Queens Consort (17 page)

AN EMPIRE TO THE SOUTH

CHAPTER 5

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE

‘An incomparable woman’

Q
ueenship was an extraordinary office and any woman who inhabited it was of necessity exceptional, but Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famously exceptional woman of the medieval period. To some extent, the historical perception of her depends on a model which assumes that the stifling sexism of the Middle Ages was as apparent in everyday life as it seems to be in the history books; that Eleanor stands out because she defied, sexually, intellectually and politically, the limits placed around her gender. Yet Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Boulogne were all women who exercised political influence in government and patronage, women in comparison with whom Eleanor seems rather less of an exception. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Eleanor of Aquitaine was an extraordinary person, in many senses a less successful English queen than her Anglo-Norman predecessors, who nevertheless stamped her image on a century.

During the summer of 1137, the thirteen-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine was briefly one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. Her first taste of independence as Duchess of Aquitaine was sandwiched between the death of her father that April and her marriage to the Dauphin of France in late July. Eleanor has been called ‘a creature of romance and legend, but not of history’.
¹
She generated slanderous speculation in her lifetime and in the eight centuries since her death has been moulded to fit the moral, theoretical and literary fashions of the ages with imaginative abandon. Since speculation is something of a tradition where she is concerned, perhaps just one instance might be permitted here: that these few months of orphaned independence inspired Eleanor with a desire for autonomy in her own lands which coloured her judgement and actions for the rest of her life.

The Duchy of Aquitaine encompassed over a quarter of modernday
France. Though ducal authority differed according to region, being concentrated around Poitou, Eleanor’s inheritance gave her overlordship of a vast tract of land incorporating Poitou to the north and Gascony to the south, the cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne and the counties of Saintonge, Angoulême, Perigord, Limousin, Auvergne and La Marche. Trade in wine and salt, varied agriculture, the control of Atlantic ports and the junctions of the pilgrim routes to Compostella as they merged towards the Pyrenean passes made Aquitaine rich, if not quite the idyllic rural paradise the Eleanor-legend contrasts so unfavourably with the chilly north where she spent the fifteen years of her first marriage. Since the time of her grandfather, Aquitaine had been an important artistic centre, the focus of the new troubadour literature that spread its influence throughout Europe, and whose codes would affect both contemporary culture and its future interpretation.

Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, was the first known troubadour poet. Eleven of his sophisticated, often erotic lyrics survive. He married Philippa of Toulouse (giving Eleanor a claim to the county which both her husbands would unsuccessfully prosecute) and, notably, left her as regent in Poitou when he went on crusade in 1099. He then arranged for their son, Eleanor’s father, to marry Anor, the daughter of his mistress, the appropriately named Dangerosa, with whom he lived for years in flagrant double adultery. Philippa, the Duchess, departed for the abbey of Fontevrault in disgust, and William tastefully declared that he would found a rival abbey at Niort, to be served by whores, though this claim has now been confirmed as an allusion to a now-lost poem. William IX might have been as famous in his own time for his personal life as his poetry, but his son William X was a much more placid character. His main interest in life was eating, which gave Eleanor something in common with her future husband, whose father, the King of France, was nicknamed ‘Louis the Fat’. William and Anor had three children, but Eleanor’s only brother died in childhood, leaving her as heir. In 1136, William roused himself to make the pilgrimage to Compostella, but before departing he assembled his vassals and had them swear allegiance to his daughter. Aware that Eleanor’s inheritance made her highly vulnerable to bride-snatchers, he also made her a ward of the French King and arranged her betrothal to the Dauphin Louis. Eleanor and her younger sister, Petronilla, accompanied their father as far as Bordeaux before he set off to cross the mountains to Spain. He died at Compostella on Good Friday, 9 April 1137.

