Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  In London, Eleanor had followed developments on the Continent between her present and former husbands with interest and possibly a touch of amusement. Whatever other emotions she may have had at this time, she had good reason to feel gratified. There was peace at home and abroad. The quarrel sparked by her remarriage had been patched, and now her eldest son stood an excellent chance of someday wearing Louis’s crown. In England the year 1158, marked by nothing more important than a new issue of coinage, was closing amid general tranquility. Well satisfied with her administration of the country, assured that every situation remained under control, Eleanor left England in the steady hands of Robert of Leicester and crossed the Channel to celebrate Christmas with Henry at Cherbourg.

  Domestically as well as politically, the Christmas court was a happy one. With another son added to their family, with their domains in peace and perfect order and the future so promising that it took one’s breath away, the Plantagenets had much cause for thanksgiving. Possibly one dark cloud dimmed their euphoria, but even that turned out to bear a silver lining. On July 26, Henry’s twenty-four-year-old brother, Geoffrey, had died. Shortly after Henry had bought him off with an annuity in 1156, Geoffrey had stumbled across a piece of good luck that undoubtedly saved him from the temptation of future strife with his brother. Brittany, in a state of anarchy ever since its duke had died twenty years earlier, was beset by rival claimants to the title, and the citizens of its key city, Nantes, tired of lawlessness, had offered the dukedom to Geoffrey. Eager for standing in the world, he accepted with delight. Now, upon his death, Henry had no intention of allowing the duchy to escape from the Plantagenet circumference, even though his claim to Brittany rested on the shakiest of foundations. During his honeymoon with the Franks that fall, he persuaded Louis to recognize him as overlord of Brittany, and he then took an army to Nantes to make certain of the city’s loyalty. When the citizens received him as Geoffrey’s rightful heir, he placed the city under the supervision of a few trusted men. Certainly, Nantes was not the whole of Brittany, but Henry felt positive that the rest of the duchy would follow in time.

  With Brittany more or less added to the empire, one might think that the Plantagenets would have been content. On the contrary, their mania for land and more land continued unabated. In this respect, Eleanor was no different from, or better than, her husband. Still laboring under the impression that she and Henry were partners in all enterprises-a justifiable impression at that stage, it must be admitted—she was eager to make a contribution to the Plantagenet holdings. She had, of course, already given him Aquitaine, a gift of dubious value, but now she presented another possibility. Even though Toulouse had not belonged to her family for nearly fifty years, she had never stopped considering the county part of her rightful inheritance. That her grandmother Philippa had ruled there and her father was born there overshadowed the fact that Toulouse had most assuredly passed into the hands of the house of Saint-Gilles. A realist in most ways, Eleanor must have known that Toulouse was irrecoverable by this time, especially after Louis’s botched effort to conquer it eighteen years earlier, but that seemed to make no difference. During the Christmas festivities, when acquisition and expansion were on everyone’s mind, it is easy to see how the subject of Toulouse came up quite naturally and how Henry must have needed little prompting.

  At this point there was something curiously self-defeating about the Plantagenets’ decision to gain control of Toulouse, however good their reasons for believing it a rightful portion of Eleanor’s inheritance. Henry already had more territory than he could comfortably supervise, and the last thing he needed was another rebellious province like Aquitaine. Although the Toulousains gave nominal allegiance to the Capetians, their political interests were directed southward to the Mediterranean, to Provence and Barcelona, the far south comprising a distinct region of its own. And what is equally curious at this point is why Henry and Eleanor selected this particular moment to offend Louis Capet, whose sister, Constance, widowed upon the death of King Stephen’s son, Eustace, had married Count Raymond V of Toulouse. In the past four years, Louis’s sister had borne three sons, the only male children of the Capetian royal line as of that time. To press Eleanor’s claim to the county by right of inheritance implied dispossession of Count Raymond and his family, something Louis was unlikely to regard favorably. With peace established between England and France, Henry and Eleanor could have selected no more inauspicious moment to bring up Toulouse. Perhaps Walter Map was correct when he wrote of Henry: “He was impatient of peace and felt no qualm in harassing almost the half of Christendom.” But in this case, it was not merely a matter of impatience ; plain and simple, his motive was greed. Toulouse was a rich county, and Henry could not resist. As for Louis, everyone knew that he could be easily duped.

