by Lisa Hilton
Eleanor’s divorce meant that in principle, Aquitaine would now be released from French overlordship. After her marriage to Henry, the recovery of her beloved duchy was Eleanor’s first priority. Her first independent charter as Duchess after her marriage is a reconfirmation of the rights of the abbey of St Jean Montierneuf in Poitiers, dated 26 May 1152. This was a standard act for any new lord coming into his lands, and Eleanor used it as a gesture to emphasise that she had regained sole control, stressing that her benefactions to the house followed in the tradition of her great-grandfather, grandfather and father. The next day, she revoked a grant of the forest of La Sèvre to the abbey of Saint-Maixent, which she had co-signed with Louis in 1146, then regranted it in her own right. These two acts are largely symbolic, indicating Eleanor’s determination to govern her inheritance herself, but if she hoped to enjoy a degree of autonomy in Aquitaine with her new husband, that hope was short-lived. Louis, concerned for the rights of Marie and Alix, refused initially to relinquish his claim on Aquitaine and continued to use his ducal title until 1154, even though Henry assumed it in 1153. Eleanor continued to be a figure of power in the duchy, but by 1156, at which point Henry had settled his dispute with Louis and sworn fealty to him for his Continental possessions, Eleanor’s position of independence had been eroded between the contending demands of both of the men who claimed the right to act on her behalf. At their Christmas court at Bordeaux, Henry accepted homage from Eleanor’s Aquitainian vassals, and for the period 1157—67, she is not mentioned in any of the duchy’s charters.
It was the same story in England. After the death of Eustace of Blois in August 1153 and the signing of the treaty of Winchester in November, Henry was finally poised to achieve his mother’s thwarted ambition and inherit the English crown. In 1154 he and Eleanor travelled to Normandy to wait for news from England. On 25 October King Stephen died, and the new King set sail from Barfleur on 7 December. Eleanor was crowned at his side on 19 December at Westminster. After that, until 1168, she appears in the sources as little more than an ornament. Her reputation as a great queen stems from her later activities in Aquitaine and in the government of her sons. By contrast, the period she spent by her husband’s side as queen of England is one of virtual invisibility. True, she did act as regent of the kingdom in Henry’s absence until 1163, issuing writs and documents and presiding over at least one court at Westminster, as well as in Normandy, but in comparison with her predecessors Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Boulogne, who ‘exercised all the prerogatives of sovereignty’,20 evidence of Eleanor governing and managing her household and lands is scant. Her role was ceremonial and, in these years, reproductive: ‘Summer and winter, crossing and recrossing the Channel, almost always expecting another child; here she is, severely reduced to the strictest obligations of a feudal queen: other than the duty to produce numerous offspring for her husband, she must be present everywhere, at every moment, showing herself to the vassals at the plenary courts of Christmas or Easter, riding, sailing, riding again.’21 This picture of Eleanor in the first phase of her English queenship highlights its two dominant demands: travel and childbirth. Eleanor and Henry had eight children between 1153 and 1166. William, their first son, died aged three in 1156, but Henry, Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Leonor, Joanna and John all survived to marry.
After William’s death, Henry II focused his aspirations on his second son, known as the ‘Young King’ to distinguish him from his father. Young Henry underwent two coronation ceremonies in his father’s lifetime, the French-style confirmations of inheritance that Matilda of Boulogne had failed to obtain for her son Eustace. In 1159, Henry married two-year-old Marguerite of France, King Louis’s daughter by Eleanor’s replacement, Constance of Castile. Despite a stipulation in the 1158 betrothal agreement that Marguerite would not be brought up by Eleanor of Aquitaine, the little girl entered Eleanor’s household after her marriage. After Constance died giving birth to another daughter, Alys, who was betrothed to Eleanor’s son Richard, Louis took a third wife, Adela of Blois. In 1165 she presented him with his yearned-for son, Philip Augustus. Like her sister, the Young Queen, Alys came to live with her new family. The previous year, Eleanor’s daughters by Louis, Marie and Alix, had been married to two brothers, Henry and Theobald of Champagne, and though Eleanor had no part in these arrangements, she convened a council with the archbishop of Cologne at Westminster in 1165 to confirm the marriage of her daughter Matilda to Henry of Saxony. The next year mother and daughter travelled together to Dover, where Matilda embarked for her new life in Germany, and around the same time her brother Geoffrey was betrothed to Constance, the heiress to Brittany. Eleanor’s involvement in her husband’s marital strategies for their offspring, as well as the birth of her last child, John, in 1166, suggests that relations between them were at least functional at this juncture, but romance was about to distort her reputation once again.
