Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (12 page)

The greatest authority on Eleanor of Aquitaine, Edmond René Labande, makes the point that Eleanor had better things to do than to murder Fair Rosamund; instead, she revenged herself by inciting Poitou to revolt. He also emphasizes that the revolt was the culmination of a skilfully conceived plan that took a long time to reach fruition. In fact one may argue that Eleanor had little, if any, interest in revenge, and had made up her mind to rebel from the day that she realised that Henry was not going to share his power with her. She had been brought up to be a great ruler, and Henry, like Louis, had deprived her of her destiny.

There is no evidence that Henry II ever suspected his queen of harbouring the slightest disloyalty towards him. One can only conclude that the king did not understand his wife and was incapable of appreciating that women too can be greedy for power. The person who should have disillusioned him, the empress Matilda, died in 1167. Her epitaph was ‘Here lies Henry’s daughter, wife and mother — great by birth, greater by marriage, but greatest by motherhood’. Even her example should have been enough to put Henry on his guard, though with hindsight it is plain that Eleanor was a consummate mistress of dissimulation.

No doubt because of his affair with Rosamund, the king was anxious that Eleanor should keep out of England. He had been having trouble with her vassals in Aquitaine and he decided that her residence among them might have a calming effect. Accordingly, early in 1168 he allowed her to establish herself in Poitou, in the Maubergeon. Five happy years would pass before she had to return to England. She was back exactly where she had been when Louis divorced her — save that Henry retained ultimate authority.

As in 1153 Eleanor’s journey to Poitiers was a dangerous one. The counts of Angoulême, La Marche and Lusignan and the latter’s brothers — two of whom would one day wear the crown of Jerusalem — were in revolt. Henry had stormed the castle of Lusignan and, before going north on another campaign, installed Eleanor in this perilous refuge. To protect her he left in Aquitaine Patrick, earl of Salisbury, a seasoned veteran of king Stephen’s wars. One day the queen and earl Patrick were out riding when they were suddenly ambushed by the Lusignans. The earl sent Eleanor safely back to the castle, but while preparing to attack he was treacherously stabbed in the back. His nephew William, an obscure young knight, thereupon charged the Lusignan party single-handed ‘like a famished lion’ and was badly wounded and taken prisoner. His captors refused to dress his wounds, and he remained seriously ill. The queen heard of his plight and ransomed him, rewarding him with money, armour, horses and rich clothes — a great stroke of luck for a poor young man. But Eleanor was always discerning in her patronage. William was to become Marshal of England, the greatest soldier of his day, and to save the throne for her grandson.

Eleanor finally re-installed herself in the Maubergeon, to begin one of the most agreeable periods of her life. At last she had regained some sort of freedom. During this time an enormous and very beautiful hall was added to the ducal palace. It still stands — now the Palais de Justice of Poitiers — as do several other buildings that she must have known well, such as the Romanesque church of Notre Dame la Grande with its exquisite facade. Poitiers itself, on its cliff and defended by massive ramparts, was a safe and splendid city. The queen’s court there was full of poets, including such troubadours as Gaucelm Faidit, Rigaut de Barbezieux, Bertran de Born and her old admirer Bernart de Ventadour, and men from the north such as Chrétien de Troyes. It has been suggested that Marie of France also came over from England to Poitiers. There were tournaments, plays and feasting, and those romantic song contests over which Eleanor herself presided, which were later described as courts of love.

Sometimes the queen’s place at these contests was taken by her eldest child, Marie of Champagne, who shared her mother’s tastes to a marked degree. Marie was an enthusiastic follower of the Arthurian cult and a considerable literary patroness in her own right; the troubadour Rigaut calls her ‘the gay and joyous countess’ and ‘the light of Champagne’. She encouraged Chrétien de Troyes to write his
Lancelot,
in which the great knight overcomes every danger to win queen Guinevere’s heart and submits to every humiliation with which she tests him.

