Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  The second year of the reign opened with the queen in full command. In retrospect, it would prove to be a tranquil year, one without history, because the chroniclers do not record a single event of any consequence. For the first time, Eleanor had an opportunity to travel about on her own, and she began to develop a grudging kind of affection for the land, so different from her beloved Aquitaine. In the twelfth century, England was still covered with mile upon mile of dense forest, where wolves and wild boars could be hunted, but there were also huge open spaces of moor and fenland, unpunctuated save for the muddy tracks that passed for roads. The queen’s retinue could be seen toiling over the green hills, through valleys where sheep and cattle grazed and where rye, barley, and wheat were cultivated in strips, through roofed and spired cities surrounded by their thick walls, past slumbering villages with thatched huts and, in the distance, a monastery or grim castle frowning down on the countryside. During the winter and spring Eleanor traveled extensively and lived on a more than comfortable scale, running up expenditures of more than £350, a considerable sum for the age. Normally, only Richard of Luci had authority to order payments from the exchequer in Henry’s absence, but many of the writs authorizing payment during this period were signed by the queen herself, an indication of Henry’s trust in her.

  Although the English tended to be suspicious of foreigners, especially a foreigner with a reputation like Eleanor’s, they discovered that the Eagle was more than a glamorous personality. Actually, the sight of the queen dispensing justice and conducting the affairs of the realm surprised no one, for England was full of competent women who spent their time running estates, fighting lawsuits, even standing sieges when their husbands were absent. There was a constantly recurring need for wives to take their husbands’ places, and when a man was called away on business or on a military expedition, it was the wife who managed the manor or fief. A goodly share of the business Eleanor did during her travels was no doubt with members of her own sex. Working with Richard of Luci and her own chancellor, Matthew, she dispensed justice through a stream of writs, some of which still survive:Eleanor, queen of the English, etc. to John fitz Ralf, sheriff of London, greeting. The monks of Reading have complained to me that they have been unjustly disseised of certain lands in London.... I therefore order that you enquire without delay whether this is so and if you find out that it is true, reseise the monks. Unless you do this, the king’s justice shall do it for we will in no way suffer that the monks lose unjustly anything that belongs to them. Farewell.

  With Henry and Becket away, Eleanor found herself in a position where she could do much as she liked. Significantly, we hear no reports of her court resembling any that she had presided over in the past; there were no poets, no troubadours, no sumptuous feasts a la Becket, in fact no gaiety to speak of, only sobriety and hard work. The pipe rolls show, however, that her personal standard of living remained high, her elegant tastes unchanged, and her family well cared for. There are expenditures for candles and incense, allowances for her two children, even an entry for the purchase of a baby carriage. With her she had Petronilla and her two brothers, all of whom she supported in generous style. During her first four years in England, the rolls show thirty-six entries indicating exchequer payments to her half brother William alone, as well as liberal allowances for Petronilla’s wine. Neither did Eleanor care for the forebears of Courage, Watney’s, and Whitbread; she disdained ale as an uncivilized beverage, much preferring the full-bodied wines of her homeland, and thus began the ever increasing importation of the wines of Bordeaux. Perhaps at this time she had built along Thames Street her own dock, Queenhithe, where the ships of Aquitaine tied up. Queenhithe, adjoining Vintners’ quay, was a curved basin that cut deeply into the riverbank. Guarding the entrance to this prominent wharfing space was a gate that could be closed when necessary and a gatehouse tower. Years later, visitors would still consider it one of the most interesting sights in London.