On the news that Eleanor had come into her inheritance, the King
sprang into action. Though he was too sick and obese to rise from his bed, he insisted that his son should go immediately to claim his wife. Aquitaine was a tremendous prize in comparison with the comparatively meagre holdings of the French crown of the period, and the King was afraid it might be snatched from his grasp. So the seventeen-year-old prince — accompanied by 500 knights, his tutor, Abbot Suger of St Denis, the counts of Champagne and Vermandois and a sumptuous baggage train transporting precious tapestries, extravagant robes and chests of treasure — set off for the palace of Ombrière in Bordeaux, where Eleanor was living, surrounded by guards. He arrived at Bordeaux on 11 July, crossed the River Garonne by boat to join Eleanor and their marriage was celebrated on 25 July in the cathedral of Saint-André by the archbishop of Bordeaux. Appropriately, given her future reputation, the bride wore scarlet. After spending their wedding night at Taillebourg en route for Poitiers, they reached the city on 1 August, the same day that King Louis died. Their investiture at Poitiers as Count and Countess was also therefore a coronation, in which Louis was described by Orderic Vitalis as coming into possession of Aquitaine as well as the kingdom of France. Eleanor was later crowned queen at Bourges.

Louis had already been crowned at Reims, according to Capetian tradition, when he became Dauphin in 1131 after the death of his elder brother Philip. Until this point, he had been intended for the Church, and was greatly influenced by his mentor, Abbot Suger, under whose tutelage he had spent his childhood at the abbey of St Denis. He was not bad looking, and was later described by John of Salisbury as loving his queen ‘almost beyond reason’, but his piety often caused him to be torn between the conflicting demands of religion and statesmanship, and his reign has been described as ‘a long career of energetic ineffectiveness’.
²
Although he was known for his pacific tendencies — which marked him out among his aristocratic contemporaries, for whom making war was part of the business of being — according to the
Chronique de Touraine
the celebrations of his marriage to Eleanor were marred by a violent incident. One of Eleanor’s vassals, William de Lézay, had refused to attend the ceremony where oaths of loyalty were sworn to Louis as the new Duke of Aquitaine. He had also stolen some of Eleanor’s precious white hawks. Full of bravado, Louis and his companions rode off to teach him a lesson, leaving behind their chain mail because of the summer heat. De Lézay ambushed the party, and Louis’s men got the upper hand only after a nasty skirmish, culminating in Louis supposedly cutting off the thief s hands personally. This seems like a rather pathetic attempt on Louis’s part to
impress Eleanor with his prowess as a warrior, but the brutality to which he was prepared to resort in extremis reveals an unpleasant side to his character.

This explosive tendency was shamefully demonstrated at Vitry-sur-Marne in 1142 in an episode for which Eleanor was held to be partly responsible. The previous year, Louis had rashly decided to make an attempt on Toulouse, in right of Eleanor’s claim on the county, without consulting his chief magnates. To his fury, several of them refused to send their obligatory liege of knights for the attack, including Theobald, Count of Champagne. The King’s effort to attack Toulouse was an embarrassment: despite his confidence that the city could easily be taken by surprise, Louis found it well defended, and he was obliged to slink back to Poitiers, where Eleanor was waiting for him. To save face, they made a grand tour of Eleanor’s lands, but as they progressed in a leisurely manner back to Paris, Eleanor’s sister Petronilla inconveniently fell in love with the Count of Vermandois, who was married to the sister of the Count of Champagne.

The next twist in the story came when the archbishopric of Bourges became vacant and the cathedral chapter elected their own nominee, Pierre de la Chatre, over Louis’s personal candidate, Carduc. In Rome, Pope Innocent II confirmed the chapter’s choice and invested De la Chatre with the post. Petulantly, Louis denied the new archbishop entry to Bourges, despite the Pope taking the alarming step of placing the royal household under an interdict. The Count of Champagne stirred the pot by giving refuge to the homeless De la Chatre.

Meanwhile, the Count of Vermandois had abandoned his wife and children and was determined to marry Petronilla. Three tame bishops were found to pronounce an annulment and celebrate the wedding. The Countess of Vermandois took refuge with her brother, who fired off furious protests to Rome. The Pope excommunicated Vermandois and Petronilla and placed their lands under interdict. Louis sent an army to lay waste to Champagne, but when Theobald proved intractable, the King himself led a band of mercenaries to besiege the town of Vitry. Louis was not an effective military commander and the best that can be said of his choice of tactics is that it lacked foresight. The townspeople, terrifed by what they had heard of the previous French attacks, crowded into the wooden castle for protection. Louis’s bowmen shot burning arrows over the walls as the mercenaries stormed the town, and soon the whole edifice was in flames. Desperately, the survivors, at least a thousand people, rushed to the sanctuary of the cathedral, but it was too late: the fire was out of
control and the cathedral was burned to the ground with the loss of every soul inside it.