The principal entertainment at the court of Poitiers was of course the
gai saber
(joyous art) of the troubadours. It is important to understand what this meant in terms of human relationships. The troubadour’s exaggerated devotion to a high-born lady beyond his reach — his ‘service of love’ — had a certain analogy to the vassal’s loyalty to his overlord. There were four stages in the troubadour’s ritual courtship: first, that of the
fegnedor
(aspirant); second, that of the
precador
(suppliant); third, that of the
entendedor
(acknowledged suitor); and fourth, that of the
drut
(recognized lover). When he achieved the last stage, the troubadour sealed his fidelity by an oath and the lady her acceptance by a kiss. He then wrote songs about his beloved, whose identity was kept secret by a pseudonym, singing that she was so perfect that her beauty lit up the night, healed the sick, made the sad happy, and turned louts into courtiers. He complained how separation from her meant death and how his love for her had totally transformed him, and he threatened that if she would not love him in return he could not eat or sleep, but would soon die from misery. In theory the relationship was purely platonic.

The ‘courts of love’ were the troubadour’s real audience, apart from his lady herself. They were essentially a court game whose most obvious expression was the
tenso,
a two-part song. In this, one troubadour would sing a stanza about a problem that his love had encountered, whereupon another troubadour would sing a second stanza giving his opinion, after which the performance would be repeated. Usually, neither could decide and they would then agree to submit to the judgment of some great lady.

Nineteenth-century literary historians were misled by the phrase ‘courts of love’, and mistakenly imagined them as some sort of feudal tribunal. Their error is understandable, however, since so little evidence survives. One of the only sources is the far from reliable André le Chapelain, who wrote in the thirteenth century, when the age of troubadours and courts of love was long over. Another, even further removed, is the sixteenth-century writer Nostradamus (brother of the famous astrologer), who pretended to derive his information from a manuscript composed by a fictitious ‘monk from the isles of gold’. But Nostradamus had access to many genuine Provençal manuscripts that have since perished. Moreover, if distorted, much of what André le Chapelain has to say in his strange treatise on love is obviously fairly near the truth. He claims to describe the formal code for the troubadours’ love affairs, professedly derived from that of king Arthur’s knights. Based on Ovid and even more openly erotic, it stands the Roman poet on his head: instead of the knight being the seducer, he is the lady’s slave; and far from a woman being male property, a man becomes female property. André mentions some of the judgments given in the courts of love — against a lady who had set her lover too stern a task, and that it is doubtful whether love in its truest sense can exist between husband and wife. Beyond question his treatise does preserve something of the curious and esoteric atmosphere of the court of Eleanor and her daughter.

Eleanor herself was still the lady of many troubadours. Helen Waddell quotes what ‘is surely the work of a German student, haunted by a passing glimpse of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and perhaps as surely her slave as Bertran de Born’. He sings:

Were the world all mine

From the sea to the Rhine,

I’d give it all

If so be the queen of England

Lay in my arms.

However genuine, this naïve
minnesinger
can scarcely have been so impressive a conquest as Bertran de Born, who was still in his twenties in the 1160s. When not a gentle, sighing troubadour strumming on his lute, Bertran was a bloodthirsty robber-baron who drove his own brother out of the family castle of Altafort in the Dordogne. He was only happy when making verses or war. Later he became the bosom friend of the queen’s eldest son Henry, and was credited by some with leading him into rebellion. Indeed Dante placed him in hell for doing so:

Sappi ch’io son Bertram dal Bornio quelli

Che diedi al re giovane mai conforti.

Io feci il padre e il figlio in sè ribelli.

(Bertram dal Bornio, be it known, am I

Who urged the young king to rebel.

Father and son at enmity I set.)

It may have been a fond memory of his adoration for Eleanor that caused Bertran to revolt.

