Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (4 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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Eleanor was seen as a foreigner, importing her decadent southern ways and corrupting the court. When her mother-in-law called her flighty and a bad influence, Eleanor dispatched her to her dower lands. Her conduct was criticized by church elders, who constantly harangued her to spend more time praying and less time singing. Louis continued to be in awe of his wife. He consulted her often on matters of state, much to the chagrin of his ministers. He even invaded Champagne to try to impress her, burning down a church filled with people in the process.
When Louis decided to go on the Second Crusade in 1147 to atone for the church incident, Eleanor announced that she was joining him along with a company of three hundred women and their attendants (one can only imagine how much luggage they brought) to nurse the wounded. Louis’ advisers were completely against it until Eleanor sweetened the deal by offering the services of a thousand men from Aquitaine.
The crusade turned out not to be the adventure that Eleanor had signed up for. Traveling was difficult, the weather sucked, and Eleanor once had to trade her jewelry for food! Louis didn’t have the first clue how to lead an army. While crossing Mount Cadmos en route to Antioch, disaster struck when Eleanor and her vassals ignored instructions and went ahead to find a better place to camp. When the king and his men arrived at the campsite, they were ambushed by the Turks, causing heavy losses. The king was only spared because he wasn’t recognized. Eleanor was blamed because it was rumored the rear was slowed down by her luggage. Since she already had a dubious reputation, it was easy to use her as a scapegoat.
Things went from bad to worse in Antioch, where they were welcomed by Eleanor’s handsome uncle who was only seven years older than his niece. At the royal palace, Raymond wined and dined his beautiful niece, speaking to her in their native tongue. Gossip of an affair spread, fueled by Eleanor’s clear preference for her uncle’s company and sparking her husband’s jealousy. Louis and Eleanor had been growing apart, and the crusade just emphasized how incompatible they were. When Raymond advised Louis not to attack Jerusalem, to help hold Antioch against the Muslim Turks instead, Eleanor took his side. When Louis refused, Eleanor declared that not only was she staying in Antioch but she wanted a divorce. Louis finally grew some balls and forced Eleanor to go to Jerusalem with him.
The attack on Jerusalem went badly and Eleanor couldn’t help saying, “I told you so.” Things were so bad that they took separate ships back to Europe. Stopping in Rome for a little marriage counseling, the estranged couple ended up sharing a bed thanks to Pope Eugene III’s maneuvering. Their daughter Alix was born nine months later, but it was too late to save the marriage.
Louis was convinced by his advisers to let Eleanor go, although losing Aquitaine must have hurt. Still, he had the future of the throne to think about. After fifteen years of marriage, they had only two daughters and no sons. Eleanor, of course, countered that it wasn’t her fault; if he wanted an heir, he needed to sleep with her once in a while. On March 11, 1152, the marriage was dissolved, on the grounds of consanguinity. The king was given sole custody of their two daughters.
At twenty-nine, Eleanor was still a catch, so much so that while on her way home to Poitiers she was ambushed by two knights who wanted to marry her. But she already had husband number two all picked out even before she and Louis divorced. The lucky guy was Henry Fitz-Empress, Count of Anjou, Duke of Normandy, and heir to the throne of England. Sure, he was eleven years younger, but he was the antithesis of the monkish Louis, exuding animal magnetism.
Eleanor and Henry were well matched. They shared similar backgrounds; both were highly intelligent and strong willed. His physical courage and keen political mind meshed well with her ambition for power. And they were powerfully attracted to one another. Eleanor must have been in heaven to be in the arms of a real man after sleeping with a saint. Defying his father, who was against the match; the ambitions of his younger brother, who also wanted to marry her; and the wrath of her ex-husband, Henry married her six weeks after her annulment came through.
Eleanor had gambled successfully. Two years after their marriage, Henry of Anjou was King of England and Eleanor was now queen of a kingdom that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Cheviots. At first they were happy, producing a steady stream of princes and princesses, eight in all. But they soon grew apart. Eleanor wanted to exercise her intelligence doing more than just hanging around the nursery or supervising her ladies-in-waiting. Henry wasn’t about to share his power with a coruler. Although he allowed Eleanor to act as regent during his absences from court, that meant little more than signing her name to give authority to his ministers, who had the real power. Henry was also busy with other women, in particular, Rosamund Clifford, fair and many years younger than the queen.
It’s not that Eleanor expected fidelity; no, what put her knickers in a twist was Henry flaunting his mistress in public, setting her up like a queen in Eleanor’s own rooms at Woodstock. Eleanor wasn’t going to put up with that. There are legends that Eleanor attempted to do away with her rival by poisoning her or stabbing her, take your pick. None of them are true. Rosamund spent her remaining years in a convent after Henry grew bored with her.
Refusing to play second fiddle to his mistress, Eleanor convinced Henry to let her return to Poitiers in an attempt to control the unruly barons in Aquitaine. There she was in her element. For five years, Eleanor was free from Henry’s dominance. Though Henry was the ruler of Aquitaine, Eleanor made sure that her lords knew that their loyalty was to her and her favorite son, Richard, who would rule after her, and not to the king. She undid many of his oppressive laws, recalled exiled vassals, and held feasts, festivals, and tournaments to please the people. Creating a court to her liking, she welcomed young knights and troubadours, who flocked to sing her praises. Along with her daughter Marie of Champagne, Eleanor held mock Courts of Love, where the real world—where men treated women like property—didn’t exist. In the Courts of Love, women had the upper hand, handing down verdicts on the behavior of men toward their loved ones.
In 1173, Eleanor brokered the alliance of her three oldest sons, Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey, and her ex-husband against Henry. It was a startling act of aggression that Henry didn’t see coming. He was enraged that his sons would dare to rebel against him and that Eleanor would back them. The plan failed and all three sons fled to France. Eleanor was not so lucky; she was caught trying to flee dressed like a man. She was sent back to England and imprisoned for the next fifteen years in various royal residences around the country. On brief occasions, she was let out of her prison, mainly for Christmas celebrations at the court, and to see Richard installed as Duke of Aquitaine after Eleanor renounced her title. Occasionally she was allowed to have family members as visitors, but Henry never let her forget that she was his prisoner.
Henry died in 1189 and Eleanor really came into her own. While the newly crowned Richard went off on the Third Crusade, Eleanor ruled England with distinction in his place, going from city to city and castle to castle holding “queenly courts,” releasing prisoners and exacting oaths of loyalty to her son, while simultaneously keeping the greedy fingers of her other remaining son, John, off the throne in his brother’s absence. When Richard was captured by the Duke of Austria, not only did Eleanor manage to raise the money to ransom Richard, but she went all the way to Austria to bring him back; not bad for a broad in her seventies. On their return, she managed to get the two brothers to reconcile.
After Richard’s death and John’s ascension to the throne, Eleanor decided to retire in 1202 to Fontevrault Abbey, where she spent her remaining two years of life seeking advantageous matches for her relatives. But she was not done yet. Besieged in her castle at Mirabeau by the forces of her grandson Arthur, who was warring with John for the English throne, Eleanor told her attackers that she would be damned before she surrendered. She died at the age of eighty-two, a remarkable age in a remarkable life, outliving most of her children. She is buried beside her husband at the abbey.
Eleanor was a woman of extraordinary power and influence even while constantly having to operate from behind the men who controlled the throne. Contemporary chroniclers, uneasy with the idea of a woman wielding power, tended to focus on Eleanor’s romantic relationships. Some accused her of being a demon in league with the devil. Modern historians, who have been able to cut past the detritus to examine her influence, have given her the credit and recognition she deserves. Eleanor of Aquitaine was an extraordinary woman for any age, refusing to be bound by the rules of proper behavior for women. She played a major role in political events, unusual for her time, helping to create an empire for her descendants through diplomacy and clever marriages. Brave and independent, she remains one of history’s most impressive women.
 
