Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  Nevertheless, by 1169, the controversy had dragged on too long for the comfort of all parties, especially the papacy, and even Henry grew anxious for Thomas’s return to England, if for no other reason than that he wished the archbishop to crown Prince Henry. Becket was the last item on the agenda at Montmirail. It was late in the afternoon of the second and final day when his tall, gaunt figure crossed the thronged field to where the two kings waited. Approaching Henry, he slumped to his knees and began to weep, but Henry quickly caught him by the hand and raised him to his feet. With burning eyes and a humility that he had not displayed in recent years, he began his capitulation by pleading for Henry’s mercy, both for himself and the Church of England. Finally, he came to the words for which everyone was waiting. “On the whole matter which is in dispute between us, my lord king, in the presence of our lord the King of France and the archbishops, princes, and others who stand around us, I throw myself on your mercy and your pleasure.” But then, to the consternation of all present, he added “saving the honor of God!” At these words, which nullified his capitulation, Henry unleashed a stream of abuse, most of it somewhat irrationally centered on the luxurious life that Becket had lived at his expense while chancellor. Finally, he turned to Louis and said:My lord, this man foolishly and vainly deserted his church, secretly fleeing by night, although neither I nor anyone else drove him out of the kingdom.... I have always been willing and am now to allow him to rule over his church with as much freedom as any of the saints who preceded him. But take note of this, my lord, that whenever he disapproves of something, he will say it is contrary to God’s honor and so always get the better of me. Let me offer this, so that no one shall think me a despiser of God’s honor.... Let him behave toward me as the most saintly of his predecessors behaved toward the least saintly of mine, and I will be satisfied.

  The field rang with an approving chorus of “Hear! Hear! Fair offer! The king has humbled himself!” Even Louis seemed impressed. Turning to the archbishop, who had remained silent, he said: “My lord archbishop, the peace you desire has been offered. Why do you hesitate? Do you wish to be more than a saint?”

  It was a question that only time would answer.

  One hundred and twenty-five miles to the south, in her high tower above the rivers encircling Poitiers, the duchess of Aquitaine observed the feudal world of kings and archbishops with a skeptical eye, especially the pledges that her husband had made in the presence of that august assembly at Montmirail. Never having known Henry to willingly relinquish power, at least no more of it than was absolutely necessary, she, too, may have pondered the implications of his actions. He was thirty-five; obviously he did not mean to give up his titles or lands in favor of his sons until his death, an eventuality that still lay some distance in the future. And, yet, the acts of homage rendered by their sons were not merely prospective but immediate. They made Prince Henry and Richard the legal count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, respectively, not under the suzerainty of their father but under the direct overlordship of Louis Capet. In the case of Aquitaine, the practical result of Montmirail was that the duchy now had two dukes. At best, it was a complicated state of affairs, in which Henry’s anxieties had triumphed over common sense and in which the only advantages could accrue to their sons—and to the French crown. If Henry did not see through Louis’s scheming, Eleanor did, and for once she may have felt a grudging respect for her ex-husband. At that point, however, she was much too busy to allow herself to be drawn into any controversy with Henry over these matters.

  When Eleanor had returned to Poitiers in 1168, she came with the intention of restoring peace to her domains. That she was not immediately permitted a free hand we know from the presence of Earl Patrick and the fact that Henry himself spent the spring and summer of 1169 in Poitou and Gascony, presumably for the purpose of restoring order. But after his departure in August 1169, he seems to have maintained a hands-off policy. Some historians give the impression that Eleanor kept continuous court at Poitiers for the next five-year period, never stirring from behind the city walls. The fact is, she traveled extensively in her own lands and from time to time in Henry’s mainland provinces. During those years, her name crops up in the chronicles as being present at Falaise, Chinon, and other Plantagenet castles, nearly always on some occasion involving the children.