It is notable that the first inquiry into the legality of Eleanor’s marriage to Louis took place in the aftermath of this horrific disgrace. The pretext for dissolving the marriage of the Count and Countess of Vermandois had been that they were related within the prohibited seven degrees. The influential cleric Bernard of Clairvaux asked how Louis dared to prosecute the annulment when he, too, was related to Eleanor within the degrees, as was demonstrated by a family tree drawn up by the Bishop of Laon. Subsequently, when the Count of Champagne sought to marry his daughters to two of Louis’s more powerful magnates, Louis forbade what would have been a threatening conglomeration of power on the grounds of consanguinity, an action that Bernard again denounced as hypocritical. After Vitry, Bernard had written to Louis, warning him: ‘Those who are urging you to repeat your former wrongdoings against an innocent person are seeking in this not your honour but their own convenience. They are clearly the enemies of your crown and the disturbers of your realm.’ It was a commonplace to criticise kings indirectly by putting the blame on ‘bad counsellors’, but in this instance Bernard seems to be pointing the finger firmly at Eleanor, her sister and Vermandois. Bernard’s chastisement, his raising of the consanguinity issue and the fact that Eleanor had not yet produced a child suggest that as early as 1143 there may have been doubts about her suitability as queen.

Eleanor and Louis were technically third cousins once removed, both being descended from King Robert II, but this had clearly not been considered relevant at the time of their betrothal since no dispensation had been sought from the Pope. Indeed, ‘there was a well-established century long tradition of Capetians entering into incestuous unions without having those marriages dissolved’.
³
Childlessness was seen as a sign of God’s disapproval of an illegitimate marriage, so perhaps Louis’s attempts to make reparation for the Champagne wars — which included restoring Theobald’s lands, confirming De la Chatre as archbishop of Bourges and adopting monastic attire — extended to paying more zealous sexual attention to his wife. In any event, in 1145, Eleanor’s first child, Marie, was born. After Bernard of Clairvaux had reassured her that if she worked to restore relations between Louis and Theobald she would finally be blessed with a child, Eleanor had been active in promoting peace, and it therefore seemed that in the arrival of Marie she had been granted a miracle.

Modern writers on Eleanor have often made much of an assumed
sexual incompatibility between her and Louis. Eleanor herself was later to imply that she had been sexually frustrated, but this could simply have been a post-hoc justification. The fact that she did not give birth until eight years into her marriage is less surprising in the light of the confusion about her date of birth. Many writers have accepted an error on the part of an early twentieth-century scholar which placed her birth in 1122. More reliable evidence from a late thirteenth-century genealogy produced at Limoges corrects this date to 1124. Eleanor was therefore thirteen when she married Louis, and it is quite possible that she had not yet reached puberty. Estimates of the average age of menarche for medieval girls range from fourteen to seventeen, so if Eleanor was at the later end of the spectrum, she may not have been capable of conceiving for some years.
⁴
This is not to suggest that Louis was a less than attentive husband; it serves merely to illustrate that, as ever with Eleanor, the assumptions about her character have proved more persistent than the facts.

Now that she was a mother, Eleanor’s position was validated, but there is little real evidence from the first decade of her marriage as to whether or not she was content in it. With hindsight, some writers have argued that she was unhappy with the repetitive ceremonial role she was obliged to play, that she found the French court austere and unrefined and that she was thwarted in her attempts to introduce southern customs. She was criticised for being extravagant — Bernard of Clairvaux disapprovingly pictured the queen and her ladies with their arms ‘loaded’ with bracelets, their earrings, long linen headdresses draped over the left arm, fur-trimmed cloaks and delicate gowns — but beyond this image there is simply no detailed account of her participation in Louis’s court during this period. Nor does she appear in any of his charters, in contrast to her predecessors, who had been politically active. Perhaps she did try to exert influence over her husband in private, perhaps she did not. There is no record either way. To infer from this absence of information that ‘these changes in the fundamental role of the queen consort, which came about
purely
[the italics are this author’s] as a response to concern over Eleanor’s influence, set a precedent for future queens of France, who mostly found themselves without power or political influence’,
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seems an excessive and inaccurate attempt to aggrandise what is more accurately described as Eleanor’s non-influence. Similarly, the idea that Eleanor shrewdly tucked away the consanguinity argument to produce at a later date seems an idea informed more by a desire to cast her as the agent of events than to represent her eventual divorce as part of a broader political schema.