Eleanor of Aquitaine Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  A Child in the Land of Love

  The Devil and the Monk

  Behind the Red Cross

  To Jerusalem

  The Unwanted Crown

  Stalking the Planta Genesta

  Queen of the English

  Betrayals

  The Court of Love

  The Wheel of Fortune Turns

  Autumn and After

  The Last Battle

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

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  ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE

  Marion Meade is the author of Free Woman: The Life and Times of Victoria Woodhull, Sybille, and Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?

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  First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton

  Published in Penguin Books 1991

  Copyright © 1977 by Marion Meade

  All rights reserved.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17393-0

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  The proper study of mankind is woman and, by common agreement since the time of Adam, it is the most complex and arduous.

  Henry Adams

  Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

  The family of Eleanor of Aquitaine

  Preface

  It is one of the paradoxes of history that those persons commonly believed to wield the least political power may sometimes exert the greatest force on the course of human events. Although Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and later of England, lived at a time when women as individuals had few significant rights, she was nevertheless the key political figure of the twelfth century. At the age of fifteen she inherited one-quarter of modern-day France, but since women were thought unfit to rule, her land as well as her person were delegated to the custody of men. Her whole life thereafter became a struggle for the independence and political power that circumstances had denied her, although few of her contemporaries could realize this.

  The historical record, written to accommodate men, has assigned women whom it could not ignore into three classic categories: wife, mother, and whore. Eleanor of Aquitaine can be found in all three, even though her life represented much more. It is true that she was the wife of King Louis VII of France and King Henry II of England, as well as the mother of one of Western civilization’s great heroes, Richard Coeur de Lion, and also of one of the great villains, King John. Nevertheless, she did more than marry and bear children, and as the eminent historian Bishop William Stubbs wrote, “Few women have had less justice done them in history than Eleanor.” That she has been judged a bitch, harlot, adulteress, and monster is not surprising, for she was one of those rare women who altogether refused to be bound by the rules of proper behavior for her sex; she did as she pleased, although not without agonizing personal struggle. Her admiring contemporary Richard of Devizes may have called her “an incomparable woman,” but for the most part history has not agreed on how to deal with her. For Shakespeare she was a “canker’d grandam,” “a monstrous injurer of heaven and earth” who should be remembered for her “sin-conceiving womb.” In the Carmina Burana, an anonymous German scholar, haunted by a passing glimpse of Eleanor, saw her as the ultimate sex symbol: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.

  As an aggressive woman who never willingly allowed herself to become the victim of circumstances and who exercised power over the most important men of her time, Eleanor presented an image of femininity so at variance with the accepted subordinate role ordained for her sex that people could only conclude she must be a demon. In the years immediately following her death, the remarkable length of her life-span inspired a number of legends, all of them entirely derogatory. In the thirteenth-century romance Richard Coeur-de-Lion, she is a beautiful demon who refuses to attend Mass or partake of the Sacrament and, when forced to do so, flies out the window. The French writer Philippe Mouskès (Chronique Rimée) quotes her as saying to her barons after her divorce from the pious and sexless Louis VII: “Look at me, gentlemen. Is not my body delightful? The king thought that I was the devil.” To the Minstrel of Reims, she remained “a very devil,” a woman so depraved that she would be capable of attempting an elopement with the Moslem ruler Saladin. The calumnies of Eleanor’s contemporaries continued to pursue her throughout the centuries as balladeers used her legend to fashion popular songs: in Queen Eleanor’s Confession she is an adulteress and the mother of an illegitimate child by William Marshal; in The Ballad of Fair Rosamond she becomes a murderess, while the adulteress Rosamond Clifford is cast in the role of a sweet unfortunate victim.

  Apart from Eleanor’s portrayal in folklore, professional historians have treated her as either a mere shadow of her husbands or as an accident among the important activities of men. The English historian John Richard Green in his Short History of the English People devoted forty pages to the reign of Henry II, and in these Eleanor is mentioned only four times; French historians also make short shrift of her as “a naughty wife” or the owner of valuable real estate. The fact is, she was in her own right a political person of the highest importance. Her decision to divorce the king of France and her remarriage to Henry Plantagenet overthrew the balance of power in France and England, producing a disruption that required 300 years of warfare to remedy. Her quarrels with her second husband and her subsequent support of her sons in their rebellion against Henry spread confusion and dismay throughout western Europe. Henry’s death and the accession of Richard brought her to supreme power, and as Coeur de Lion’s representative in England during the Third Crusade, she repressed the ambitions of John while at the same time thwarting the designs of Philip Augustus. At Richard’s death, it was entirely due to her efforts that John reached the throne. Despite her association with these four kings, she struggled to retain her own identity, and it is a measure of her success that 772 years after her death she survives not as Queen Eleanor of England or Queen Eleanor of France but simply as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  Eleanor l
eft only a few writs and charters, routine documents that are for the most part as impersonal as government orders of any period, as well as three letters that may be considered genuine. There are three additional letters that, in my opinion, have been erroneously attributed to her, although I was certainly tempted to use them, since they reveal a real living being full of intense emotions. The unfortunate fact is that Eleanor, a highly literate woman, left no intimate record of herself, no letters, diaries, or poetry that might provide insights into her inner life. Her contemporaries knew her, of course, but what they observed and understood of her as an individual was rarely included in their histories.