Joan of Arc
 
1412-1431
 
Even little children repeat that oftentimes people are hanged for having told the truth.
—JOAN OF ARC AT HER TRIBUNAL
 
 
She was just a small-town girl living in a small-town world, called Domrémy, France, population two hundred. But in a few short years everyone in the medieval world would know her name. Her actions helped turn the tide in the Hundred Years’ War with England. Not bad for an illiterate peasant girl from the French countryside whose public career lasted less than two years!
Joan was born around January 6, 1412. Unlike the image of her as a poor, barefoot peasant girl, Joan came from a family of wellto-do farmers who owned a nice two-story home with a slate roof that’s still standing. Her father, Jacques, was well respected by the villagers; he was responsible for the defense of the town and collected the taxes. Until the age of twelve, Joan lived an ordinary life, going to church, helping her mother with the housework, and tending the sheep, with marriage or the convent in her future. But God and history had other plans for her.
Joan first started hearing her “voices,” which she claimed were those of the saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, when she hit puberty. Nowadays if a teenager claimed to be hearing voices, she would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenic and pumped full of psychotropic drugs. But this was the medieval world, where no one put you in a padded room if you heard voices, particularly if they came from God. However, Joan’s voices told her to do something extraordinary. She was to lead an army against the English, and crown the Dauphin, who was heir to the throne, King of France. At first Joan refused to listen. How could a teenage girl with no connections hope even to meet the Dauphin, let alone lead an army? The task was so daunting that she kept her voices to herself, not even telling her priest.
The French and English had been fighting over who got to wear the French crown for nearly one hundred years. Thanks to the longbow, the English kept winning, soon occupying huge chunks of France. In 1415, Henry V scored a major victory at Agincourt, along with a French princess and the promise of the crown. After the deaths of Charles VI of France and Henry V in 1422, half of the kingdom now believed that Henry’s son, the child king Henry VI of England, was their king, while the other half supported the Dauphin. Joan’s hometown was smack in the middle of the war zone. While Domrémy was true to the forces of the King of France and his allies, it was surrounded by those loyal to the Duke of Burgundy, who had allied with the English. But Joan couldn’t refuse God’s orders, and she had her voices to guide her. She just needed to find a way to the Dauphin.
Leaving home without telling her parents, Joan convinced her uncle to accompany her to Vaucouleurs to see the powerful lord in her area, Robert de Baudricourt, to tell him that she had heard the voice of God and to ask him for his help in meeting the Dauphin. She reminded him of the prophecy that France would be lost by a woman
3
and regained by a virgin from Lorraine. Annoyed, Baudricourt sent her home and told her uncle to give her a good beating. Not willing to take no for an answer, Joan came back two more times. The third time several of his knights were persuaded by her sincerity and determination and asked for permission to accompany her. Baudricourt finally gave in and agreed to give her his support.
Joan made her way to Chinon with an escort of six men. Before they left, she made the radical decision to cut her hair and put on men’s clothing. She was now a soldier of God and needed to dress like one. They crossed France in eleven days in the middle of February, passing through English territory miraculously without a hitch. Joan had dictated a letter asking to be put on the Dauphin’s calendar. What she found at Chinon didn’t inspire confidence. Charles was insecure, introverted, and indecisive. He wasn’t exactly jonesing to be king. It hadn’t done his father any favors. Charles VI had ended up mad as a hatter, thinking he was made of glass. His mother wasn’t exactly Mother of the Year material either, claiming he was illegitimate. Joan pulled him aside to talk privately and revealed to him information that only God or his confessor would have known. Nobody knows exactly what she said but it was enough to convince him.

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