Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  When Henry promised to spend the day in a certain place, even if he had ordered his herald to publicly proclaim his intention, Eleanor could be quite sure that he would suddenly change his mind and decide to leave the town at daybreak. Then pandemonium would break out, with people rushing about as if they were insane, beating their packhorses and driving mulecarts into one another. Those who had been bled the previous night or who had taken a laxative were compelled to join the exodus regardless of their physical distress or be left behind. In vain did the courtiers protest their discomfort, for the word consideration did not exist in Henry’s vocabulary, at least not on business trips. If, on the other hand, he announced that he would set out early the next morning, Eleanor took it for granted that he would sleep until noon, while the loaded sumpter horses stood waiting with their burdens and the court prostitutes and the vintners took advantage of the delay to do a bit of business. Finally, the enormous royal train, numbering over 250 persons, would straggle down the highroad, but where it might stop next, no one ever knew. “When our courtiers had gone ahead almost the whole day’s ride,” wrote the royal clerk Peter of Blois,the king would turn aside to some other place which had perhaps one single dwelling with accommodation for himself and no one else. I hardly dare say it, but I believe that in truth he took a delight in seeing what a fix he put us in. After wandering some three or four miles in an unknown wood, and often in the dark, we thought ourselves lucky if we stumbled upon some filthy hovel. There were often a sharp and bitter argument about a mere hut, and swords were drawn for possession of lodgings which pigs would have shunned.

  Henry’s way of conducting the government by fits and starts bewildered his courtiers and vexed his queen, even though she must have understood that his unpredictable movements did not always spring from mere caprice or perversity. He always had a reason, usually known only to himself, but nonetheless there was method to his disorganization. When he dragged them in one day over a distance that should have taken three or four, Eleanor saw that it was to forestall some bureaucratic disaster; when he made unscheduled stops, it was to catch his officials unawares and check if they were attending properly to their duties. Still, his management of everyday business was not terribly efficient. “He was slow in settling the business of subjects, whence it happened that many, before their affairs were settled, died or departed from him dejected and empty-handed.”

  Physical comforts were unimportant to Henry. But even though “the discomforts of dust and mud he suffered patiently.” others cursed and complained about “the miseries of court life” throughout the entire tour. For Eleanor, the racket and disorder, the weariness of constant travel, were bad enough, but the meals were the worst trial of all. The bread was half-baked, the fish four days old, the wine sour or thick or greasy and always reeking of pitch from the cask. There were nights when she was served wine so muddy that she had to close her eyes and filter the liquid through clenched teeth. The meat, half-cooked, was tainted and foul, and, as Peter of Blois vividly remarks, they had to “fill our bellies with carrion and become graves for sundry corpses.” There was nothing, evidently, that Eleanor could do to improve the court’s incredibly low standard of living. Despite her capacity for roughing it, she was very particular in her domestic habits. Nevertheless, everyone, the fastidious queen included, resigned himself sooner or later.

  By December, the royal progress was back in the north of England, and Christmas court was held in Lincoln. The new year of 1158 opened in the far northern reaches of the country, where Henry insisted on inspecting the garrisons of castles he had taken from the Scots. In mid-January, they began to perambulate down through the center of the island, through Yorkshire, then into Nottinghamshire, where Eleanor and Henry stopped at their royal residences of Blyth and Nottingham, and finally into Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. By Easter they were in Worcester, where Henry devised a novel idea: He decided that he and the queen would renounce their crowns. The trappings of royalty had always meant a great deal to Eleanor; the elaborate pageants at Christmas and Easter, the solemn placing of the crown upon her head, the formal processions into church, and the ceremonies surrounding the king and queen’s offering and communion were highly gratifying. Nevertheless, at the offertory after Easter Mass, she and Henry laid their crowns upon the altar, vowing never to wear them again. Henry was pleased by the gesture, Eleanor no doubt less so. That year of touring with her husband must have been a disheartening, although enlightening, experience. Nothing had turned out as she expected. Long accustomed to luxury, she who had doted on gracious living, fine wines, and exquisite victuals had now spent eight months under conditions so vile that a peasant would have balked, and now she no longer had even a crown to show for it. Her feelings of discomfort were no doubt maximized during this period, because after Christmas she found herself pregnant again, for the fifth time in six years.