  Of necessity I have had to base this biography on written sources from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knowing, however, that even these contemporary chroniclers are riddled with bias, since monks and historians—in the twelfth century one and the same—have always abhorred emancipated women. The details we would like to know about Eleanor are missing, although sometimes they provide more details than one wishes to know about the men in her life: that Louis cried a great deal and fell asleep under trees, that Henry had reddish hair and doodled in church, that Richard chose his lovers from members of his own sex, that John lay in bed with Isabella of Angoulême instead of defending his kingdom. But in the case of Eleanor, the chroniclers wrote sparingly, except to insinuate that she was a bad wife and a worse mother. They claimed that she was extraordinarily handsome, and judging by her tomb effigy at Fontevrault and by the

  Cloisters’ capital in New York, it is possible to confirm the accuracy of their statements. Unfortunately, they neglected to mention an ordinary detail like the color of her hair.

  Given these limitations, we still know more about Eleanor than about any other woman of her era. She was a woman of enormous intelligence and titanic energy who lived in a passionate, creative age. The stage on which she moved encompassed the Crusades, the new Gothic architecture, the struggle between Church and State, the songs of the troubadours, the ideas of courtly love, and the burgeoning of a feminist movement. Nor can one overlook the stellar personalities of her century: Thomas Becket; Saint Bernard; Peter Abélard; William Marshal; and the troubadour poets, of whom her grandfather William was the first. Eleanor participated in these important movements, she knew all the personalities, and, an indefatigable traveler, she was familiar with every great city of medieval times: London, Paris, Rome, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. At twenty-five she set out for the Holy Land as a Crusader and at seventy-eight she was still on the move, journeying over the Pyrenees to Spain to fetch the granddaughter whose marriage would be, she hoped, a pledge of peace between England and France.

  None of the dialogue in this biography is invented—all of it comes from the chronicles—nor did I find it necessary to fictionalize Eleanor’s life. Her history, what little is known of it, is novel enough.

  Acknowledgments

  I should like to express my appreciation to the New York Public Library for generously granting me the privilege of working in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room. I am also grateful to the following museums and organizations for their cooperation in furnishing photographs: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Roger-Viollet, the French Cultural Services, Photographie Giraudon, the British Tourist Authority, the Archives de France, and the Service de Documentation Photographique de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux. Thanks is also due to the literary estate of Hubert Creekmore for permission to reprint his translation of William the Troubadour’s poem on page 20; to Claude Marks and the Macmillan Company for Bernard of Ventadour’s poem on page 160; and to Macmillan, London, and Russell and Russell Publishers for Kate Norgate’s translation of the Richard Coeur de Lion sirventès on page 322.

  Prologue

  For generation after generation Aquitaine had been ruled by a long line of Williams. The first Duke William, born in 752, was a childhood friend and loyal companion-in-arms of the Emperor Charlemagne, as well as a great warrior in his own right. Chansons of later centuries would embroider his feats with brilliant threads of mythology, recounting victorious deeds against terrible Saracen giants, transforming his life into legend. In plain fact, he fought bravely, reaping riches and honors until, at the age of forty-eight, he resolutely turned his back on the world and retired to a Benedictine monastery that he had built near Montpellier. After his death and canonization his retreat became known as—and today is still called—Saint Guilhem-le-Désert.

  While by and large the heirs of the saintly Duke William were capable administrators, none equaled him in piety; indeed, some fell far short. Nevertheless, his line, mercifully assured by the periodic births of male children christened William, endured for over three hundred years.

  Then, in the third decade of the twelfth century, through death, carelessness, or perhaps, as some claimed, the will of God, the reigns of the Williams abruptly came to an end.

