Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  By December 6, after four long weeks of waiting, the wind slackened somewhat, but fog still shrouded the shore, and the sea looked as menacing as ever. Henry, however, had reached the limit of his patience, and “by God’s eyes” he would delay no longer: the next day. he announced, was the feast of Saint Nicholas, protector of sailors and travelers, and they would sail, regardless of the weather. Before dawn, the voyagers heard Mass and then filed into the galleys. The sea was so hidden in silvery fog that the world might have ended just beyond the harbor. Eleanor, seven months pregnant and carrying her fifteen-month-old son, boarded one of the heaving vessels, which cautiously proceeded into the wrinkled face of the Channel. With her across that stretch of choppy sea she took more than her children, born and unborn: she also transferred Aquitaine to the dominion of the English crown, thus planting the seeds of that century-long conflict that would only be resolved, ironically, by another woman, Jeanne d’Arc.

  On December 8, after a day and a night of rolling in the fog, the convoy finally dropped anchor on the southern coast of England, although the ships were scattered for miles along the coastline. The royal vessel landed in a harbor near the New Forest, but Henry, feverishly impatient as usual, could not be bothered to wait for his escort. Immediately, he and Eleanor set out for Winchester, which housed part of the royal treasury. The others were left to catch up as best they could. The English, incredulous at the rumor that Henry had ridden the waves of the storm, emerged from their hearths, sat down by the frozen road, and waited for a glimpse of their twenty-one-year-old king with his ruddy, leonine face and the famous queen who had divorced a dull king for a bold young warrior and who would ever be known to the English as the Eagle. By the time the royal procession neared London, its ranks were swollen by local barons and prelates and by crowds of villagers with snow-damp feet trudging in the wake of history.

  Eleanor’s first glimpse of London in that chill December must have given her a moment’s pause. There is no exact way to fix the population of the city in 1154, although from various accounts an estimate of forty thousand seems reasonable. The chronicler William Fitz Stephen chauvinistically called London “among the noble and celebrated cities of the world,” renowned for its healthy air, its honest Christian burghers and “the modesty of its matrons.” The women, he added, “are very Sabines.” Eleanor saw no Sabine women; rather it was a man’s city to which “every nation under heaven delighted in bringing their trade by sea.” By the docks along the Thames, she could see wine shops and painted women and ships being repaired with pegs and nails, ropes being hauled, and crews loading. “The Arabian sends gold ... the Nile sends precious stones; the men of Norway and Russia, furs and sables; nor is China absent with purple silk. The Gauls come with their wines.” London was a rich city, where trade was god and men thought mainly about making money, where one of the biggest attractions was the Friday horse fair at Smooth Field (Smithfield), where earls, barons, and knights came to buy the high-stepping palfreys with their gleaming coats, colts stepping with jaunty tread, war-horses with tremulous ears and enormous haunches, and where, in another part of the field, countryfolk perused cows with full udders, woolly sheep, and mares fit for the plow. London, like Paris, teemed with people. The streets were lined with rows of wooden houses, firetraps smeared with red, blue, and black paint, and many of the residents were tradesmen who manufactured goods on their premises. In Chepeside, the busiest street in the city, the shops of the drapers and goldsmiths displayed silk mantles from Damascus and enameled trinket boxes from Limoges. Londoners were inordinately proud of their city. “The only plagues of London,” conceded William Fitz Stephen, “are the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires.”

  The city’s most wonderful attraction, the one its citizens boasted of most often, was not a cathedral or the Tower of London or even Westminster Palace, but a public cookshop along the Thames that remained open twenty-four hours a day.

  There daily you may find food according to the season, dishes of meat, roast, fried and boiled, large and small fish, coarser meats for the poor and more delicate for the rich, such as venison and big and small birds. If any of the citizens should unexpectedly receive visitors, weary from their journey, who would fain not wait until fresh food is bought and cooked, or until the servants have brought bread or water for washing, they hasten to the river bank and there find all they need.

