Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  It has been suggested that she now took up residence in Angers, the ancestral capital of the Angevin counts, although probably at least part of her time was spent in Poitiers. As her deputy in Aquitaine she appointed her uncle Ralph de Faye, who was her mother’s brother and whom she trusted. If after her years of struggle to return to Aquitaine, she felt reluctant to pull up stakes once more, she made no objections. This was not the first time that she had been obliged to place a husband’s priorities above her own, nor would it be the last. Her confidence high, she surveyed her present as well as her future and found it full of promise. Not the least of her satisfactions was the discovery, shortly before Henry’s departure, that she was expecting his child. Exultant and no doubt enormously relieved, she had been able to bid him farewell with a full and optimistic heart.

  The castle of Angers, still standing today, was completely rebuilt in the thirteenth century, but a hundred years earlier it still must have been a comfortable, imposing residence. The city of Angers itself, no provincial hinterland, had its full share of schools, churches, and convents; philosophy and poetry were not unknown there, and the Loire valley produced an exquisite vin rose. In short, it offered possibilities for Eleanor who, instead of relaxing and slipping into a contented, idle pregnancy, embarked on a more strenuous program than she had undertaken in years, both as an administrator and as a woman intent upon enjoying herself. During 1153 she was free to live a life of her own design, and regardless of Henry’s less than enthusiastic attitude toward troubadours, she had collected a number of them during her autumn travels. To Angers, then, she transported her household of Poitevins, her assorted vassals and relatives, including, no doubt, her sister, Petronilla, and her two illegitimate brothers, William and Joscelin, and the enthralled music makers who asked nothing better than to sing her praises. Released from all restrictions at last, she was able to push from her mind any lingering memories of Louis’s puritanical court, even to some extent able to dismiss her young husband, who also had no use for the trilling of troubadours, and create for herself the milieu she loved best.

  The glimpses we catch of Eleanor during this interlude come from poetry rather than from chronicles or charters, and they reveal a woman young, vibrant, and eager to be adored. Her pregnancy notwithstanding, there was no dearth of men ready to fall in love with her and, an equally important consideration, to receive the rewards she distributed with a generosity reminiscent of her grandfather. By right of inheritance and by her own intelligence, she was amply equipped for the role of literary critic and patroness and, quick to recognize artistic talent, she extended her patronage to Bernard of Ventadour, a gifted poet who had been banished from his last place of employment for making improper advances to the lady of the castle. The son of an archer and a kitchen servant, Bernard may have emerged from humble beginnings, but he had been taught the art of poetry by his master, Eble II of Ventadour. Just as Henry Plantagenet, the man of action, appealed to one side of Eleanor’s nature, Bernard appealed to another: her love of romance; her fantasy of being worshiped: her belief that despite the teachings of the Church, women were not inferior to men, not their equals, but their superiors. The sensitivity of a man like Bernard, whom Henry would have dismissed as effeminate, was a magical quality that drew her just as strongly as Henry’s quest for political power; she would never be satisfied with a man who combined anything less than both of these traits.

  For Bernard’s part, he could no more resist Eleanor than a bee the blossom. In 1153, times were hard in Europe; there had been famine in some places, and people were occupied by more serious matters than hiring poets. The duchess of Aquitaine, however, “was young and of great worth, and she had understanding in matters of value and honor, and cared for a song of praise.” In the next century it would be claimed that Bernard became Eleanor’s lover, but at the time there was no insinuation of overfamiliarity. On the contrary, Bernard’s lyrical passion was entirely suitable in a troubadour addressing a beautiful young duchess. It was the sort of admiration—chivalrous, wildly romantic, essentially meaningless—that Eleanor had always enjoyed, something to which she had been accustomed at the court of William the Troubadour. In Bernard’s panegyrics, we see Eleanor through the gallant eyes of the poet but perhaps as other contemporaries saw her as well: “gracious, lovely, the embodiment of charm,” “lovely eyes and noble countenance,” “one meet to crown the state of any king.” When Bernard thinks of her, he feels “a wind from paradise,” when he looks at her, his heart is so full of joy that everything in nature seems changed, and “I see in the winter only white, red and yellow flowers.”