  There remained only a maiden of fifteen, a member of what people then called “the lesser sex.”

  From that moment forward everything changed, not only for Aquitaine but for the whole of western Europe.

  From their palaces in Poitiers and Bordeaux, the dukes of Aquitaine ruled, after a fashion, a domain that the chroniclers described in superlatives. “Aquitaine,” wrote Ralph of Diceto, “abounding in riches of many kinds, excels other parts of the western world in such wise that it is reckoned by historians as one of the happiest and most fertile among the provinces of Gaul.” Enclosing the two counties of Poitou and Gascony, the duchy was impressive enough to cover much of central and southwestern France, indeed its dominions spread over one-quarter of that modern-day nation. Behind its frontiers—Anjou and Brittany on the north, the wild barricade of the Pyrenees on the south, the Atlantic on the west, and on the east the Rhone ridges of the Massif Central—lay a territory not only larger but wealthier than that of the Frankish kings.

  Its countryside was a richly ornamented tapestry of blues and greens and blacks, abundant dark forests and emerald pastureland crisscrossed by the silvery river waters of the Garonne, Charente, Creuse, and Vienne. Aquitaine means “land of waters,” a name dating back to the century before Christ, when the Romans pushed northward from their colony at Narbonne and conquered almost the whole of Gaul. Clustered thickly in the river valleys were villages and farms, walled cities and moat-ringed castles with their massive keeps jutting straight up to the skies. The land overflowed with fruit—cherries, plums, raspberries, the wild wood strawberry—and with acre upon uncountable acre of vineyards. In the autumn, when the oak forests turned russet, the grapes would be pressed into the ruby wines for which the region was famous, and then even the humblest peasants would drink joyously until their lips were stained carmine. Along the seaboard, the harbor towns of Bordeaux and La Rochelle did a thriving export business with the wine as well as salt, and in Bayonne fishing boats ventured forth upon the Atlantic toward the limitless horizon and returned with whale, herring, and porpoise, which would hang in salted strips in the marketplaces.

  Despite the easy life made possible by a temperate climate and an abundance of crops, the peasants lived their lives under a blanket of anxiety, always conscious of the fact that they were expendable. Most of them, whether serf or free tenant, held their lands from a seigneur on a hereditary basis. With the social strata cemented into airtight compartments, they were born in thatched hovels and died there and were taxed and worked in the interim as the nobility deemed fit. Both men and women tilled the fields and tended the vines; they kept pigs and perhaps a goose or two, and they made cheese. Inside the village churches, they prostrated themselves on the naked stones and made their novenas to the Blessed Virgin or Saint Radegonde, beseeching these holy ladies’ intercession with an awesome God; but if the Lord failed to respond, they reverted to pagan superstition and summoned fairies and witches. When war came, as it did often, for the nobility regarded fighting as their chief occupation, their huts were burned, their vines trampled, their women raped. At
such times they ate chestnuts and roots, and their children were found dead along the roads. their mouths stuffed with grass. It did not matter that the lands of their lords teemed with rabbit, squirrel, and crow, for the fate of the poacher, if caught, was death by hanging.

  By contrast, life for those higher up the social scale was not merely agreeable, it exuded a grandeur unique for the times. True, the local lords were a pugnacious, fiercely independent lot given to continual petty squabbling, but in the late eleventh century Aquitaine enjoyed a peace and prosperity unknown to the rest of Europe. “When they set themselves to tame the pride of their enemies, they do it in earnest; and when the labours of battle are over and they settle down to rest in peace, they give themselves up wholly to pleasure.” The Aquitainians lived for pleasure; it was the ideal that they pursued, the principle for which they were willing to sacrifice nearly everything. The southern lords vied with each other to establish splendid miniature courts in their castles. Refusing to hoard their gold in coffers, they used the income from their lands to purchase luxuries and hold great feasts until they won the reputation of being lavish, ostentatious, and, a principal virtue, hospitable. To outsiders, especially to the northern barons, who were bearded, unkempt, and unwashed, the luxury and elegance of the southerners, with their shaved faces and long, parted locks, appeared effeminate. The foppery of the easygoing, free-spending Aquitainians never ceased to astonish their contemporaries, and critics in subsequent centuries would still be decrying their flamboyance. “Nowadays,” scornfully wrote Geoffrey of Vigeois about 1175, “the meanest would blush to wear such clothes. Rich and precious stuffs are woven, whose colours suit each man’s mood; the borders of the clothes are cut into little balls and pointed tongues, until their wearers look like devils in a painting.”