  When Eleanor rode into London, she may have wished herself, for once, one of the common folk who could stop at the Thames-side cookshop, because even though she and Henry were not exactly unexpected visitors, no proper preparations had been made for their arrival. Westminster Palace, the official residence of royalty, had been so despoiled by King Stephen’s men that it now was far beyond human habitation. While Henry might have happily bivouacked at Westminster had he been alone, Eleanor was accustomed to more comfortable surroundings. The royal family took up temporary quarters across the river from the Tower of London, in the village of Bermondsey, where there was an ancient Saxon palace and an abbey, newly built.

  Eleven days after their arrival, on Sunday, December 19, 1154, Henry and Eleanor were crowned king and queen of England in the abbey church of Westminster, which was in scarcely better shape than the palace. To Eleanor, the dinginess of London’s great halls and the dilapidated condition of its churches were telling evidence of the strife that had rocked England during Stephen’s rule. Nevertheless, no expense was spared to make the coronation as magnificent a ceremony as possible. Into the abbey in solemn procession came the pages, knights, and barons, followed by the bishops, abbots, and priests, their vestments gleaming with gold and precious stones, and finally Henry and Eleanor, accompanied by Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury. The abbey shone with countless candles, the choir of monks sang lustily, and the great bells in the tower crashed thunderously. During Mass, the Archbishop anointed Henry and Eleanor with holy oils and placed the crowns upon their heads. Immediately afterward, Henry issued the customary coronation charter, a sort of printed inaugural address, in which he ignored the twenty years of Stephen’s reign as surely as if they had not existed. In practically every other sentence he referred to his grandfather, whose ruling precepts he vowed to follow: “I am granting and giving by this charter, confirmed to God and the Holy Church and to all my counts, barons and subjects, all the concessions and grants, liberties and free customs which King Henry, my grandfather, gave and granted them. Likewise I outlaw and abolish for myself and my heirs all the evil customs which he abolished and outlawed.” Denying what displeased him, saying what people wanted to hear, harking back to the past, Henry freed himself to initiate whatever innovations he pleased. In reality, he had no intention of copying his grandfather’s policies, and for that matter, the next thirty-five years would prove to be the most radical in the realm’s history—for they were years in which the foundations of English common law were laid. No ruler of England, before or after, would so strongly influence the development of its institutions as Henry Plantagenet, and so thoroughly would he do his work that, after his passing, the royal government would be able to function, if need be, without a king.

  Once Henry and Eleanor had been “crowned and consecrated with becoming pomp and splendor,” they rode along the Strand among their subjects, the Londoners running up and down to stare at the lion and the eagle, booming out their approval with shouts of “Waes hael”and “Vivat rex.” Henry, proverbially careless of his clothing, knew the value of putting on a good show, and that day he looked every inch a king, a worthy successor to William the Conqueror. As for Eleanor, a Victorian biographer would dress her in “a wimple or close coif with a circlet of gems over it; her kirtle or close gown has tight sleeves and fastens with full gathers just below the throat, confined with a rich collar of gems” and over this was added “an elegant pelisson, bordered with fur.” Unfortunately, no contemporary description of Eleanor’s coronation gown has survived, if indeed any of the sober church chroniclers thought to include a
fashion commentary, but it is reasonable to surmise that she wore the best of her finery. The only fact of which we can be certain was that she was pregnant.

  Queen of the English

  Snow had blotted the roof of the Tower of London and spread a ghostly white sheet over Billingsgate and Castle Baynard. Along the embankment by the Thames, the choking aroma of woodsmoke from bonfires drifted over the frozen river. From the manor house at Bermondsey, Eleanor could watch girls and boys skating on the river, shrieking their pleasure at the sun. Some made sleds from blocks of ice and were pulled along by their friends; others tied to their feet the shinbones of animals, and with poles that they struck against the ice for momentum, they were “propelled swift as a bird in flight or a bolt shot from an engine of war.” Around the entrance to Bermondsey hung the ribauz, those good-for-nothings who were always begging and plundering at the slightest provocation, and the king’s bailiffs periodically shouted them away in “English,” that queer Teutonic jargon spoken by the lower classes. Ever since Christmas, a constant stream of barons had been pouring into Bermondsey to discuss “the state of the realm and the restoration of peace” with their king, bringing with them their dogs, pet monkeys, parrots, and hawks. The Great Hall more nearly resembled a menagerie than a royal dwelling.