  Fortunately for the Plantagenets, the strained situation in southern France at that time lent itself to the kind of venture they had in mind. Count Raymond of Toulouse was already at war with Count Raymond-Berengar of Barcelona, in addition to other dissatisfied vassals. Henry was not so crass or unskillful as to announce his designs on Toulouse openly; instead, sometime in April 1159, he and Eleanor casually drifted south through Aquitaine, winding up at Blaye in Gascony, where he formed an alliance with the count of Barcelona. To sweeten the pot and to make certain that Toulouse, once taken, did not stick to Raymond-Berengar’s fingers, Henry proposed a betrothal between his son, Richard, and Raymond’s daughter. Their partnership sealed, he sent a formal summons to the count of Toulouse, demanding surrender of the county in Eleanor’s name, which, of course, Count Raymond refused to do. For that matter, he responded by setting off an alarm and notifying his overlord and brother-in-law, Louis Capet, of the danger threatening.

  If Louis received a rude shock from the man whom, just months earlier, he had called lovable, he did not allow it to affect his determinedly friendly policy toward the king of England. In 1159, he met with Henry in February and again in June, and although they could reach no agreement, they parted on warm terms. Louis was not the complete dupe he appeared. His hostility toward Henry had been, to a large extent, an expression of his resentment against Eleanor’s remarriage, and it had run contrary to the policy laid down by Abbot Suger, namely that the military inferiority of the French made cooperation with more powerful vassals the only sensible course. Although Louis had reached a stage of life where he preferred sensibility, nevertheless this new development created a dilemma. He could not very well contest Henry’s claim to Toulouse, because he himself had pressed it when he had been Eleanor’s husband. But neither could he accommodate Henry in his aspirations. For the moment, then, Louis stood tactfully aloof.

  The early months of 1159 passed in a flurry of war fever. It is probable that Eleanor resided first at Rouen and later at Poitiers, which seems to have been headquarters for the mobilization. To be at home again must have filled her with pleasure; to be preparing for a war that would certainly be won was doubly exciting. For there was no doubt in her mind that her masterful husband, his military record unblemished save for that better-forgotten clash with the barbaric Welsh, would emerge victorious. On March 22, Henry had issued a summons to his vassals in England, Normandy, and Aquitaine to assemble at Poitiers on June 24. Not wishing to inconvenience England, so long a journey from Toulouse, he demanded only the services of his barons. Any English knight who did not wish to make the trip was assessed the sum of two marks, which would pay for a mercenary to fight in his place. In addition to the levy of this scutage, he exacted contributions from towns, sheriffs, Jewish moneylenders, and, much to their consternation and indignation, the clergy. Since the tax on the Church was collected by Becket, many concluded that it was his idea, which was probably untrue. Nevertheless, some years later bitter churchmen would remember and charge that Thomas had plunged a sword “into the vitals of Holy Mother Church with your own hand when you despoiled her of so many thousand marks for the expedition against Toulouse.” From laymen as well as churchmen
, over eleven thousand pounds flowed into Henry’s treasury during the first half of 1159, enough to support a siege for at least five or six months.

  On the appointed day, banners flouncing, the army left Poitiers in splendor. Altogether it was a brilliant and impressive parade of Henry’s vassals: the barons of England, Normandy, Anjou, Brittany, and Aquitaine; King Malcolm of Scotland, with an army that had required forty-five vessels to transport across the Channel; a showy contingent led by Thomas Becket, who, his ecclesiastical career rapidly fading into dim memory, headed not less than seven hundred knights of his own household, a tremendous force for that time and an indication of his extremely comfortable financial position. In addition, there was the count of Barcelona with some of the unhappy vassals of the count of Toulouse—William of Montpellier and Raymond Trencavel, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne. The last time such a stupendous army had been seen in those parts was for a major Crusade.