  I am not one to scorn

  The boon God granted me;

  She said in accents clear ..

  Before I did depart,

  “Your songs they please me well.”

  I would each Christian soul

  Could know my rapture then,

  For all I write and sing

  Is meant for her delight.

  In England, however, no troubadours composed songs, no ladies played games of love with their preux chevaliers. “The kingdom,” said a chronicler, “was suddenly agitated by the mutterings of rumors, like a quivering bed of reeds swept by the blasts of the wind.” England waited to see if Matilda’s nineteen-year-old son, whom some called “intrepid” and others called “rash,” would bring King Stephen to heel, or vice versa. Actually, from the moment of Henry’s landing at Bristol, everything, the weather included, seemed to conspire in his favor. Undeniably, his own shrewdness was a factor, for instead of attacking Stephen at Wallingford, which had been under siege for a year, he made a surprise attack on Malmesbury Castle, a strategy that had the effect of obliging the king to come to him. When the rival armies finally faced each other across the Avon River, “the floodgates of heaven were opened and heavy rain drove in the faces of Stephen’s men, with violent gusts of wind and severe cold, so that God himself appeared to fight for the duke.” Henry, the storm at his back, calmly accepted the king’s surrender of Malmesbury. After this bloodless victory, he ceased to be regarded as a brash young adventurer, and some of England’s most powerful nobles began coming to his support with money and troops. Thus, by the beginning of summer, Henry felt secure enough to go to the aid of his besieged followers at the castle of Wallingford. Once again, circumstances—some said divine will—prevailed to clear the way for his success. When King Stephen was thrown from his horse three times prior to the battle, his advisers interpreted these incidents as ill omens. “It was,” the chronicles tell us, “terrible and very dreadful to see so many thousands of armed men eager to join battle with drawn swords, determined, to the general prejudice of the kingdom, to kill their own relatives and kin.” Standing on opposite banks of the Thames at a narrow place in the river, Henry and Stephen spoke together out of earshot of their armies. Shortly afterward, each man returned to his troops, announcing that the battle had been called off but offering no explanation.

  King Stephen’s son, Eustace, disgusted at what seemed to him spineless conduct on the part of his father, left Wallingford reeling with rage. However much detested throughout England for his obnoxious qualities, Eustace considered himself the rightful heir to the throne. Plowing through the Suffolk countryside, he rode up to the Abbey of Bury Saint Edmunds, where he audaciously demanded money to pay his men. The monks, while welcoming him graciously, refused to part with their silver. On August 17, “he ordered all the country round about, and especially St. Edmunds’ harvests, to be plundered and all the loot to be brought to a nearby castle of his.” That evening, sitting down to a dinner of eels, he was said to have strangled on the first bite and to have died almost immediately.

  Eustace’s sudden death can most likely be attributed to tainted fish, but to the twelfth-century mind it seemed a punishment direct from the hand of God, who seemed to be laboring in the cause of Henry Plantagenet. On November 6, 1153, his support tottering, his spirit collapsed, Stephen met with Henry at Winchester to disc
uss terms of peace. The two men traveled together to London, where, in the presence of the leading nobles of the land, a treaty was hammered out: “Be it known to you that I, the King of England, Stephen, have made Henry, Duke of Normandy, the successor to the kingdom of England after me, and my heir by hereditary right, and thus I have given and confirmed to him and his heirs the kingdom of England.” By the terms of the Treaty of Winchester, Stephen was to rule for the remainder of his life, with Henry, his “son and heir,” to succeed him. After a generation of civil war, the vows of fealty that the English nobles had made to Matilda had finally come to pass, and the way was paved for the first of the Plantagenet dynasty.

  Stephen, however, was fifty-eight years old, in fairly good health, and although he had agreed that “in all the business of the kingdom I will act with the advice of the duke,” Henry knew that he had no real authority. He understood, too, that Stephen might live possibly another ten or fifteen years and that certain malcontents “whose teeth were spears and arrows” were already trying to sow discord between them. Having accomplished his objective and at a loss as to what to do next, Henry lingered anticlimatically in England until the spring of 1154. Around Easter, he decided to return to Normandy, where he “was joyfully received by his mother, his brothers and all the peoples of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou.”