  From the beginning, Eleanor felt ambivalent about her new land. England stirred in her a feeling of protectiveness, and in its hardworking people, level-headed and eager to reconcile liberty with order, she must have sensed a spirit akin to her own. Nevertheless, she who loved music and beauty, the gracious easy living that she knew so well, found none of it here. The civil war had ended, but its scars remained, and the memories of privations still cast their shadows over everyday life. Frivolity was not an attitude that came naturally to the English, nor did it appear to be one that might be induced in these sober tradesmen with their unpolished wives. Poetry they had little taste for, the etiquette of courtly love they would have greeted with open-mouthed gapes. Here was nothing of the silken charm of Aquitaine, of wit and romance, of troubadours wracked by containable passion for unattainable loves. While Henry had come to the throne with an abiding love and a practical working knowledge of the land he was to rule, Eleanor was too much a child of the south, too much a grandchild of William IX, ever to be completely at home in such a backwater of civilization, and in those early months of 1155 she must have felt alien indeed.

  Perhaps the most striking fact about the first year of Henry’s reign was Eleanor’s utter lack of significance. Eagle though she may have appeared to her subjects, to the chroniclers she remained a cipher to be commented upon only for the standard female achievement—on February 28, 1155, she gave birth to her second son, who was christened Henry after his father and grandfather. Otherwise, the chronicles have nothing to say, and the reason, of course, may have been that Eleanor was content to spend her time tending her two infants, gossiping with her sister and Henry’s half sister, Emma, an illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey of Anjou. It is difficult, however, to imagine Eleanor voluntarily insulating herself in the women’s quarter at Bermondsey and bouncing babies on her lap, not because she lacked maternal instinct but because it was customary for upper-class women, and royalty especially, to hand over their infants to the care of a nurse almost immediately after birth. A more likely explanation for Eleanor’s seeming inactivity was that her husband, having located capable men to assist him, had no particular use for her administrative talents at this time.

  Once the formality of the coronation was out of the way, Henry immediately set himself to the task of resuscitating the kingdom from a state of total decay. Not only were the national resources exhausted, but also the legal and administrative machinery of government had rusted to a standstill. Working in his favor was one factor: For the first time since the Conquest, a new king had succeeded to the throne without a competitor and with the good will of his subjects. Still, the work cut out for him was nothing less than the creation of order out of chaos, and it is understandable if he approached it with some anxiety. The most important post he had to fill was that of the chief justiciar, the person who would head the judicial system, supervise the routine matters of government, and act in the king’s place when he was out of the country. With a desire to show his subjects that he held no resentment toward those who had supported Stephen, that the past was past, he divided responsibility for this job between Richard of Luci, a man who had served King Stephen faithfully but who was also thoroughly familiar with the workings of governmental machinery, and Robert, earl of Leicester, who had been one of those barons to change his allegiance and come over to Henry during the campaign of 1153. As treasurer of the exchequer, Henry selected Nigel, bishop of Ely, and for his chancellor, accepting the recommendation of the archbishop of Canterbury, he agreed to take on Theobald’s archdeacon and protégé, Thomas Becket. Theobald had assured him that Becket was an able person, and although Henry had brought to England his mother’s chancellor, William de Vere, with whom he was well satisfied, he felt that it would be politic to accept Theobald’s suggestion. It certainly would not hurt to put himself in the Church’s good graces. The office of chancellor, important but lacking prestige, was mainly a secretarial position; it consisted of supervising the royal chapel, the collective name for the household clerks; heading the secretariat where the royal will was translated into charters, letters, and writs; and acting as custodian of the Great Seal. The appointment of a civil servant to handle his paperwork was not a decision that Henry pondered for long.