  In the following months the court toured through Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Carlisle. Toward the end of July, they reached Winchester, where, fatigued and nervous after their long months of the road, they disbanded. When Henry departed for the Continent in the second week of August, Eleanor could not have been terribly sorry to see him go. She was eight months pregnant, and if she had planned on a rest, it was not forthcoming. Back at Westminster, which now must have appeared the most magnificent palace in the world, she immersed herself in work again. A writ issued in favor of Malmesbury Abbey and dated at this period reveals her as having viceregal powers, meaning that she was serving as coregent with Richard of Luci. On September 23, 1158, without fuss or fanfare and almost seeming to be an afterthought, she gave birth to another son, Geoffrey, and immediately went back to work. According to the pipe rolls, a considerable amount of business was conducted in the queen’s court that autumn, some of it, evidently, requiring her to leave London. She traveled through Hampshire, Kent, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Devonshire, and we know that on November 29 she was in the south of England, at Salisbury, because she issued a judgment on behalf of Matilda, countess dowager of Chester, as well as a certificate confirming a quit-claim. There was no time to think of troubadours or poetry, only trials to be concluded and orders to be dispatched “by writ of the king from Overseas.” By this time she had proved herself capable of replacing her husband in every way, and she had accomplished more than he was capable of; she had peopled Westminster with three male heirs.

  In later years it would be suggested that every unpleasant trait exhibited by her sons must have been due to the manner in which she raised them. To establish the unfairness in such a charge, one only has to look at Eleanor’s activities during her childrens’ infancies to understand that she had small role in their upbringing. There were nurses to feed her children, comfort them when they cried, teach them how to speak, dose them with medicines when necessary, even chew their meat before they had teeth. If Eleanor was a remote figure, Henry was even worse in this respect, for he was rarely at home, and when he was, he had little time or inclination for romping with toddlers. The discipline, which was a medieval father’s primary duty, the scoldings, beatings, and admonitions to show “no glad cheer lest the child wax proud,” he largely ignored. At the same time, however, his children were never far from his thoughts, which may have been what Gerald of Wales meant when he wrote that “on his legitimate children he lavished in their childhood more than a father’s affection but in their more advanced years he looked askance at them after the manner of a stepfather.” It is true that he and Eleanor spoiled their children in their formative years, but not necessarily with physical affection or attention. Henry, especially, dreamed immense dreams on behalf of his offspring, planning for them glorious futures that would reflect on the family and, not so incidentally, extend the power of the Angevin empire. Family, empire, children—these three were all that mattered to Henry and, as time passed, to Eleanor as well. Between them, they had created an empire as well as a dynasty to accompany it; their children would be the most fort
unate youngsters in the world. Even as early as 1158, politics for Eleanor and Henry had come to mean a family affair and the children a means of extending their political influence.

  Sometime during the early portion of their royal progress in 1157, Henry had concocted a scheme of such audacity that probably only his mind could have conceived it. There had been talk of Louis Capet and probably more than a little mirth over the fact that Louis’s second wife had proved as inept as Eleanor in producing an heir for the French throne. In the four years since Constance of Castile had wed Louis, she had given birth to only one child, a girl named Marguerite, and Louis had been heard to grumble about his alarming superfluity of daughters. Aside from the obvious irony of Eleanor now having two sons and her former husband none, it occurred to Henry that perhaps Louis would never be able to sire an heir. Therefore, he boldly proposed to marry his eldest son to Louis’s new daughter, a stroke of diplomacy that, he hoped, would bring France into the Angevin empire and one day give young Henry the crowns of both England and France.

