Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen

by Seward, Desmond

  Henry and Eleanor then went on progress through her domains. The inhabitants were quickly taught that their new master was a very different man from Louis VII. At Limoges, when the monks of the abbey of Saint-Martial refused feudal dues by a legal quibble, he promptly demolished the walls that had only recently been built to protect both abbey and town. No rebelliousness is recorded elsewhere in Aquitaine at this time.

  In January 1153 duke Henry sailed for England, landing in Dorset and making for Bristol, which had always remained loyal to Matilda’s cause and from where her party controlled a large area of the south-west, extending as far east as Wallingford on the river Thames. He was soon joined by Robert earl of Leicester and later earl Ferrers came over to him with other former supporters of king Stephen — many English lords had lands in Normandy. In July he relieved the heroically loyal town of Wallingford, while another group of his supporters under Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk, also waged an effective campaign. Stephen, brave but incompetent, fought on in the hope that he might be able to bequeath his crown to his eldest son Eustace; he still controlled most of England, and Eustace was ruthless and determined. But in the middle of August, count Eustace choked on an eel during dinner at Bury St Edmunds, where he had been plundering the abbey lands. Stephen was heartbroken. Abandoning the claims of another son, at Christmas at Westminster he formally recognized the duke of Normandy as his heir, and in January 1154 at Oxford he made his barons do homage to Henry as their future king.

  While her husband was away in England, Eleanor’s principal residence appears to have been Angers, the capital of Anjou. It was — and still is — a most agreeable town on a beautiful site overlooking the river Loire, with fine buildings that included a strong palace-citadel. There were abbeys both inside and outside its walls and even schools of learning as at Orleans and Chartres. The local white wines were already famous.

  On 17 August 1153 she gave birth to her first son, who was named William after her father and grandfather. Meanwhile Eleanor was able to amuse herself in a way that had all too often led to trouble when she was married to Louis. No doubt remembering Marcabru, the duchess gave shelter to an even more famous troubadour, Bernart de Ventadour. Despite his lordly name he was not a nobleman; his mother had been a kitchen servant of the family of Ventadour in the Limousin. There was a tradition of gai saber in this family and the lords of Ventadour encouraged Bernart to cultivate his remarkable poetic talent. As so often, the young man’s verses to the lady Alaiz, wife of Eble II of Ventadour, were a little too warm; the affair ended with Alaiz being imprisoned and then cast off, and Bernart himself had to flee for his life. He quickly found a congenial refuge with Eleanor, probably about the time Henry was fighting king Stephen, and soon developed an extravagant passion for her that he made known in some of his most admired songs. A thirteenth-century biographer says that ‘he was a long time at her court and he fell in love with her and she fell in love with him’. Later Bernart described himself as being ‘like a man beyond hope’, sighing ‘in such a state of love I was, though I would come to realize that I had been a madman’, that his wits fled whenever he saw the duchess, and he had ‘no more sense than a child, so overcome by love was I’. He told Eleanor — whom he addressed as ‘my magnet’ [mos aziman] — ‘You have been the first among my joys and you shall be the last, so long as there is life in me.’ In Provencal his songs have a liquid beauty that must have enchanted the duchess and her court.

  According to a somewhat dubious tradition, Henry then summoned Bernart to England. A hundred years afterwards the biographer Uc de Saint-Circ explained that the duke, understandably uneasy at the poet’s outpourings, took this means of removing him from his wife’s court. Bernart did not enjoy England and wished he was a swallow who could fly back to Eleanor ‘across the wild, deep sea’. He managed to return, but Eleanor herself was soon to go to England. In the end Bernart found a new patroness to worship — Ermengarde, viscountess of Narbonne — and finally died a monk.

  There is no information about the relationship between Eleanor and Bernart other than his verses and some later and highly inaccurate chronicles, but her patronage shows impeccable literary taste. Bernart de Ventadour is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest troubadours. It is revealing that in one of his poems he compares his love for Eleanor with that of Tristan for Izeut la blonda, showing that the duchess and her court were already familiar with the Arthurian cycle at this early date.

  Duke Henry returned from England in April 1154. He and Eleanor then went to Rouen, where for the first time she met her mother-in-law Matilda, the daughter of Henry I of England and grand-daughter of the Conqueror, and the widowed empress of Germany who had nearly become queen of England in her own right. For all her ability and her bravery, however, the arrogance of ‘the lady of the English’ had tipped the scales against her in a ferocious war of succession. Even so she had sometimes shown herself magnificently resourceful. Trapped in Oxford during the winter of 1142, Matilda had herself lowered down from the castle walls and then with only three knights, dressed all in white like herself, had crossed the frozen river beneath and calmly walked unseen through Stephen’s camp to safety. Now she had passed all her claims to Henry, contenting herself with giving advice and helping him to govern Normandy. This splendid virago seems to have mellowed with age, and there is no record of any clash with her daughter-in-law. No doubt she recognized her as a woman of the same mettle as herself.