  While Eleanor was proving herself a highly efficient sovereign, Henry was having more difficulty than he had anticipated in handling his brother. Geoffrey’s claims to Anjou and Maine were excellent, but what he failed to consider was that Henry never gave up any land he once acquired, and the loss of this territory, lying between Normandy and Aquitaine, would cut the two duchies off from each other. After a stormy meeting at which they failed to come to terms, Geoffrey sped back to his castle of Chinon with Henry and his army in hot pursuit. In the end, “now humbled and penitent,” he was stripped of his castles and forced to forfeit all claims to Anjou and Maine and content himself intead with a promise of an annuity amounting to one thousand pounds sterling and two thousand pounds Angevin (one Angevin pound was worth about one-fourth of an English pound). At the time, this settlement may have sounded generous to Geoffrey, but he had no way of knowing the worthlessness of Henry’s promises. In the two following years he received a total of only eighty pounds.

  While Henry was fighting his brother in Anjou, Eleanor was fighting for the life of their two-year-old son, William, in England. Whether the child had been in poor health for some time or whether he succumbed to a passing fever is unknown. Poor sanitary conditions, combined with a primitive state of medicine, were sufficient cause for sudden death, and the lives of children, especially vulnerable, were often ended by smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and dysentery. The death of the young was part of the natural order of life, and even in the case of a prince, no cause of death was given, none requested. Although people of the twelfth century felt an immense resignation in the face of death, they were by no means indifferent to the loss of their children. The pain of losing their firstborn son would have deeply hurt both Eleanor and Henry. The little prince was buried in Reading Abbey, at the feet of his great-grandfather Henry I.

  In June, still mourning for her son, Eleanor gave birth to her third child by Henry, a girl whom she named Matilda in honor of her mother-in-law. That summer she lost all interest in remaining in England; the reins of power had grown burdensome, and she wanted nothing better than to return to her homeland. In July, within weeks of Matilda’s birth, Eleanor packed up her children and household, withdrew funds from the exchequer and, whether or not Henry approved, crossed the Channel to Normandy. By August 29 she was reunited with her husband at Saumur, in Anjou, and in October the entire family traveled back to Aquitaine. Henry agreed to this southern progress more to please Eleanor and mitigate her bereavement than from any inclination of his own. Moreover, it was becoming increasingly clear to the queen that, far from sharing her love of the south, he regarded it as a source of irritation and wished to spend as little time there as possible. In England, “swords were beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks, and none now girded himself to battle” but none of his policies, none of his carefully devised instruments of government, worked with Eleanor’s vassals. The region’s natural anarchy, comparable to the disorders that had beset France 150 years earlier under Hugh Capet, offended Henry’s every instinct for law and order. Louis Capet had been unable to rule it—his officials could not keep even a modicum of order—and if Henry had wondered whether he could do better, he was not long left in doubt. The ducal authority of Eleanor’s forebears, that long line of Williams, had been acceptable to the southern counts and viscounts only so long as it remained ineffective, as fortunately or unfortunately it nearly always was. In Poitiers and Bordeaux, the Williams had maintained estates and fortresses, but in the rest of the vast region, authority rested in the hands of the local lords, whose word stood for law in their respective neighborhoods. The various subdivisions of the duchy professed to have nothing in common, save a long tradition of mutual enmity—the Gascons mistrusted the Poitevins, the Poitevins despised the people of Limoges. For that matter, in 1156 about the one thing Eleanor’s vassals could agree upon was their dislike of Henry Plantagenet and his annoying attempts to introduce centralized government.

  While Eleanor’s liege men joyously received their duchess with t
roubadours and pretty speeches, they treated Henry, at best, as if he were merely a titular consort, at worst an object of contempt. As he had demonstrated at Limoges only a few months after their marriage, nothing could work him into a rage faster than the Aquitainian nobles, whose insolence and intractability he believed proverbial.

  Henry’s legendary tantrums were generally attributed to his demon ancestors, that is, they were excused as falling beyond the range of his control. But people do not get into rages in which they scream and bite the furniture because they can’t help it. Under certain conditions, such as delirium due to illness or extreme intoxication, a person may lose all control, but these are exceptional instances. In a normal state, people are responsible for their behavior, and Henry, normally, was a responsible person. His fits of anger were nearly always a form of blackmail in that he performed in the presence of an audience for the purpose of gaining some goal. In early childhood he had perfected his act in hate-filled castles, where his mother and father had quarreled and screamed. His outbursts, done for effect, relieved him, but they also allowed him to get his way. It had worked in the nursery, and it continued to work when he grew up.