  By July 6, Henry’s army had encamped outside the high red walls of Toulouse and, siege engines and catapults in place, settled down for a lengthy stay. Medieval sieges were painfully boring for both besiegers and besieged. Those inside the walls of Toulouse grew claustrophobic and, to relieve their restlessness, would periodically sally forth to provoke Henry’s men into a clash of arrows and swords; then they would retreat inside the walls once more. There was little for Henry to do beyond preventing food or military help from reaching the Toulousains. July and August passed to the monotonous thumps of the engineers working their stone throwers. Henry, who hated inactivity, lacked the temperament to conduct a long siege, although he had brought with him his clerks and he kept busy with administrative chores, issuing writs, hearing judicial cases, and listening to subjects who had followed him to the gates of Toulouse to seek favors or appeal law cases. Toward the middle of September, the general ennui was enlivened by a strange sight. Louis Capet appeared before the city gates and requested permission to enter. Since he had brought no army—indeed he meekly declared that he had come only to safeguard his sister—he was permitted entry. But Louis’s unexpected arrival seemed to present Henry with a dilemma, or so he claimed. Within a week, he called off the siege, declaring that he had too great a reverence for the king of the Franks to attack a city in which his overlord resided. This, of course, was nonsense, for Henry had no reverence or even respect for Louis. Probably his real reasons for abandoning the siege were practical ones: The cost of feeding thousands was turning out to be an expensive business; the unsanitary conditions had caused an epidemic among his troops; and, of course, he was bored.

  Henry’s decision to abandon the war sparked the first recorded disagreement between the king and his chancellor. Thirsty for military victory, horribly disappointed that he had lost the chance to lead his troops into a real battle, Thomas angrily argued against giving up. “Foolish superstition” was what he accused Henry of, declaring that Louis himself had forfeit any consideration by siding with Henry’s enemies. Not only that, but if Henry were to assault now, he could take Toulouse and make Louis a prisoner as well. Henry, barely controlling his temper, must have reiterated that he had, after all, done homage to Louis as his feudal overlord, and to attack his person would set a poor example for his own vassals. Without being explicit, the chroniclers hint that the disagreement between the two men grew heated. In any event, Henry left Toulouse on September 26, leaving behind his churlish chancellor, who then proceeded to assault several castles in the vicinity. By the time they next met, the clash would be seemingly forgotten.

  It was a jubilant Raymond of Toulouse who watched the departure of that army whose vast stockpiles of arrows, siege machines, lances, and axes had rendered the chroniclers speechless. The duchess of Aquitaine had been foiled by his father, and now history had happily repeated itself. Someday Raymond would have revenge on Eleanor, but in the autumn of 1159, such events were still far in the future.

  From a careful inspection of Henry’s itinerary in the remaining months of 1159, it appears that he traveled directly north from Toulouse, by way of Limoges, to Beauvais in Normandy, where Louis’s brother had been stirring up trouble along the border. One receives the distinct impression that he purposely avoided Poitiers, that after his argument with Becket he had small desire to face his wife. It is easy to guess Eleanor’s surprise and chagrin; this had been the second time that she had sent a husband against Toulouse, and both expeditions had ended in failure. In Louis’s case, defeat had been understandable, for he was hardly a warrior. But what excuse could she make for Henry? With his resources, in terms of both manpower and money, the capture of this single city, no matter how well defended, should have been an easy matter. It must have occurred to her that Henry was not the fighter that either his mother or father had been. He had spent half a year planning the war, raising a large army and vast sums of money, but when his opponent could not be intimidated, he had given up. Others might believe Henry’s reluctance to attack his liege lord the height of scrupulousness, but Eleanor saw it as a dent in the image of a man she had regarded as invincible.

  Above, the Palais de Justice, Poitiers, formerly Eleanor’s ancestral palace. On the right can be seen the Tour Maubergeonne, where Eleanor’s grandfather William IX lodged his mistress.

  Right, Duke William IX of Aquitaine, a portrait from a fourteenth-century manuscript of troubadour poetry in the Bibliothèque Nationale

  The figures representing a king and queen of Judah and believed to be likenesses of Eleanor and Louis were completed around 1150, shortly after the Second Crusade. From the west portal of Chartres Cathedral.