  At last, on 25 October 1154, king Stephen died, and the news reached Rouen early in November. Terrible weather kept Henry from his kingdom for another month. Finally, despite the contrary winds, he set sail with Eleanor from Barfleur in a fever of angry impatience. The voyage must have been as miserable as those she had known on the crusade, and the ship lost contact with the fleet in a dense fog. But after twenty-four hours of storm-tossed peril she and her husband were blown on shore near Southampton.

  6 Queen of England

  ‘She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed.’

  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

  ‘A very clever woman, most noble of blood, but fickle.’

  Gervase of Canterbury

  Henry and Eleanor were crowned ‘king and queen of the English’ by the archbishop of Canterbury on 19 December 1154. So unanimous was the acclaim that archbishop Theobald had had no difficulty in governing the kingdom during the six weeks between Stephen’s death and Henry’s arrival. It was probably at the coronation that Henry received his name of ‘curtmantle’, on account of his waist-length French cloak, which made an odd contrast with the old-fashioned voluminous garments of the English magnates. As was customary, the new king issued a coronation charter, but it was not the usual list of concessions designed to please the great. Instead Henry II promised to restore lands and laws to what they had been at the death of his grandfather Henry I in 1135.

  Presumably Eleanor was intrigued by her new country. Although she knew the Balkans, the middle east and Italy, and had experienced extremes of hot and cold weather, the damp English climate with its rain and fogs must have been an unpleasant surprise, even if summers were warmer then than they usually are today. An enthusiastic Englishman, William FitzStephen, writing only twenty years later, has left an attractive picture of the London of Henry II:

  On the east stands the Tower, exceeding great and strong, whose walls and bailey rise from very deep foundations, their mortar being mixed with the blood of beasts. On the west are two strongly fortified castles, while from them there runs a great continuous wall, very high, with seven double gates, and towers at intervals along its north side. On the south, London once had similar walls and towers; but the Thames, that mighty river teeming with fish, which runs on that side and ebbs and flows with the sea, has in the passage of time washed those bulwarks away, undermining them and bringing them down. Upstream, to the west, the royal palace rises high above the river, an incomparable building ringed by an outwork and bastions two miles from the city and joined to it by a
populous suburb.

  There were thirteen greater churches and 126 smaller ones.

  Apparently London’s outskirts were equally agreeable:

  On all sides, beyond the houses, lie the gardens of the citizens that live in the suburbs, planted with trees, spacious and fair, laid out beside each other … To the north are pasture lands and pleasant open spaces of level meadow, intersected by running waters, which turn mill wheels with a cheerful sound. Nearby lies a great forest with wooded glades full of lairs of wild beasts, red and fallow deer, boars and bulls.

  The corn-fields produced abundant crops, and William rhapsodizes about the variety of food — ‘dishes roast, fried and boiled, fish of every size, coarse meat for the poor and delicate for the rich, such as venison and various kinds of birds’ — to be found every day in ‘a public cook-shop’ near the river. He speaks of scholars’ competitions, tournaments in boats on the river, and many other amusements.

  But one suspects that William FitzStephen was the eternally self-satisfied Londoner, blind to any of his city’s imperfections. In reality Eleanor’s London was probably dismal enough when compared to contemporary Paris or Bordeaux, but it was her husband’s capital and she made the best of it. An abundance of imported goods must have done much to soften its discomforts. And many Londoners could make themselves understood in their peculiar Anglo-Norman dialect of French. (A modern comparison might perhaps be the difference between Australian and English.) It was a long time since Norman courtiers had sneeringly named Henry I and his English queen ‘Godric and Godgifu’ because of their partiality for Saxons. The two peoples had intermarried so that nowadays language was a matter of status rather than race. Every upper- and middle-class Englishman spoke French, which was the language of commerce as well as of the court and the castle.

  King Henry had little time to ponder on the differences between the ways of life in his widespread domains. The ‘nineteen years-long winter’ of his predecessor’s reign had left much of England in miserable disorder. The monks of Peterborough (who had stubbornly continued to keep their chronicle in Anglo-Saxon) give an appalling picture of conditions in the fenlands, terrorized by robber barons in impregnable castles.

  When the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men. Then, day and night, they took people they thought had any goods — men and women — and imprisoned them, torturing them with indescribable tortures to extort gold and silver; no martyrs were ever so cruelly tortured. They were hung up by the thumbs or by the head, with weights tied to their feet. Knotted ropes were fastened round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brain. They put them in prisons where there were adders and toads and killed them that way too.

  The monks tell of boxes in which men were crushed with stones until their ribs, legs and arms were broken, of massive chains locked around a man’s neck and throat so that he could neither lie nor sit and was unable to sleep. The poor suffered no less than the rich, their oppressors killing ‘many thousands’ by starvation. Further, ‘when the wretched folk had no more to give, they robbed and burned all the villages, so that you could easily go a whole day’s journey and never find anyone occupying a village or cultivated land. Corn was dear, and meat and butter and cheese, because there was no one in the country. Many unhappy people died of starvation; some lived by begging, who had once been rich men; others fled the country.’ In the west, in the north, in many midland shires, in the Thames valley and in Kent it was as bad. Indeed, when Eleanor first came to England she found a miserable land, ‘where men said that Christ and his saints slept’.

