Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (8 page)

Politically, Henry had taken a calculated risk in marrying Eleanor. The effort needed to keep Aquitaine and its aggressive baronage under control might well prove so exhausting as to hamper him in winning England. On the other hand, if she had taken someone else for her husband he would have been a constant threat to Anjou, which was separated from Poitou only by the river Loire. And Henry was never frightened of taking risks.

Louis was horrified by the news. No doubt he had expected any prospective suitor of his former queen to ask his permission before marrying her. After all, Eleanor was his ward and Henry was his vassal, so they were legally bound to seek his leave. It was just the sort of callow misjudgment that Louis would make. Plainly he and his advisers were horrified by the tidings, realizing that they had made a terrible political blunder. Some of the outrage felt by the French court is echoed by the malicious lie recorded by a chronicler that Henry’s father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, had been Eleanor’s lover and for this reason had forbidden his son to marry her. At one stroke all abbot Suger’s worst forebodings had come to pass. Not only had the Capetian monarchy let Aquitaine slip from its fingers but the duchy had been snapped up by one of the king’s most formidable vassals. If Henry obtained England in addition, he would be the most powerful ruler in western Christendom.

As usual Louis VII reacted violently and too late. Nevertheless he managed to assemble a dangerous-looking coalition. It included the king’s brother, the count of Dreux, whose lands bordered Normandy; the new count of Champagne; Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey, whom he had deprived of the four castles left to him by his father and who hoped to become count of Anjou in his place; and Eustace, count of Boulogne, who was king Stephen’s eldest son and heir, and Henry’s rival in the succession to the English throne. Quite apart from what they might take from the duke’s territory, these five intended to conquer Aquitaine and divide it between them. Henry, himself naive on this occasion, had not expected such a storm. He was busy on the Norman coast preparing to invade England when in June he heard that Louis was attacking his eastern borders. He rode to meet him at such a ferocious pace that many of his men’s horses foundered, and, when the French king retreated hastily, laid waste Dreux and then struck southward, capturing Geoffrey’s chief stronghold of Montsoreau and Geoffrey himself together with most of his supporters. Louis retired to his bed with a fever, worn out after only two months of fighting this alarming opponent, and agreed to a lengthy truce.

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.