  Rock crystal and pearl vase that Eleanor gave to Louis at the time of their marriage, now in the Louvre. The Latin inscription on the base reads that she gave it to her husband who presented it to Abbot Suger who in turn donated the vase to the Abbey of Saint-Denis. This is the only surviving object from Eleanor’s life.

  Service de Documentation Photographique de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux

  Entry of emperor Conrad III and Louis VII into Constantinople during the Second Crusade, a fifteenth-century miniature from “Grandes chroniques de France.” The artist was mistaken because the two armies entered the city at different times.

  Crowned heads of Eleanor and Henry, an engaged capital from the Church of Notre-Dame-du-Bourg near Bordeaux, which now can be seen at the Cloisters in New York. Probably the carved heads date from a progress they made through Aquitaine in 1152.

  Left,the remains of Eleanor’s seal. struck in 1152 shortly after her marriage to Henry, from a charter in the Archives de France

  Statue of Richard I by Marochetti, 1860, outside the House of Lords, London

  Tomb effigy of King John at Worcester Cathedral. John was the first Plantagenet king to be buried in England.

  King John signing the Magna Charta at Runnymede in 1215

  The necropolis of the Plantagenets is in the abbey church at Fontevrault. Above, the tomb effigy of Henry II; right, the tomb effigies of Eleanor and Richard. Also buried at Fontevrault Abbey are Joanna and Isabella of Angoulême.

  The Abbey of Fontevrault near Tours, founded around 1099 by Robert d’Arbrissel to house a foundation of monks and nuns under the rule of an abbess. Here Eleanor spent the last years of her life.

  Betrayals

  Exactly how different the decade of the 1160s would be from the previous one the queen was soon to discover. Until the siege of Toulouse, the lucky years had shimmered and slid together, the future appeared so full of promise that the Plantagenets seemed touched by magic or the hand of a benign God. But Christmas of 1159 at Falaise cannot have been a happy one for Eleanor. For the past month, snow and biting winds had swept the Norman countryside, the December sky was colored like iron, and within the cheerless castle where William the Conqueror had been born, the atmosphere was overcast by failure. Henry was not a man to suffer patiently a wife’s sarcasms or recriminations, but on the other hand, neither was Eleanor a person to dissemble her feelings about a war so cl
osely bound up with her own personal ambitions. Like Becket, she could see that Louis, bumbler though he might be, had been successful in confounding the king. Accustomed as she had grown to thinking of Louis as a fool and Henry as the clever one, it must have been unsettling to discover that perhaps her images of both men had been distorted. Henry’s failure at Toulouse seemed enormous to Eleanor, and although there was no open quarreling, the signs of coolness between them were apparent.

  Usually, Christmas courts brought on a fierce lust in Henry, but this Christmas, unlike others, Eleanor did not conceive. Perhaps after six years of almost continuous pregnancy she was relieved to take a rest. Henry, a person who did not dwell for very long on either success or failure, had already appeared to have forgotten Toulouse, and now he grew adamant in pressing Eleanor to return to England. She had been absent from the kingdom for a year—he had been away for over two—and while his trust in Richard of Luci and Robert of Leicester remained intact, this was too long a period to leave England unattended by either himself or Eleanor. Perhaps more crucial, however, was his imperative need for money.

  Before the Christmas holiday ended, Eleanor left Falaise, and on December 29, despite the bad weather, she boarded the royal yacht Esnecca with young Henry and Matilda and crossed the Channel. Her movements during the next few months are reminiscent of Henry’s when the chroniclers declared that he appeared to fly from city to city throughout his domains. At Westminster and Winchester, Eleanor arranged for coin to be loaded on carts and packhorses. Whether following Henry’s instructions or by her own authority, she escorted the treasury collection to Southampton, where it was loaded on the Esnecca, but instead of riding back to London, she accompanied the precious cargo to Barfleur, saw it safely unloaded, and then returned immediately to Southampton.