  During Henry’s sixteen-month absence Eleanor had produced a special triumph of her own. On August 17, the same day that Eustace had died, she had given birth to a son, whom she had taken upon herself to christen William, after the dukes of Aquitaine, and designate as heir to her duchy. If, as has been suggested, the name also honored Henry’s great-grandfather William the Conqueror, this surely must have been a secondary consideration in her mind. Although the chroniclers neglect to mention Henry’s wife in the list of those who joyfully welcomed his return, Eleanor had more reason than most for rejoicing. At thirty, she had killed off her past as certainly as if it had never existed, and it must have seemed as though the birth of her son represented a final ironic salvo to Louis Capet. One of the prices of divorce had been the loss of her daughters, with what anguish it is impossible to say, and any visiting privileges she may have been guaranteed had been immediately forfeit when she married Henry.

  At last the self-contempt she had experienced through her inability to bear an heir for the Franks had vanished: at last the son for whom Louis had hungered had been born, but he would sit upon another throne. And as if to prove that her child were no fluke, no lucky accident from a woman almost past her prime as a childbearer, she became pregnant again just two months after Henry’s return. Looking ahead, she could see only days of honor and glory in which regret would play no part. Henry’s success in England had painted on her horizon the prospect of someday being the wealthiest, most prestigious queen in Christendom, and yet Eleanor was realist enough to understand that she never could have enjoyed that future had she not provided her young husband with a son. Henry seemed delighted with the eight-month-old infant, as he would be with all his children when they were young, spoiling them, making grandiose plans for their futures, lavishing paternal passion on them far in excess of what could be expected of the ordinary medieval father. Unknown to Eleanor at this time, William was not Henry’s only son. In the previous year, probably a month or two after William’s birth, a child had been born to an English woman of the streets, Ykenai, who, according to Walter Map, was “a common harlot who stooped to all uncleanness” and who had gulled Henry into believing the child his. “Without reason and with too little discernment,” chides Map, Henry had received the child as his own and named him Geoffrey.

  Eleanor’s life underwent minor changes during the six months that followed Henry’s return. Throwing himself tumultuously into the business of ordering his affairs, he relieved her of the reins of government, an authority Eleanor may have relinquished with some relief at that time. Some of her vassals in Aquitaine, taking advantage of both duke and duchess’s absence, had begun to cautiously test their power, and Henry, after stopping at Rouen to see his mother, made a flying trip to the south in an effort to put down the smoldering fires of rebellion. Watching him in action, Eleanor was more aware than ever of the overwhelming force of Henry’s personality and his thunderous roars when thwarted. By the end of June, he was back at his mother’s court in Rouen, where Eleanor joined him and met her mother-in-law. In her relations with Louis’s mother she had been notably unsuccessful, mutual antagonism driving Adelaide from the court, but with Matilda it would be another story. There was much for Eleanor to admire in this remarkable, hard-headed dowager who had spent two decades fighting for her son’s inheritance. Fascinated by Matilda from a distance, she found, however, that it would not be easy to like her at close quarters. Aside from the empress’s cool, formal manner, she had a type of relationship with her son that immediately aroused Eleanor’s natural jealousy. From the outset, it was made plain to her that Henry truly valued only his mother’s opinion, and to a woman like Eleanor, with strong opinions of her own, this must have been exasperating indeed. The bond between Matilda and Henry, more akin to two generals than mother and son, stirred her antagonism. She soon discovered that if Henry wanted advice—and at this period he did, apparently, seek the opinions of others—it was to Matilda that he went for guidance; it was Matilda’s judgment on political affairs that he valued above all others. This must have been a disturbing revelation to Eleanor, who considered herself, by virtue of age, experience, and her capacity as his wife, to be a more fitting confidante.

