Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  William X seems to have been noticeably fond of his eldest daughter, making her his constant companion. In consequence, Eleanor’s childhood was passed under many roofs. Like all rulers of the high Middle Ages, her father was perpetually on progress — administering justice and bringing rebellious vassals to heel — and Eleanor went with him. Inside the Roman city walls of Bordeaux she lived in the Ombrière palace with its tall keep, the ‘Crossbowman’, although she must also have stayed at the rambling old Tutelle palace just outside. When at Poitiers she inhabited the splendid Maubergeon Tower, which had once housed her grandfather’s ladies. There were similar keeps and palaces at Limoges, Niort, St Jean d’Angély, Blaye, Melle, Bayonne and other towns, together with all the fortresses of the vassals. In addition there were many rich abbeys that frequently had the expensive honour of entertaining the ducal household. There were also particularly favoured residences belonging to the duke, such as Belin (near Bordeaux) and Talmont, a castle and hunting lodge on the coast of Poitou.

  Eleanor’s education was by no means confined to needlework. She was taught to read Latin: first, the prayers and services of the Church, then the Bible, the writings of the fathers and Ovid. She learned to such effect that later she was able to enjoy Latin comedies when they were performed before the court, and it is likely that she could speak the language. She was certainly able to write it — a rare accomplishment for a member of the laity. She was also taught to read and write Provencal, acquiring an expert knowledge of the gai saber (joyous art), as the troubadours termed their craft.

  Eleanor may well have picked up more than gai saber from the troubadours. Many came from the county of Toulouse, which (especially the town of Albi) was the centre of a new religion, a form of Manichaeism. The romantic history of the Albigensians has obsured the nature of their beliefs; they held all matter to be evil, procreation being the ultimate sin. But such views intrigued poets who practised platonic love. Moreover the integrity of the Albigensian ministers contrasted favourably with the corruption and sloth of all too many of the Christian clergy. Whole districts of southern Aquitaine became Albigensian. Although not even the chroniclers accuse Eleanor of being an Albigensian, there must have been plenty of them at her father’s court and it is impossible that she did not know a good deal about their creed.

  Obviously Eleanor matured early, partly from being constantly in her father’s company. One may guess how much she regretted not having been born a boy and how this regret, together with the freedom bestowed by her position and by Aquitainian court life, made her determined to do just what she pleased and careless of convention. Nevertheless, although she was independent and strong-willed, she was much too feminine ever to be a tomboy; but later she was credited with wearing armour like a man, and she may have displayed a certain casualness in sexual matters.

  By this date the Capetian monarchy was at last beginning to assert itself and think of expansion. Louis VI was accused, with justice, of making a god out of his belly, and by his mid-forties he was too fat to mount a horse, yet for all his gluttony he was determined to be more than just ‘duke of the Ile de France’. After enforcing strict law and order for the first time throughout the Capetian domains, by military skill and sheer force of character, he then made even his greatest vassals defer to him as a judge and arbitrator, as in the disputed succession to the lordship of Bourbon. By 1124 his vassals had grown dutiful enough to help him fight off an invasion by the emperor Henry V and the English king Henry I. Louis also found other sources of support by issuing to town communes throughout France (though seldom in his own territory) charters to set up corporations, which freed them from feudal obligations to their local lord. Understandably, Louis le gros cast greedy eyes on Aquitaine and its heiress. With such a king, Eleanor would have to give priority to a Capetian suitor. In any case, should her father die, the wardship of herself and of her fief would fall to the king.

  On Good Friday 1137, despite his strength, duke William X died at Compostella, where he had gone to pray to St James the Apostle, and was buried under the high altar at Compostella. Eleanor had no other course than to turn to king Louis. Although a woman could inherit a fief, receive homage from its vassals, and lead them to war, it was also true that under feudal law any ruthless suitor might seize her, force her to marry him, and enjoy her inheritance. It is not known whether William had expressed any wish that his daughter should marry Louis’s son but it is more than likely that he had recognized Louis’s right to be her guardian. Eleanor was speedily betrothed to Louis le jeune, who was Louis VI’s only surviving son. Even before the marriage, the fat monarch made his son formally claim Poitiers and Aquitaine and receive the homage of his new vassals at Limoges on 29 June 1137.