  Just as her contemporaries were mystified by the private arrangements she had made with Henry, neither is it easy from the distance of eight hundred years to understand either her personal or her political relationship with the king of England. On the face of it there seems to have been, as we would say today, an amicable separation in which each observed a live-and-let-live policy. But this certainly fails to paint a complete picture. From everything we know of Henry, he was too much the autocrat to allow Eleanor total freedom in ruling a duchy he considered nominally his. On the other hand, curiously enough, he appears to have done precisely that. As long as Eleanor did nothing to jeopardize his interests, as long as she cooperated in matters concerning the children and pretended to be his loyal wife, then he did not interfere. Actually, in the short run, there were undeniable advantages; not only was he able to save face and avoid an open acknowledgment that he could not rule Aquitaine, but furthermore—and no doubt this was a consideration—he neatly rid himself of a wife he no longer desired.

  By 1169, Eleanor could not have dodged an incontrovertible reality: She was no longer young. In fact, at forty-seven, she was at an age that the twelfth century considered rather past middle age and somewhat into the realm of the elderly. Life expectancy varied. If a man survived childhood, he could expect to live to his thirties; if he survived his thirties, then he had a good chance of living until the fifties. A woman’s life was far more hazardous. If she survived her child-bearing years—and many women did not—she might live perhaps a few years longer than her husband. In the opinion of one chronicler, life beyond the age of fifty was undesirable, the afflictions of the elderly arousing more horror than pity. While still a stunning woman, Eleanor was no longer the young belle who had dazzled the world from Bordeaux to Antioch, not even the mature beauty whose perfect ripeness had lured young Henry Plantagenet and inspired sweet rhymes from Bernard of Ventadour. Called the flower of the world so often that she had come to believe it, she was now forced to acknowledge the deadly passage of time and the fact that a fresher blossom, the girl that people called Rosa Mundi, had taken her place. What remained to her at forty-seven were her children, especially her heir, Richard, and her heritage, and to these she gave herself wholesale. Their cause became hers.

  For more than thirty years her subjects had patiently suffered occupation under her foreign consorts, but now, with the return of their duchess, a new regime had become possible. From 1169 on, Eleanor’s twofold resolution stands out clearly: to cut off Aquitaine from the Plantagenet empire insofar as this seemed feasible, and to create for herself a realm that would reflect the splendors of the past and prefigure innovations of the future. To lance the fear and unease that roamed the duchy’s cities and villages, Eleanor took to the highroads on royal progresses that carried her to the four corners of her land. Hers were no disorderly chevauchées such as those Henry had conducted through her dominions. She brought with her no army of mercenaries who forced vassals to huddle bitterly behind their barricaded keeps or sent them scurrying for the safety of the Île-de-France. With the pomp and majesty of which only she was capable, she came to her towns in peace, eager to make up for past abuses, asking for renewed oaths of homage, offering proudly for their approval and admiration her son and heir, Richard. With the soldiers and military governors gone, with Capetian and Plantagenet overlords occupied elsewhere, she began to undo the effects of oppression, using her considerable charm and influence to bring together feuding vassals and defuse their explosive jealousies.

  Once more the ducal palace at Poitiers, darkened these many years, became the center of all that was civilized and refined. As in the time of her father and gra
ndfather, troubadours, musicians, scholars, and literary types of all varieties were welcomed at court; traditional fairs and tournaments were revived; beguiling customs that had fallen into abeyance with the last of the male dukes were hauled from dusty recesses of memory and reinstated with full honors. Those who had sought refuge from the sword of Henry Plantagenet began to come home. Where Henry had razed walls and taken hostages, Eleanor salved raw emotions and attempted to exorcise bitter memories; where Henry had sneered at crowns and royal gewgaws, Eleanor gloried in peacock processions and pageants, deliberately seeking out occasions for ceremony. Wherever she went, she pushed Richard into the spotlight as the rightful heir of the Troubadour, providing the southerners with constant reminders that Henry had been replaced. In Poitiers, she arranged for the boy to be invested with the honorary title of abbot of Saint-Hilaire and called upon the venerable archbishop of Bordeaux to present him with the lance and standard that signified that distinguished office.

