceptive. Henry did not think of her as an equal nor could he bear to see power slip from his own hands, but it would be a number of years before Eleanor could acknowledge this fact. If she misjudged her husband, he was equally blind in reading her desires, for, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, she was one of those “women desiren to have soverainetee.”