Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (3 page)

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 Eleanor 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, he 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).

Nevertheless, Louis still retained his interest in ecclesiastical matters. In May 1140, in Sens cathedral (the cathedral church of the primate of France), the king — together with the papal legate and numerous bishops and clergy — presided over the disputation between St Bernard and Peter Abelard. Bernard, who liked to take his sacred texts literally, was infuriated by Abelard’s advocacy of examining the scriptures and the writings of the fathers in the light of reason and by his claim that, because logic and philosophy must inevitably be on the side of truth, a sceptical approach was a virtue. In horrified tones, the saint read to the assembly seventeen carefully chosen passages from Abelard’s writings that, out of context, sounded damning; the shocked assembly immediately condemned the author without allowing him to defend himself. Later, however, when Abelard went to Rome and appealed to the pope, he was at once absolved of any heresy. Bernard of Clairvaux was a ruthless enemy, as Eleanor was to discover to her cost.

Ironically, the next unfortunate incident in which Louis was involved began with a Church matter. He insisted on appointing his chancellor Cadurc as archbishop of Bourges, despite the fact that Pierre of Le Châtre had been canonically elected and had even received the
pallium
from the pope. The king refused to allow Pierre to enter Bourges, whereupon Innocent II placed France under an interdict; he also sent Louis a stern letter telling him to stop acting ‘like a silly schoolboy’. The king’s reaction was to take a solemn oath to keep Cadurc as archbishop. Meanwhile Pierre had taken refuge with count Thibault II of Champagne, with whom Louis was already in conflict.

Eleanor’s younger sister Petronilla had eloped with count Raoul of Vermandois, who was the king’s cousin and grand seneschal of France. Although Raoul was married and much older, the queen gave Petronilla her complete support. Raoul persuaded his brother the bishop of Noyon and two other prelates to annul his marriage on grounds of consanguinity and then married Petronilla with royal approval. Horrified, St Bernard protested to the pope, who excommunicated the bishop of Noyon and ordered Raoul to return to his first wife. No one took any notice.