  Even in the first months of her marriage, then, Eleanor had been aware of the spectacularly poor beginning her husband had made with her subjects, and she knew her people well enough to predict that Henry could look forward to a difficult task in introducing Anglo-Norman concepts of government.

  In her assessment of the situation, Eleanor had been right. Even minor barons refused their feudal duties to Henry, and the oaths of homage he forced from them were of little practical value. That fall, however, as they made their progress through Poitou, Henry seemed determined to show them that he would tolerate no further defiance. In Limoges, he exercised his feudal rights by making the young heir to the viscountship his ward and then turning over the government to two Normans. In Poitou he unceremoniously ejected the viscount of Thouars from his lands and destroyed his castle, ostensibly for having aided Geoffrey Plantagenet in his recent rebellion but in truth because he found the viscount a troublesome vassal. He wished to leave no doubts in the minds of the southern nobles that he would assert his ducal rights, no matter how many castles he must raze, and in this he appeared to be successful. As the royal family traveled south to hold their Christmas court in Bordeaux, Eleanor’s vassals came forth to offer homage to Henry as well as the two children, but an indication of how little he trusted their word is evident from the fact that he took hostages to ensure their fidelity.

  In this depressing and unstable atmosphere, it may have seemed to Eleanor that she had lost Aquitaine forever. In some ways. her marriage to Henry and her ever-growing family (she had become pregnant again in December) had been made at a great price; the political realities of the situation were now coming home to her as she acknowledged Aquitaine as a place where she might never live again, at least not with Henry Plantagenet. Beyond that, her domains were a source of friction between them, for she did not completely agree with Henry’s policies. In theory, she heartily approved of the concepts of centralized government, which she had seen operate successfully in England, Normandy, and Anjou, but in practice, she had little hope of their acceptance in her own land, where the autonomy of the barons was traditional. Moreover, Henry’s policy of appointing foreigners to key government posts only exacerbated opposition. Eleanor had complete trust in her uncle, Ralph de Faye, and felt content for him to remain her deputy, but Henry viewed Ralph’s supervision as ineffective, and by Henry’s standards, it undoubtedly was. Eleanor must have suspected that the only way in which Henry could maintain his policies was by incessant war with her vassals or the constant presence of either Henry or herself. Henry had no intention of relocating in Aquitaine, nor would he permit Eleanor to return on a permanent basis. And by December he was already agitating for her return to England, where he had more urgent need of her services.

  However reluctant to leave the south, Eleanor was back in London by February 1157. Henry had not accompanied her and the children, partly because he remained unsatisfied as to the security of his Continental possessions, partly because he still did not trust Geoffrey. When he finally joined her after Easter, it was not for long, because immediately he began planning an expedition against the Welsh.

  Owain Gwynedd, prince of North Wales and a perennial trouble-maker, had taken advantage of King Stephen’s laxity to push his way steadily eastward into England until, by 1157, he was threatening to capture the city of Chester. As far as Henry was concerned, the Welsh were a minor nuisance whom he had been able to place at the bottom of his priorities list; now, with both England and the mainland at peace, he was no longer content to leave the Welsh situation in this unsatisfactory state. While Eleanor supervised the routine business of government, Henry assembled an army and a fleet, hired archers from Shropshire, and ordered supplies of grain, cheese, and sixty casks of wine from Poitou.