  In view of Louis’s feelings about the parents of Prince Henry, broaching this outrageous idea to him required a considerable amount of tact and delicacy, not to mention nerve. Certainly no mention could be made of the possibility that he might never have a son; the negotiations must be conducted on a more impersonal level, such as Henry’s desire for harmonious relations between the two states. Nor could the mission be undertaken by Henry and certainly not by Eleanor. There remained only Henry’s alter ego, Thomas Becket, a man who possessed the style and diplomatic talent to carry it off.

  In the spring of 1157, the chancellor had been reprieved from the barbarities of touring with Henry and dispatched to Paris with an entourage designed and choreographed to overwhelm both Louis and his court. Becket’s trip may have been Henry’s idea, but its details and execution could have been invented by no one but the queen and performed by none other than Thomas Becket. In one respect, Eleanor and Thomas were not so different; they were both adept at staging splendid shows. Collaborators for once, they created a pageant that would leave the Franks gaping in wonder, and it is almost comic to imagine the two of them, sitting in a hovel “pigs would have shunned,” dreaming up a farce that would convince Louis of England’s wealth and persuade him to give up his daughter to a man and woman he hated. When Becket’s embassy rattled across the cobbles of Paris in June 1158, people streamed from their houses to watch him go by. Two hundred and fifty footmen singing Welsh and English songs led the procession, and behind them followed the chancellor’s hounds and greyhounds, led on leashes by their keepers. There were “dogs and birds of every sort that kings and rich men use,” not only falcons but goshawks and sparrow hawks. Eight great wagons, each of them drawn by five horses, were laden with the chancellor’s belongings, and two carried English beer “made from a decoction of grain in water, in iron-bound kegs, to give to the French who marveled at that kind of a liquid, a healthful drink indeed, clear, of the colour of wine, and more pleasant to the taste.” Each wagon was guarded by chained mastiffs and by “a stout lad in a new tunic,” each horse carried a monkey on its back. Behind the wagons came twenty-eight packhorses carrying money, books, chests of gold and silver plate, and the chancellor’s chapel. Finally, as if all this might not be sufficient to stupefy the Parisians, there marched the chancellor’s personal retinue—two hundred squires, knights, clerks, stewards and lesser servants, and the sons of nobles. “All these men and all their followers shone in new holiday attire, each according to his station.” And last of all, surrounded by a few of his intimates, rode the king’s chancellor himself. To the Franks, he looked like a king: certainly, he was dressed like one, and in his chests he had brought twenty-four changes of clothing “whose texture mocks the purple dyes of Tyre,” apparel that he planned to distribute among various influential men in Paris.

  Never in their lives could the Franks recall an embassy of such magnificence, and they asked each other who this man Becket could be.

  When they learned that he was only a servant of the English king, they said, “Wonderful indeed is this King of the English, whose chancellor comes in such great fashion.” Eleanor could not have hoped for a more satisfactory response if she herself had put the words in their mouths.

  In view of this ostentatious display of English wealth, it would have taken powerful extrasensory perception on Louis Capet’s part to guess that his former wife was not living like a Byzantine empress. Becket’s mission to France may have been a state affair, but Eleanor meant it to convey a personal message to Louis; she wanted to show him how far and how high she had come without him. He was a loser, she a winner, a perhaps cruel but common enough emotion among the divorced of any era.

  One might think that Louis would have seen through this nonsense or have felt offended by such obvious showing off. But precisely the opposite seems to have happened. Perhaps he was just as bedazzled as his subjects, because he outdid himself as a host. He arranged for the embassy to be lodged in a new hall built by the Templars, the only one in the city spacious enough to accommodate so large a crowd of visitors. He also ordered the markets of Paris closed so that his guests would not be tempted to spend a penny in his capital, but Becket, who had instructions to give instead of take, sent his stewards into the suburbs to buy provisions just the same. The one-upsmanship mushroomed to absurd heights: Louis and his nobles entertained the chancellor’s party at a magnificent feast, but the chancellor, not to be outdone, entertained Louis at an even more sumptuous banquet. Years afterward, the Franks were still talking about how Becket had paid 100s. sterling for a single dish of eels. Spending with the abandon of a man on an unlimited expense account, which is precisely what he had, Becket distributed gifts all over Paris—clothing, dogs. falcons, silver plate, and, of course, those barrels of English beer. In the student quarter, where he had once lived in obscurity during the time of Peter Abelard, he fêted the scholars and their teachers and paid the debts of English students. When it came time for departure, his chests and carts stood empty, but he triumphantly carried back to England the answer for which he had come—Louis’s consent to the betrothal.