  The future Louis VII was now sixteen. Originally he had been destined for the cloister and had spent his early years as a ‘child monk’ at the monastery of Saint-Denis under the benevolent eye of abbot Suger. However, when he was nine his elder brother Philip’s horse had been frightened by a runaway pig, giving its rider a fatal fall, whereupon Louis became heir to the throne and was crowned joint-king according to Capetian custom (to ensure an undisputed succession). But the memory of his pious childhood and his affection for monks never left him; he continued his sacred studies and sometimes wore a coarse grey gown and sandals like a simple brother. In appearance he was well built, but not overweight like his father, with long yellow hair and mild blue eyes. His strangest characteristic was his humble, unworldly manner, which none the less gave him a naive charm. Yet he was more intelligent than he seemed at first, and far from ineffectual. His worst faults were an appallingly violent temper — his rages were terrible — and a paralysing sense of sin and guilt.

  Louis took over a month travelling from Paris to his wedding, riding by night to escape the heat. He was accompanied by his old friend abbot Suger, who was also his father’s trusted minister, by the bishop of Chartres and other prelates, and by an imposing escort of great vassals that included count Thibault of Champagne and count Raoul of Vermandois (a pair of whom Eleanor would later hear a good deal). Naturally he brought sumptuous presents.

  Even the monkish young king must have been dazzled by his lavishly gifted bride, when at last he met her. Quite apart from her great possessions, Eleanor was very desirable in herself. So far as one may judge from the contemporary sources and the ecstasies of even the most grudging clerical witnesses, at fifteen she was a beauty — tall, with a superb figure that she kept into old age, lustrous eyes and fine features. (It is likely that her hair was yellow and her eyes blue, as at that time these were considered indispensable for truly remarkable good looks.) Obviously she had inherited the splendid constitution of her father and grandfather. In manner, as befitted a lady who claimed descent from Charlemagne, she was gracious and regal. She must have been far more adult than her bridegroom. Even then she was probably already a protector of troubadours, especially of those fleeing from the irritation of their adored ones’ menfolk. (She was to be no less noted for sympathy with her own sex in trouble; her concern for wives who had run away from brutal husbands was later evident in her patronage of the abbey of Fontevrault, which served as a refuge for them.) She was indeed a girl of extraordinary promise.

  On Sunday 25 July 1137 the couple were married in the cathedral of Saint André at Bordeaux, by archbishop Geoffrey of Loroux, in the presence of the lords spiritual and temporal of Gascony, Poitou and the Saintonge. Afterwards, at the nuptial banquet in the Ombriére palace, Louis wore the ducal coronet of Aquitaine. Then they went on progress, the wedding night being spent at the castle of Taillebourg.

  A fortnight later another ceremony took place in the cathedral at Poitiers. On 8 August Eleanor and Louis were consecrated duke and duchess of Aquitaine with a sacramental rite modelled on that of the service for crowning a king of France. During the banquet in the Maubergeon that followed, abbot Suger brought them the news that Louis VI had died a week earlier, killed by gluttony. For the next fifteen years El
eanor was to see little of Aquitaine.

  2 Queen of France

  ‘Les prêtres ne pourraient souffrir aux sacrifices L’audace d’une femme.’

  Racine, Athalie

  ‘To live with a woman without danger is more difficult than raising the dead to life.’

  St Bernard, Sermons on the Canticles

  On Christmas Day 1137, Eleanor of Aquitaine was crowned queen of France at Bourges. Louis also received the sacrament although he had already been crowned. He was infatuated with his beautiful wife, who returned his affection, being only too thankful to be safe from importunate and ruthless suitors. To begin with the couple showed no signs of incompatibility, and for the next few years Eleanor gave herself up to the enjoyment of a court that she made the gayest and most splendid in western Christendom.