In 1165, Henry II fell in love with Rosamund de Clifford, the daughter of a minor Norman knight. Their affair lasted a decade, and although Henry was only in England for three years or so during this period, it provided ample and enduring raw material for the weavers of Eleanor legend. From September 1165 to March 1166, the King stayed mainly at Woodstock, uncharacteristically for such an habitually peripatetic man, and failed to keep Christmas with his wife. He later built a garden at Everswell, near the royal palace, featuring ponds and bowers. The chroniclers were off. The besotted King had reputedly constructed a fantastic maze of ‘Daedalus work’ for his beloved (a description that appears for the first time in Higden’s fourteenth-century Polychronicon) and the neglected Queen was murderously enraged. The rivalry between the two women was immortalised in stories and songs such as ‘The Ballad of Fair Rosamond’, though very little indeed is known of the real Rosamund and there is no evidence that the fantastic maze was ever built or that the Everswell garden had anything to do with her. In appropriately melodramatic style, Eleanor is supposed to have poisoned her rival, a tale that has received an unreasonable degree of attention given that Rosamund lived until 1176, by which time Eleanor had been in prison for three years.
The Rosamund episode has been used as an explanation for the fact that, by 1168, Henry and Eleanor had effectively separated but, once again, there was a simple, practical rationale behind an apparently emotional act. Eleanor’s childbearing years were now over and it made perfect sense for her to relocate to Aquitaine to manage her perennially unruly vassals, leaving Henry with greater freedom to concentrate on his other lands. Eleanor may well have welcomed the chance of autonomy, not to mention a more gracious mode of living than that experienced by Henry’s entourage, whose accommodation more often resembled a campsite than a court, but their marriage had always been based on business, and it was business that provided the primary reason for Eleanor’s removal from England. That the Plantagenets were a spectacularly unhappy family would be proved time and time again on the battlefield in years to come, but Eleanor’s presence in Aquitaine in 1168 was part of the loose administrative strategy through which Henry tried to govern his geographically and culturally disparate dominions. His territories — England, Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, which extended from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees — were collectively known as the Angevin empire, though they were never subject to imperial-style government. None of the Angevin kings called himself an emperor, all preferring to style themselves ‘King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Count of Anjou’, and while Henry did introduce similar administrative structures to this ‘odd conglomeration of diverse powers’,22 he himself seems to have thought of, and intended to pass on, his lands as federated regional states rather than a single, centrally governed bloc. Royal authority varied greatly between the tightly controlled Anglo-Norman realm and the disparate, fluid and often mercurial loyalties of the south. Henry’s decision that Eleanor should return to Aquitaine was an attempt to increase his hold on those southern aristocrats who were inclined to disregard thei
r overlord when he was not facing them with an army; in short ‘to calm and contain the Aquitainians, Henry gave them back their duchess’.23
In December 1168, then, Eleanor held her first independent Christmas court at Poitiers. This marked the beginning of the productive period during which she operated as governor of Aquitaine. Based at Poitiers, where she had refurbished the Maubergeonne Tower, the former lodgings of her grandfather’s mistress Dangerosa, and surrounded by Poitevin, rather than Anglo-Norman counsellors, Eleanor was free to involve herself in the day-to-day management of her lands as she had never previously been able to do. Initially she was very much Henry’s regent, but after the investiture of her son Richard as Duke of Aquitaine in 1170 she associated two thirds of her known acts with him. Assisted by her sensechal, Raoul de Faye, and her two clerks, Jordan and Peter, Eleanor busied herself with granting and confirming donations to religious houses, directing taxes, tolls and rights over customs and commodities such as wheat, salt and wine and confirming the loyalty of her lords by receiving their homage at Niort, Limoges and Bayonne.
Eleanor was also able to cement what was to become a sixty-years patronage of the abbey of Fontevrault, which she had first visited in 1152. The house, whose links with the dukes of Aquitaine dated back to the time of William IX, was notable for accommodating men and women, with the monks providing the manual labour and the nuns fulfilling a contemplative role, as specified by its founder, Robert d’Arbrissel. Both orders were governed by an abbess who, it was stipulated, must be a widow rather than a virgin who had never known the world. Henry, too, had ancestral ties with Fontevrault: the couple had founded Fontevrauldine cells in England, at Eaton, Westwood and Amesbury. In 1170 Eleanor granted lands, timber and firewood to the abbey and she went on to build the huge octagonal kitchen, with its five fireplaces, that may still be seen there today. Positioned where Eleanor’s natal territories bordered Henry’s, Fontevrault was to become both power base and retreat for her in later years, as well as — at Eleanor’s designation, it has been convincingly argued24 — the great dynastic memorial to the Angevin line.
At first, Eleanor in Aquitaine continued her policy of support of and cooperation with her husband. In 1169, Henry the Young King and Richard met Louis VII at Montmirail and agreed upon a treaty which would give Normandy, Anjou and England to the Young King, Brittany to Geoffrey, in right of his betrothal to Constance, and Aquitaine to Richard, the latter two grants to be held in vassalage to Louis. It was also confirmed that Richard would marry Alys, the sister of the Young King’s wife and Louis’s second daughter by Constance of Castile. Richard was invested as Duke in 1170, a very satisfying development for Eleanor, who used the occasion to demonstrate her own power and augment it by her association with the future duke. At the cathedral of St Hilaire on 31 May, Eleanor wore the coronet of Aquitaine over a silk mantle and a scarlet cloak embroidered with the three leopards of Anjou. In her hand was the sceptre she had carried at her coronation as queen of England. The coronet was placed briefly on Richard’s head, then substituted with a plainer silver circlet: Eleanor was making it clear that she was still in control. Richard was by her side at her Christmas court of 1171, and the next year they received King Alfonso of Aragon and King Sancho VI of Navarre on a diplomatic visit to discuss the county of Toulouse and the conditions of the Gascon-Pyrenean borders. Significantly, in three acts issued at Poitiers in 1172, Eleanor alters her previous form of address ‘to the king’s faithful followers and hers’ — fidelibus regis et suis — to ‘her faithful followers’ fidelibus suis. In theory, her power in the duchy still devolved from Henry, and she was certainly limited geographically to a relatively small area around Poitiers, and economically by the fact that Aquitaine had no chancery of its own, but it does appear that during this period Eleanor was dissociating herself from Henry and reasserting her status as duchess in a manner whose significance would be revealed when the Angevin empire erupted in revolt the following year.