  Many robber barons remained undisturbed in castles they had built unlawfully — simple, easily erected affairs of earth mounds, ditches and stockades — continuing to terrorize entire districts. In the fortnight after his coronation Henry issued a whole series of orders to deal with the problem. Illegal castles must be demolished and mercenaries must leave. Any royal lands given away by king Stephen or seized by the barons were to be restored to Henry. He is said to have pulled down over a thousand castles, and within three months nearly every mercenary had left England. William of Newburgh (the greatest of the twelfth century historians of England) says that these men were so terrified, and slipped away in so short a time, ‘that they seemed to have vanished like phantoms’. All were cowed by this formidable ruler who inexorably increased his iron grip over the entire country, travelling its length and breadth, deciding law suits and punishing criminals, and reinstating men in manors of which they had been wrongfully dispossessed. In a few months he brought back the peace and order of his grandfather’s day, becoming a byword for swift justice.

  This was only the beginning of Henry’s programme of more efficient government. He improved the existing machinery, and then created new institutions. There was a comprehensive investigation of royal dues and a methodical examination of revenue; tax collection was made more thorough and new taxes imposed, Exchequer officials receiving every encouragement. A new and purer silver coinage was issued. The administration of the common law was drastically reformed by the introduction of the assize system and the rise of local juries; judges travelled regularly through the shires, dispensing justice at set times of the year. The king also hoped to harmonize ecclesiastical and secular courts, so that the latter could deal with crimes committed by clerics. He strengthened his rule over every area of his domains, centralizing the administration at Westminster and Rouen.

  Nonetheless Henry’s own presence was the surest guarantee of good conduct. He was constantly in the saddle, a royal judge perpetually at assize, interviewing sheriffs and checking tax receipts. Walter Map wrote feelingly: ‘Solomon says “There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air: the way of a serpent on a rock: the way of a ship in the midst of the sea: and the way of a man with a maid”. I can add a fifth: the way of a king of England.’ Peter of Blois complains how Henry was always leaving early or changing his mind so that the vast royal retinue was thrown into complete disorder — ‘a lively imitation of hell’. Courtiers and officials accompanying him often found when they reached their destination that there was accommodation for the king alone, and would draw their swords to fight for a hovel ‘which pigs disdain’. One night, he rode over the Welsh mountains in drenching rain for sixteen hours. Peter says that sometimes the king covered in a day five times the distance a normal man thought feasible: he probably averaged as much as forty miles.

  The Plantagenet tombs at Fontevrault. Archives Photographiques, Paris.

  Eleanor’s youngest son, king John: from the effigy in Worcester Cathedral. A. S. Kersting.

  Eleanor had to accompany her husband along terrible roads that at best were the remains of those left by the Romans, at worst little tracks that became quagmires in winter or wet weather. No doubt she rode on horseback when she could, but if pregnant (which she frequently was) she must have had to endure travelling in clumsy, leather-roofed waggons with springless wooden wheels. It may have been some consolation that comforts were at hand in the wains that jolted after her: furniture, bedding, plate, table linen, hangings and curtains, even portable chapels, to make tolerable gaunt stone keeps or rough wooden halls.

  In spite of all the discomfort, with such an active mind herself the queen must have admired her new partner’s energy and originality, his decisiveness and stream of fresh ideas. No man could have been more different from Louis VII. Eleanor frequently dispensed justice in Henry’s absence, arbitrating in disputes over land and feudal dues, and presiding over law courts. She also kept a careful watch on certain tax receipts. Throughout, she showed herself clear-headed and firm, indeed dictatorial.

  In the later stages of her pregnancies and at great feasts, however, and no doubt too sometimes at her own whim, Eleanor stayed in Henry’s palaces, which were probably far from uncomfortable — at least for the queen and her ladies. The most important were Westminster, Clarendon and Woodstock. Westminster was an admini
strative complex and the centre of royal government, with its law court and Exchequer. It had become so derelict as to be uninhabitable, but the king had it rebuilt in 1155. It was spacious enough, possessing two great halls and a range of private apartments. Clarendon was no less impressive, with a magnificent hall and an unusually capacious wine cellar. (Its overgrown and incompletely excavated site near Salisbury is one of the most inexplicably neglected of English historical monuments.) But despite such splendours as marble pillars, these sumptuous buildings were still in many ways barbarous, with rushes on the floor, and a fireplace whose smoke had to find its way out through a louvre, and lit at night by flaring torches or guttering rushlights.

  Probably only the queen’s bowers were proof against draughts, panelled, with tiled floors and glass windows, and furnished with silk hangings and oriental carpets. She is known to have bought cushions and tapestry when in England, and from the Pipe Rolls it seems that her apartments were lit by sweet-scented oil and perfumed with incense. She possessed gold and silver plate, brassware and table linen. According to Peter of Blois the royal household had to make do with ‘half-baked bread, sour wine, stale fish and bad meat’, but this can hardly have been the fate of Eleanor’s ladies, as she imported quantities of her native wine from La Rochelle and her cooks made lavish use of pepper and cinnamon. Nevertheless she doubtless presided with easy aplomb over banquets in the draughty, smoky great halls.