  In Limoges, a city that had suffered Henry’s wrath, she managed her son’s investiture as duke of Aquitaine with a dexterity that suggested a shrewd eye for public relations. The monks at the Abbey of Saint Martial had recently discovered among their archives an ancient account of the life of Saint Valerie, the city’s patron saint, a noble virgin who, according to legend, had been martyred for her faith at the dawn of the Christian era. In the days of Eleanor’s forebears, the legend of Saint Valerie had played an important part in the coronation of the dukes of Aquitaine, and now Eleanor rekindled local chauvinism by reviving this ancient ritual. On the day of the coronation, a great procession escorted Richard to the Church of Saint-Étienne, where he contracted a symbolic marriage with Saint Valerie, her ring upon his finger signifying his indissoluble bond with the land of his forebears. Robed in a silk tunic and wearing a crown of gold. Richard led a procession of clergy to the altar, where he received his sword and spurs. Afterward, there was feasting and jousting the likes of which had not been seen in Limoges for many decades, and later, the delighted southerners declared that Richard’s coronation outclassed any they had seen in Paris or Reims.

  It should not be supposed that pageants and coronations suddenly transformed Aquitaine into a twelfth-century Camelot. Eleanor was swimming in a swift stream against the current, and the problems she faced in governing a traditionally ungovernable region had been found virtually insuperable by every man preceding her. While anarchy did not disappear, it did abate, and for a time, the land knew a precarious kind of peace or at least what passed for peace among the southerners. If it was not the government Henry had hoped to install, it was one that reflected Eleanor and her conceptions of the ideal state: music and poetry, love and laughter, freedom, justice, and a modicum of order. In the late sixties and early seventies, all roads in Aquitaine led to Poitiers and to the ducal palace, where events were taking place that intrigued the Aquitainians and amazed the rest of Europe. During these years, Eleanor’s household sheltered much of the future royalty of Europe. The Plantagenet children, once dragged from castle to castle, country to country, often without one or both parents, had never known a proper home. Now she drew them together in the halls and gardens where she herself had grown up: Prince Henry and Richard, Eleanor and Joanna, Geoffrey and his future wife, Constance of Brittany. The only missing child seems to have been John, whose father, in a moment of levity, had nicknamed him Lackland because he had run out of lands to bequeath the boy. It is believed that John spent his childhood in the care of nuns at the Abbey of Fontevrault, possibly with his parents’ intention that he devote his life to the Church, but more likely due to Eleanor’s unmistakable aversion to the boy. In addition to Eleanor’s own brood and their Poitevin cousins, circumstances had made her stepmother to the Capetian younger generation. Despite Louis’s earlier objections to Eleanor as a mother, events had decreed otherwise, because now under her supervision were both daughters of his second marriage, Marguerite and Alais, and soon there would come to Poitiers, like a wraith from the past, Eleanor’s firstborn daughter, the disappointing female she had borne to Louis before the Crusade.

  The countess of Champagne, nee Marie Capet, had never really known her mother. For part of her childhood, Eleanor had been absent in the Holy Land, and afterward had come the divorce. She had been reared in the strictly religious French court by two consecutive step-mothers, who provided her with the most conservative of upbringings and in an atmosphere where the name of Eleanor of Aquitaine must have been a byword for female irresponsibility, not to mention perfidy. The likelihood of her having any contact with Eleanor during those intervening years is extremely remote, and yet the young woman who journeyed down to Poitiers from Troyes about the year 1170 could not have been more attuned to her mother’s thinking than if there had been no separation. More than any of Eleanor’s children, including Richard, Marie was her mother’s child. The manner in which this strange reconciliation came about is a detail that no chronicler saw fit to record; it is tempting to surmise that Louis, disturbed by the fact that two of his young daughters had fallen into undesirable hands, deliberately sent Marie to subtly keep an eye on the situation. At any event, she suddenly appeared as a leading figure at Eleanor’s court, a woman in her late twenties who bore ideas that curiously paralleled her mother’s.

  Marie was already a person of some consequence in her own right. Even though she had been betrothed as a child, Louis had not seen fit to permit her marriage to Henry the Liberal of Champagne until she had reached the advanced age of nineteen. Unlike the Capetian court, her new home at Troyes was a center of culture and taste in northern France, and its sophisticated court a gathering place for poets such as Chrétien de Troyes. Marie gives the impression of being an aggressive woman who carved spheres of influence for herself, but, less politically minded than Eleanor, she took for her province of expertise the literary.