The courtiers of queen Eleanor’s unreal world at Poitiers dressed fantastically, as was fitting. ‘They have clothes of rich and rare materials, in colours chosen to match their moods’, the contemporary chronicler Geoffrey of Vigé tells us, ‘they flaunt slashed cloaks and flowing sleeves like hermits. Young men grow their hair long and wear shoes with pointed toes’. Geoffrey also adds that one might mistake the ladies for snakes, because of the enormously long trains that they drag after them. Moreover a precursor of the Rue de la Paix clearly existed in Eleanor’s Poitiers. Among suitable presents to give to a lady, André le Chapelain lists fine handkerchiefs, circlets of gold or silver, brooches, small looking glasses, purses, girdles, combs, sleeves, gloves, rings, caskets, and almost anything else that might be of use for her toilet or on her dressing table.

Marie of Champagne was not the only great lady to support Eleanor at the court of Poitiers. There was also the queen’s other daughter by Louis VII, Alice of Blois, together with her niece (the countess of Flanders) and Ermengarde, viscountess of Narbonne. It was indeed a most regal court, and suitably it was visited by kings. In June 1172 Eleanor received both Alfonso II of Aragon and Sancho VI of Navarre — though for this she took her courtiers to Limoges.

From time to time the queen saw her husband. She kept Christmas with Henry at Bures near Bayeux in 1170 and at Chinon in Touraine in 1172. He still insisted on retaining ultimate control of Aquitaine. He is known to have visited the duchy in 1170 and again early in 1173, governing personally and dispensing justice as though he were the duke. One can only guess at Eleanor’s fury: not even in her own land did she enjoy real power. But the king does not seem to have noticed any resentment on her part, or else he simply ignored it. It is more than probable that his wife concealed her anger. For, secretly, she was suborning the lords of Aquitaine and Poitou, making sure that their first loyalty was to their duchess and not to the king of England.

9 Eleanor’s Sons

‘From the Devil they came and to the Devil they will go.’

St Bernard

‘She is cunning past man’s thought.’

Shakespeare,
Antony and Cleopatra

In January 1169, Henry II and Louis VII met at Montmirail in Maine to negotiate (it was hoped) a lasting peace settlement. For two years both kings had been engaged in a futile war that, while being both expensive and destructive, had gained no advantage for either. Among other matters an attempt was made to reconcile Henry with Thomas Becket, but both king and archbishop were incapable of compromise. The principal business, however, was to secure Louis’s agreement to Henry’s plans for a dynastic settlement that would divide the Angevin empire among his sons and enable him to ensure the local barons’ recognition of their right to succeed. The settlement would also help the English king to subdue rebellious vassals who, in almost every part of his French domains, had recently been so troublesome. Louis agreed readily, only too pleased to guarantee the future division of his overmighty neighbour’s empire. Eleanor, of course, was not consulted. But she must have seen in Montmirail her opportunity to overthrow her husband and to regain complete independence.

The eldest surviving Plantagenet son, Henry, was to have England, Normandy, Maine and Anjou — his father’s own inheritance — together with the overlordship of Brittany. To ensure his undisputed succession, the Capetian custom was adopted of crowning the fifteen-year-old boy king in his father’s lifetime. The coronation took place on 24 May 1170 in Westminster Abbey and was performed by the archbishop of York (Thomas Becket having refused an invitation to return to England to do so). No pomp was lacking, the crown made by the London goldsmith William Cade costing £38 6s 0d — an enormous sum for the period. His wife Margaret — Louis’s daughter — was not crowned with him, a strange and insulting omission. At the coronation banquet the old king, as he was henceforth to be known, waited on the young king. The archbishop of York commented unctuously that no prince in all the world was waited on by a king. The youth replied, ‘It is not unfitting that the son of a mere count should wait on the son of a king’. The retort tells us a good deal about the young king, who was both conceited and ungrateful. From now on he had his own household, and contemporary writers refer to him as ‘Henry III’, an eloquent testimony as to how seriously they took his kingship. It is said that Eleanor was delighted by her son’s elevation. There was, it is clear, considerable affection between her and the young king, who sometimes visited Poitiers with his wife. No doubt the queen was already working to make him her ally against the old king.