  Thomas Becket had accompanied Archbishop Theobald to the coronation, and afterward he stuck close to his master’s side during the trip from Westminster Abbey to Bermondsey. If Eleanor failed to notice him at the coronation, she could not have avoided him during the Christmas court at Bermondsey, where the cleric was first brought to Henry’s attention as a prospective chancellor. Thomas was a slender, unusually tall man with dark hair, aquiline features, and hands so long and tapered that they would have looked well on a woman. Although he had a slight tendency to stutter, he spoke well, being one of those people with the facility for making complicated subjects seem plain to his listeners. Also notable were his intelligence, charm, and a gaiety of temperament, whether natural or assumed it was hard to tell. Whatever sparks of interest flew between Thomas and the Plantagenets at Bermondsey were solely on the part of Henry, who, always affable, seemed to take an immediate liking to the archdeacon and his cheerful badinage.

  If the meeting at Bermondsey made little impression on Eleanor, it was the most momentous day in Thomas Becket’s experience. Born in London, the son of a prosperous Norman merchant, Thomas was brought up in middle-class respectability, educated at Merton Priory in Surrey, and had also studied in Paris while Eleanor had been queen of France: As his father, Gilbert Becket, prospered, he managed to acquire some property and also served a term as sheriff of London. Into his spacious house came rich young noblemen, one of whom taught the boy Thomas the aristocratic pleasures of hawking and hunting. His father’s affluence did not, evidently, endure, for by the time Thomas had grown to adulthood, his father was poor, his mother had died, and entertaining was no longer done in his home. With no career prospects on the horizon, he was obliged to work for three years as a clerk and accountant in the business of a kinsman, a dreary existence for an ambitious young man with a taste for elegance. Finally, two of his father’s friends recommended him to Archbishop Theobald, and Gilbert himself pulled strings by reminding the archbishop that long ago they had been neighbors in Normandy. As a result, Thomas was taken into Theobald’s household and given a place on his staff. During the ten years that followed, and despite the fact that he was twice dismissed and then reinstated, Thomas rose to a high place at Canterbury, where he became Theobald’s adviser, diplomatic courier, and general dogsbody. It was not until the autumn of 1154 that the archdeaconry of Canterbury fell vacant and Thomas had been appointed. Now, barely two months later, came the dazzling promotion to king’s cha
ncellor.

  That winter Eleanor saw little of her husband, who, she knew by now, hated to remain in one place longer than a week and sometimes grew restless within a matter of days. Before the end of January, he was off to clean up unfinished business from Stephen’s reign; first on his agenda was the demolition of unlicensed castles built illegally during Stephen’s lax rule and the ejection from the country of the hated Flemish mercenaries, whom Stephen had used to buttress his position. There still were, in fact, a few rebellious barons who remained loyal to the dead king, and now Henry showed them that he would tolerate no opposition. Marching on Suffolk and then York, he besieged one castle after another until he had brought the troublemakers to submission. He was away when his son was born in February but returned to London several weeks later. Wasting no time in celebration or relaxation, he immediately called a council of all those bishops and abbots who wished to have their charters renewed. That Eleanor did attempt to involve herself in affairs of state at this time is evident from the fact that her name appears as a witness, along with Richard of Luci and Thomas Becket, on charters granted to the canons of Holy Trinity and Christ Church. Two weeks later, she traveled with Henry to Wallingford, where the king had called together the barons and bishops of the realm to swear allegiance to his eldest son and, in case of William’s death, to Henry as his second heir. This must have been a jubilant occasion for the queen. Secure in the love of her powerful husband, the matriarch of a now solidly established dynasty, her position assured after her uncertainties in France, Eleanor, at thirty-three, was entering her prime. The attacks of melancholia that had oppressed her in the Île-de-France had evaporated in the April greenery of England; boredom had no chance of surfacing in this atmosphere, frenzied and vigorous, created by her youthful husband’s zealousness and his passionate addiction to movement and power.