On the evening of 5 March 1173, the Young King crept out of the bedroom he was sharing with his father at Chin on and rode for Paris. From the Norman border, Henry II sent an envoy of bishops to ask Louis of France to return his son. ‘Who is it that sends this message to me?’ asked Louis, feigning bewilderment.
‘The King of England,’ they replied.
‘Not so,’ answered Louis. ‘The King of England is here.’
It was a declaration of war. For years, Henry and Eleanor’s beautiful son and heir had been chafing against what he saw as the unreasonable constraints placed upon him by his father. He might have been crowned twice, but all he had to live on were promises. Even his younger brother Richard had more power than he, while his father had cavalierly granted away his promised castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau as part of a planned marriage settlement for John without even asking his permission. Spoiled, lazy and greedy, the Young King refused to understand the exigencies under which his father was operating, and, encouraged by an opportunistic Louis, he was determined to fight for his rights. He was supported not only by the treachery of his brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, but by Eleanor, who chose to ally herself with her ex-husband against the father of her sons.
What were Eleanor’s motivations for this extraordinary step? Some writers have claimed that the assassination in 1170 of the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas á Becket, provoked her beyond endurance, but this has been dismissed by others as a ‘post-hoc contrivance’.25 Eleanor had actively supported Henry in his struggle against Becket, with whom she had had a distant personal relationship, and though she would have been as shocked as any conventionally pious person by his murder, she was nothing if not a pragmatist. Becket was set for sainthood, but she could make little political use of that. Another theory is that Eleanor wanted to assert herself against Henry as a consequence of the frustrations of her marriage, in particular her resentment at being overshadowed by his mother, Empress Matilda. Again, this is implausible, because Eleanor had been living independently since 1168, a year after Matilda’s death. These factors could well have informed her attitude to Henry, but why would she have waited five years to extract her ‘revenge’? A popular charge is that Eleanor was so jealous of Rosamund de Clifford that she raised Poitou for spite, which is as absurdly melodramatic as suggesting that she murdered Henry’s mistress. A likelier explanation is more prosaic: power. Eleanor loved Aquitaine and she wanted to ensure that it would pass intact to Richard. Her elder sons were respectively fourteen, fifteen and twenty, still young and in need of guidance. If Henry were to be defeated, Aquitaine, freed from his interference, would be much more governable, and Eleanor would have a considerably wider stage on which to exercise her control.
How far was Eleanor directly involved in the rebellion? William of Newburgh, Ralph Diceto and Roger of Howden all agree that she advised Richard and Geoffrey to ally themselves with the Young King and sent them to Paris to join him. Richard FitzNigel, too, asserts that Eleanor used her influence on the younger boys. A letter written to Eleanor by the archbishop of Rouen on Henry’s instructions confirms that the English king believed his wife was responsible for turning his sons against him — ‘the fact that you should have made the fruits of your union with our Lord King rise up against their father …’ — and acknowledges her capacity to sway them: ‘Before events carry us to a dreadful conclusion, return with your sons to the husband whom you must obey and with whom it is your duty to live … Bid your sons, we beg you, to be obedient and devoted to their father.’
Eleanor was threatened with the full anger of the Church if she did not obey, but she paid no mind to the archbishop. She was determined to see the struggle through. She was not, however, acting alone. Although Gervase of Canterbury presents the whole rebellion as being planned and carried out by Eleanor, Louis and it was claimed, Eleanor’s seneschal, Raoul de Faye, were also deeply involved. What Eleanor did was to skilfully manipulate a varied set of regional grievances against Henry into a concentrated movement, using the ambition
s of the French King and the ever-turbulent lords of the south to bolster the strength of her sons. This was not revenge, but an exceptionally cold-blooded political gamble. Eleanor’s readiness to make use of Louis, and to be of use to him, suggests that she did not permit emotion to play much of a part in her strategies. She could put aside whatever feelings she still had for Henry after twenty years together if disloyalty would get her what she wanted. The scandalous events of Eleanor’s life have often led to her being depicted as a creature of emotion rather than reason, a portrayal that emphasises her ‘feminine’ willingness to allow her heart to rule her head. Nowhere is this more untrue than in her promotion of the 1173 rebellion. Eleanor was not jealous, or peeved, or frustrated: she was ruthless.