  Paris, which was to be her principal home, was largely un-walled and unpaved, and many of the ruins of the old Roman city were still standing. Its heart was the walled Ile Saint Louis in the middle of the river Seine, where three centuries before the inhabitants had taken refuge from the Vikings, and which was dominated by the palaces of the king (the cité palace) and of the bishop (where Notre Dame now stands). On the right bank the bridge over the Seine was defended by the Grand Châtelet (great castle) and on the left by the Petit Châtelet (little castle). On the left bank stood the ancient Roman palace of the Thermae (baths), a vast rambling edifice whose massive but crumbling masonry had been patched up over the centuries by Merovingians, Carolingians and Capetians in their turn, like so many of the city’s buildings. On the north bank a growing community of tradesmen, merchants, artisans and money changers had established itself in a semi-rural area covered by vines, orchards, market gardens and even small farms. Paris was far from being the glorious Gothic capital that it became in the following century, and as yet was probably no more impressive than the queen’s own cities of Poitiers and Bordeaux.

  Nevertheless, for so intelligent a woman as Eleanor, Paris and its neighbours must have been extraordinarily stimulating. ‘Paris, queen among cities, moon among stars, so gracious a valley, an island of royal palaces’, wrote Guido of Bezoches in an often quoted passage, ‘and on that island hath philosophy her royal and ancient seat: who alone, with study her sole comrade, holding the eternal citadel of light and immortality, hath set her victorious foot on the withering flower of the fast aging world’. For what has been called the twelfth-century renaissance was at its height. There was not yet a university of Paris, but schools of theology and philosophy had sprung up amid the religious houses of the left bank, attended by students from all over the world (including, at that date, an Englishman called Thomas Becket). Currently they were full of Peter Abelard’s ‘heresies’ about individual judgment; in his letters, Abelard claims that ladies of rank were coming to his lectures. It is likely that the queen knew of his ideas, and she may well have heard him speak. Similar schools existed at Orleans, Chartres and Tours, where there were lectures on Plato and Aristotle, the latter only recently re-discovered by scholars travelling in Moorish Spain. Orleans was a stronghold of humanism. The poetry of antiquity was enjoying a new vogue; men were learning to appreciate Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Martial. The twelfth century was also the classic century of the mediaeval Latin lyric. Moreover the troubadours of southern France were echoed in the north by the trouvères, who wrote in the langue d’oïl, and composed not only love songs but also the epic chansons de geste. As for the visual arts, the invention of the pointed arch was about to launch France on the first and most beautiful wave of Gothic architecture. At the deepest level, there was also a spiritual revolution, expressed in the foundation of new religious orders — Cistercians, Carthusians, Premonstratensians, Fontevrault.

  Although the queen had Latin plays performed before the court and filled it with troubadours and trouvéres, her amusements were on the whole far from cerebral. She introduced Provencal verse and all the elegancies of Aquitaine, including respect for ladies — much to the scandal of churchmen and, no doubt, of northern husbands. The north was equally scandalized by the southern fashions that came with her — the curled beards and short mantles of the men, and the elaborate head-dresses of the ladies.

  Although besotted with his beautiful wife, the young king’s excessive piety could not be repressed. Eleanor’s often frivolous mind can hardly have relished Louis’s monkish behaviour — fasting and other austerities, and taking his place in the choir stalls to sing the office with his spiritual brethren. She may have taken more interest in his studies, as she later showed a knowledge of Aristotelian logic, and knew how to use the syllogism in argument. She may well have enjoyed the learned dissertations and disputations that the king arranged in the palace gardens. At this date Louis shared some of his wife’s pleasures too, and he seems to have been fond of hunting and the tournament. Deeply in love, he spent a good deal of his time with her and it is possible that he shared at least a little of her taste for poetry. They toured her duchy together, holding court in the great cities.