  Something of the talent of William the Troubadour must have surfaced in the countess, a gift for inventing tales and creating worlds with words, but circumstances prevented a direct use of her talents. In her time, the idea of a female poet was not unknown—of the 450 troubadours known by name, 4 are women—but a daughter of Louis Capet did not take up the calling. Instead, she accepted outlets more appropriate to a woman and became a patroness of the arts, one of her protégés being Chrétien de Troyes, who composed, at her suggestion, the romance of the gallant Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.

  In the harsh authoritarian world of masculine kingship, the world from which Eleanor had so lately fled, the court at Poitiers stood as an oasis where a woman of independence and imagination might find the freedom to invent a milieu suitable to her own taste. It had, like all oases, a fantasy quality about it, although to Marie and Eleanor; to the countess of Flanders and the countess of Narbonne; to Henry Plantagenet’s half sister, Emma of Anjou; to the dozens of highborn ladies in residence at one time or another, the court was reality, the rest of the world a distortion. They saw themselves as innovators of a rational new world, a prototype for the future perhaps, in which women might reign as goddesses or at the least mistresses of their own destinies. Eleanor and Marie and their friends may be forgiven their excessive optimism, because in some respects the twelfth century seemed the dawn of a new age for women. There is no question that the rigid feudal view of women had already begun to splinter. The Church’s traditional misogynistic view of the female as an instrument of the devil, a thing at once evil and inferior, had given way to the cult of the Virgin, and all over western Christendom the gospel of Mary was slowly dispelling the image of Eve the temptress; Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven, was worshiped in the magnificent new Gothic cathedrals, in pilgrimages to various shrines throughout Europe, in festivals such as the Annunciation and Candlemas, which celebrated the main events of the Virgin’s life. Along with the cult of the Virgin, there had appeared in more recent years the cult of chivalry, with the medieval lady as Mary’s secular counterpart. While Mariolatry had swollen mysteriously among the genera
l populace, the chivalrous cult of the lady was a deliberate invention of the aristocracy, encouraged if not specifically devised by women themselves. Even though God had seemed to change sex by the twelfth century, the position of women still oscillated between the depths and the unreal elevation of the pedestal. In this time of great confusion about the roles of male and female, some women—the nobly born, the educated—felt the need for a redefinition of the relationship between the sexes. The inferiority of the female they acknowledged to be a myth, and in the Middle Ages, as Henry Adams wrote, “the superiority of the woman was not a fancy, but a fact.” It was not a fact that the average medieval man could readily accept, however, and women’s ongoing struggle with men continued.

  At Poitiers, the “man problem” was a matter of more than merely personal concern to Eleanor; it was, on the contrary, a political dilemma of disturbing proportions. Despite the professed ideals of chivalry and courtly love then current, the knights of Aquitaine were still, in her estimation, rude and barbarous beneath their veneer of courtesy. The young men who swarmed to her court, especially during the June “season” between Whitsunday and Saint John’s Day, when there occurred the annual armistice in interbaronial fighting, were a restless, bellicose lot, many of them landless, penniless younger sons with no occupation except troublemaking. They came to joust and dice and find a woman, either on a permanent or on a temporary basis, and they brought to her court a disorder that she found potentially dangerous. In the past, this footloose segment of society had been siphoned off to Crusades or funneled into the Church, but Eleanor, wrestling with the perennial problem of anarchy in her estates, sought more long-range cures for this social ill. To her daughter she assigned the task of educating these high-spirited male subjects of hers so that the younger generation might be molded into civilized beings who, not so incidentally, would know how to respect women. Eleanor’s ideas went far beyond what we today would call feminism, in the sense that equality of the sexes was not precisely her goal. Rather, she believed in the superiority of women. What was needed, in her opinion, was a code of civility to embody and publicize these ideas. Not for nothing had she labored in the service of the legal-minded Henry Plantagenet; if the king of England could write down laws for Church and State, as he had at Clarendon, then the duchess of Aquitaine could informally codify and commit to parchment a system of manners to regulate the social conduct of her male subjects.