  For this reason, after the tour had disbanded in the late summer of 1158, Henry had sent Eleanor back to Westminster to tend the kingdom while he rushed to the Continent to arrange the details of the royal alliance. He met with Louis near Gisors, in the Vexin, an appropriate conference site because of the schemes percolating in his fertile mind. In the fateful summer during which he had met Eleanor, it will be recalled, his father gave up the Norman Vexin to Louis as the price of Henry’s recognition as duke of Normandy. There was no region Henry coveted more than this buffer zone between Normandy and the Île-de-France, and he had never regarded its loss as anything but temporary. Now he proposed that Louis dower his daughter with the Vexin and its castles. Since young Henry was only three and Marguerite less than a year, there could be no marriage for at least a decade, and in the meantime, France was to retain control of the Vexin. Louis had no objections, and the meeting ended on a friendly note. Just one detail remained: the transference of the infant Marguerite to Henry’s possession so that she might be brought up, as was customary, with his family until old enough to be married. In September, Henry visited Paris for the first time in seven years, and considering the interim hostility between the two kings, he received a royal welcome from Louis and Constance. Henry’s entrance into the city was in marked contrast to Becket’s. He came as himself, simply dressed with only a few servingmen, playing the role of humble vassal to his liege lord. If there was a touch of hypocrisy here, it went unnoticed, for Louis, responding in kind, played the role dearest to himé&—the monk—and escorted Henry on a tour of Parisian churches, standing happily to one side as Henry distributed large sums of money to the monks.

  It was, apparently, a time of remarkable harmony between the two kings, even though the occasion was overcast by the invisible, but palpable, presence of Eleanor. She had not been invited to Pa
ris, of course, nor had Henry ever suggested bringing her. Such a three-way confrontation between the two kings and the woman who had had them both would have been in the height of bad taste, although one suspects that Eleanor might have enjoyed it. Certainly, the men avoided any open discussion of the queen, but finally, although indirectly, she entered the negotiations. Louis, surprisingly agreeable to every term Henry presented, balked at the thought of his daughter being reared by his ex-wife. Indeed, he flatly refused to hear of it. He did not regret retaining custody of her two daughters—how unfeminine and headstrong, how like their mother they might have turned out—nor did he regret their being raised by his pious second queen, who knew the value of docility in a female. Now he had no intention of turning over his third daughter to, in his opinion, an unfit guardian like Eleanor. Slightly annoyed but unwilling to see the alliance collapse over a minor detail, Henry suggested as an alternative that Marguerite be placed in the household of his chief justice for Normandy, Robert of Newburgh, whose castle was located near the French border. Since Newburgh was known to be a man of unimpeachable character and exceptional piety, Louis seemed mollified, and Henry was able to leave Paris with the baby. Throughout the autumn, the mood of conciliation between the Capets and the Plantagenets continued. In November, Louis decided to make a pilgrimage to Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy and requested permission to pass through Henry’s domains. Not only was it granted, but Henry himself escorted Louis to the abbey high above the sea, hearing Mass with him and dining spartanly in the refectory with the monks. Together in that silent abbey, with only the rush of the tide as background music, they would never be closer, and afterward, Louis was overheard to remark, to the astonishment of his retinue, that he knew of no man so thoroughly lovable as the king of England. After visiting his daughter and approving arrangements for her care, he returned to Paris laden with gifts and the distinct impression that the difficulties between France and England had been mended. It was an impression that would not last for long.