  In those early days Louis VII was full of energy and self-confidence. His asceticism saved him from his father’s greed and girth. He had begun well with a marriage that had trebled his domains, and there was every hope that his reign would be a glorious one. He felt himself a match for any of his vassals, and there was no one abroad to threaten him; Germany was torn by disputes over an imperial election, and England was distracted by the miseries of king Stephen’s anarchic rule.

  Honourable and straightforward to the point of naivety, Louis was becoming renowned for his courtesy, his kindness and generosity, and his simplicity. Once he lay down to sleep in a wood, guarded by only two knights, and when the count of Champagne chided him for his rashness, he replied ‘I can sleep alone in complete safety as I have no enemies’. In later life he showed an attractive unworldliness when talking to the Englishman Walter Map about the wealth of kings. Louis said that the monarchs of the Indies possessed jewels and lions, leopards and elephants; the rulers of Byzantium and Sicily had wonderful silks and precious metals; the German emperor commanded fine soldiers and war horses; and the king of England ‘lacks nothing — he has gold and silver, precious stones and silk, men and horses, all of them in abundance’. But as for the king of France, ‘We have nothing but bread, wine and contentment’.

  Louis has his modern admirers. Professor Fawtier tells us that ‘historians have been surprisingly slow to appreciate Louis VII at his true worth; and yet his saintly character strongly reminds us of his great-grandson St Louis’, and goes on to claim that he was essentially a realist. But on some occasions Louis was far from being either saintly or realistic. It is true that he continued his father’s policy with considerable success, eventually establishing complete and lasting control of the Ile de France; he also carried on the extension of the royal authority throughout France by issuing charters to the towns. Nevertheless, despite all his honesty and genuine benevolence Louis had a savage temper and a curiously unbalanced streak that on occasion affected his judgment disastrously.

  Masterful and fiercely energetic, Eleanor soon established almost complete control over her husband. Her first trial of strength when she came to Paris was with her mother-in-law. Adelaide of Savoy did not take to her youthful supplanter and soon retired to the estates in Champagne that had been her dowry. It is a testimony to the fifteen-year-old queen’s force of character that the battle was won so quicky. Adelaide consoled herself by marrying the lord of Montmorency and passed into obscurity.

  Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis was a different sort of adversary, all the stronger for his disarming kindness. This frail little monk of humble origin, who was both an aesthete and a mystic, had been the friend and counsellor of Louis VI and continued to advise Louis VII. He showed unusual compassion for the poor and their sufferings at the hand of rapacious lords. His influence showed in the king’s behaviour: building a hunting lodge at Fontainebleau Louis appropriated a peasant’s field by mistake; when he learned the truth, h
e ordered the manor to be demolished and returned the field. Perhaps from Suger too came Louis’s tolerance of Jews. But the abbot was also a gifted statesman, anxious to extend Capetian territory and good government. He regarded Aquitaine as a heaven-sent acquisition and did his best to encourage good relations between the king and queen.

  Nevertheless Eleanor managed to take his place, sending Louis on expeditions that can hardly have had Suger’s entire blessing. When, in the year after their marriage, the bourgeoisie of Poitiers repudiated all feudal obligations to her and set up a corporation or ‘commune’, Louis and his knights at once stormed the presumptuous city; he then rounded up the sons and daughters of its leading citizens in the square outside the Maubergeon with the intention of taking them back to Paris as hostages. Their frantic parents sent a message to Suger, begging him to intervene. The abbot came as quickly as he could and, with some difficulty, persuaded the king to release the children. It has been plausibly suggested that this merciful act turned the queen against Suger; she did not like people meddling in affairs that directly concerned her. Louis was far from merciful when, shortly afterwards, he had to deal with certain of her vassals who, led by the lord of Lezay, refused to pay homage and stole some valuable gerfalcons from her hunting lodge at Talmont; he cut off their hands with his own sword. In 1141 the king led an expedition against Toulouse, claiming the county for his wife. He achieved nothing and was soon forced to retreat, but Eleanor, who was obviously delighted, gave him a magnificent present — a vase of crystal mounted in gold and set with rich jewels (which can be seen in the Louvre today).