  Toward the end of July, he started out from Chester, working his way along the river Dee toward Rhuddlan, where he intended to join forces with his fleet. Before he had proceeded many miles, however, he realized that the Welsh might be more than he had bargained for. Despite his considerable experience in warfare, he had never before encountered fighters like the men of North Wales, who, evidently, had not heard of chivalry or rules of war. Essentially guerrillas, they never fought on level ground if there were forests or mountains about; they disdained niceties such as armor and the etiquette of capturing and ransoming knights. Instead, they cut off their enemies’ heads. Owain’s forces fell upon the English with such ferocity that the royal standard toppled to the ground, and Henry himself was believed dead. In the end, after sustaining heavy losses, Henry only just escaped with his life and managed to reach Rhuddlan and his navy. At that point, the king had had enough of the Welsh. Even though North Wales was by no means subdued, he established a truce with Owain and, Welsh encroachment into his kingdom checked for the moment, hurried back to Chester.

  Immediately, Henry embarked on the next project on his agenda—a tour of England that would take him into every corner of his kingdom. Without returning to London, he summoned his entire court to join him at Chester. Becket, Richard of Luci, Robert of Leicester, and a host of minor officials hurried north, but Eleanor, eight months pregnant, remained behind at Westminster. In the last week of August, Henry began moving south through Warwickshire to Malmesbury, Windsor, Woodstock, and Oxford. Eleanor may have been feeling neglected, and no doubt she had been thoroughly frightened by Henry’s near death, for suddenly, with the birth of her child imminent, she left the palace and hastened to Oxford, where she joined the court caravan. Her husband’s conscientiousness in visiting every hamlet in England was all very well, but there must have been times when she was not content to languish, alone and pregnant. On September 8, at Beaumont Palace, just within the city gates of Oxford, she gave birth to another son, and the pipe rolls recorded an expenditure of twenty shillings for the lying-in. The child was christened Richard, although why this particular name was selected is not clear, since there had been no Richards in either the queen’s or the king’s immediate families. Perhaps the boy was named for Richard of Luci, whom both of them respected. A woman of Saint Albans, Hodierna, was chosen as nurse, and she cared for him together with her own son, who had been born on the same day. Hodierna and the infants may possibly have joined the royal progress, but it is more likely that Eleanor, so fearfully conscious of the high risks of infancy after William’s death, may have felt reluctant to expose Richard to the ardors of travel at so tender an age.

  There is no question that she had a special feeling about this son from the outset, making it quite clear to Henry that Richard would be her heir and designating him as the future duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou as she had done with her dead son. A prophecy attributed to Merlin the Magician, whose anonymous predictions were generally regarded as a foreshadowing of the destinies of Henry II and his family, focused pointedly on thi
s powerfully close relationship between Eleanor and her third-born son: “The eagle of the broken covenant shall rejoice in her third nesting.” Those who made it their business to interpret prophecies declared that the eagle could only be divorced Eleanor “because she spread out her wings over two realms, France and England” and that her third nesting must be Richard, who “strove in all things to bring glory to his mother’s name.” Bending the facts to fit, the chroniclers conveniently overlooked one thing: While Richard was indeed Eleanor’s third son, he was her sixth child. Daughters, evidently, did not count, either with the wizards or their interpreters.

  During the next year, Eleanor and Henry would travel, at a conservative estimate, over 3,500 miles, and even though the medieval nobility took for granted a peripatetic mode of life, with frequent moves from castle to castle, this distance was beyond the ordinary. On the orderly, well-disciplined chevauchees of Eleanor’s father and ex-husband, everything proceeded according to rule. The itinerary was planned in advance, its stages duly announced and strictly adhered to so that every subject who had business with the king knew exactly when and where to find him. Every member of the royal party, from the chancellor and chaplain to the porters and laundresses, knew when the retinue would arrive and depart. Eleanor’s own chevauchées through England and Aquitaine hewed to a precise schedule, with the early part of the day devoted to business meetings and audiences, the later to socializing. A progress, no matter the country, had always been an exciting experience for Eleanor, and some of her happiest memories were her childhood travels. Touring with Henry, however, proved to be an entirely different matter and one that her contemporaries likened to a passage through the underworld.