  Eleanor’s court was not able to survive the move from Angers to Rouen, since Matilda, though highly literate, preferred philosophers to poets; reluctantly, the troubadours made their way back to the more congenial southland. It promised to be an uneventful summer, although Eleanor would find the time passing quickly, and certainly she could never complain of boredom. Messengers, bringing news from London, Paris, and Rome, came and went continually. Henry, rarely home, had no sooner returned to Rouen than he began to think of leaving, once to besiege a troublesome vassal at Torigni, once in August to meet briefly with Louis Capet. In September, an illness sent him to bed, but he recovered rapidly, and by early October he was in the Vexin, campaigning again. During that summer reports about Louis’s private affairs drifted into the Rouen command post. Rousing himself from post-divorce lethargy, Louis set off on a pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela. Ostensibly a religious expedition, it was also for the purpose of inspecting the daughter of the king of Castile as a possible bride. Evidently Constance, a sober maiden who bore no resemblance in personality or looks to Eleanor, passed his scrutiny, for Louis returned to Paris betrothed. No doubt to Eleanor’s amusement, her former husband traveled all the way to Spain and back by way of Toulouse and Montpellier so that he would not have to ask Eleanor for a safe conduct nor step foot on her territory.

  Toward the end of October, with Henry still away in the Vexin, only Eleanor and Matilda were in Rouen to receive a travel-stained courier from England, the bearer of an important message from Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury: On October 25, King Stephen had died at Dover from “a flux of hemorrhoids”—Henry must “come without delay and take possession of the kingdom.” The call, which no one had anticipated for a decade or more, had arrived like a thief in the night. Henry, who had a reputation for traveling faster than any other man in Europe, rushed back from the Vexin, and within two weeks he had collected a properly imposing retinue of soldiers, barons, and prelates, men who had long ago tied their destiny to his, as well as old crusading companions of Eleanor’s, and hurried them all to the windy harbor town of Barfleur to help him claim his first crown and Eleanor her second. Matilda, oddly enough, would not be among those present at Henry’s anointing, for she either volunteered or was requested to remain in Normandy to keep the peace, but among the party were Henry’s two younger brothers, Eleanor’s sister and brothers, and the infant Prince William.

  In England, the throne remained vacant. St
ephen was dead and with him had died a generation of misery and civil war. He was not regretted, but the new king, a mere lad, folk said, remained an unknown quantity. Still, people hoped great things of Henry, peace if nothing else, and the versifiers composed hopeful odes in his honor: “Then shall beam forth, in England’s happier hour/ Justice with mercy, and well-balanced power.”

  Out to sea the thunder growled, and at Barfleur Henry, immobilized, stared at the Channel churning with sleet, rain, and violent winds. Each day he consulted his mariners and swore noisily; each day, restless as a caged lion, he scanned the leaden November sky for a break in the weather, but the storms perversely continued. Monotonously, the days wore on until they had tarried in the inns and taverns of Barfleur a whole month. Eleanor had time to watch the seabirds shrieking and to converse endlessly with Petronilla and her brothers, time to ponder the bizarre twists and turns that had brought her to this sleet-swept port. Whether directed by her own sagacity or by God or even by some happy conjunction of the planets, she had fastened her future to the Plantagenet star, which now seemed destined to dominate the heavens. The weatherbeaten youth she had scrutinized so carefully in Paris only three years earlier “seemed to have obtained divine favor in almost everything, not only from the beginning of his reign but even from his first year and his very birth.” At the same time, she could not have helped but reflect how the rise in his fortunes had been connected to deaths, most of them untimely: Prince William drowning in the White Ship, Geoffrey Anjou’s sudden passing, Eustace strangling on eels, Stephen’s death only a year after Winchester. Each man’s removal from the scene had brought Henry a step closer to the empire for which he hungered. She knew that his blood raced for yet more land, more power, because he had been known to say “that the whole world was too small a prize for a single courageous and powerful ruler.” With this man she could not predict where the future might take her. For the moment there was England to think of, and from everything she knew of the country—its cold, damp climate; civilization’s last frontier, inhabited by rude barbarians—it seemed the opposite of Aquitaine and far, far worse than Paris. But there would be no returning to Aquitaine, perhaps not for many years. Aquitaine must wait, as it had always waited for her, a fair and gracious sanctuary.