Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (24 page)
The hosannas over, they slipped quietly out of Rome the next day and began a series of forced marches into northern Italy and up over the Alps through the Jural Alpine pass. Some miles southeast of Paris, at Auxerre, they were met by Abbot Suger in response to a panicky note from the king imploring Suger to meet him secretly so that he might be informed of all plots and “how we must conduct ourselves toward all.” It was a silent, morose group that made its way toward the Île-de-France in the early days of November. The woodlands along the Seine were barren and damp under the autumn sun, but no one felt the chilly breath of approaching winter more deeply than Eleanor. As unsatisfactory as their papal visit had been, there existed no question in her mind that the final word on the divorce had not been spoken in Tusculum. Still, at that point, her future must have looked hopeless indeed.
The damp gray walls of the Cite Palace closed around Eleanor like a metaphorical dungeon from which there is no hope of escape. From the moment of their arrival, and for several months afterward, the Capets were the focus of whispers, rumors, and plots. Any popular rejoicing over their return was drowned by recriminations and angry mumblings of a decidedly seditious nature. There were demands for explanations, questions for which there could be no reasonable answers. The Church harked back to the inscrutable ways of the Almighty by pointing out that God’s judgments never erred and lessons could be learned from even the greatest of calamities. What appeared, for instance, to Abbot Bernard as “evil times” ordained by Heaven, others were not willing to accept so fatalistically, and they looked to the earthly plane for causes. Blame was freely attributed, with Manuel Comnenus, the barons of Jerusalem, Raymond of Antioch. Geoffrey de Rancon, and even the queen herself bearing a share. Criticism fell most heavily, however, on Louis. While still in Palestine, he had quarreled with his brother Robert, who had rushed home after Damascus with plans to depose the king. Like Eleanor, Robert was angered by Louis’s monkish posturings and decided, not without justification, that his brother might be happier at the Abbey of Clairvaux than upon the throne of France. It took all of Abbot Suger’s considerable acumen to suppress the rebellion and preserve the king’s birthright until he made up his mind to come home. Even so, there remained in the realm an atmosphere of sullenness that could not be dispelled by the feeble attempts of a few patriots to defend their sovereign. Surely, some Parisians suggested, ordinary decency, if not national pride, demanded that the Crusade and the king’s safe return be honored in some way. Probably prompted by Suger, a commemorative medal was coined, showing Louis seated in a chariot with the goddess of victory fluttering above. “To the king returning victorious from the Orient the citizens give joyful welcome,” read the inscription. Since this legend, so blatantly inaccurate, may have given rise to derisive mirth in some quarters, a second medal was struck to prove that an actual victory had occurred. The only confrontation with the enemy that might possibly have been interpreted as a victory was the minor incident at the Maeander River in Asia Minor, and therefore the medal read, “Turks killed and in flight on the shore of the Maeander,” a pathetic enough summation of Louis’s deeds and one better forgotten.
For Eleanor, the homecoming was made all the more desolating by the confirmation of a suspicion that she may have felt even while crossing the Alps. To her consternation, she realized that she was pregnant. Nothing could have sealed her future more decisively, for now there would be no divorce, no possibility of going back to Poitiers, nothing to look forward to but gray years stretching into the interminable future with a man she despised, her priest disguised as a king. Louis, elated, behaved as though he had forgotten the marital trauma of the past two years. At last he could present an heir to his people. Even those Franks who had been busy blackening Eleanor’s name with gossip about her alleged depravity in Antioch were obliged to regard the queen with new respect. In hardly anyone’s mind, and certainly not in the king’s, did there arise the possibility that the child might be a girl. Surely a conception so meticulously choreographed by the pope himself could result in nothing but a healthy son.
To those who later recalled that winter, it seemed to be the coldest they had ever known. The Seine froze over, the wine criers disappeared from the streets, and in the bone-bitingly cold chambers of the Cite Palace, where Eleanor extracted what warmth she could from fires and braziers, there was ample time for reflection. Peering out through the slitted apertures that passed for windows, gazing at the winter mists ris- , ing from the Seine, there was nothing to remind her of the sun-sluiced gardens of Antioch. Except for her daughter, Marie, an infant when she left and now five years old, nothing had changed. The short, stout figure of the indispensable Suger still padded through the halls of the palace; Abbot Bernard still issued proclamations from the swamps of Clairvaux; the omnipresent Thierry Galeran still shadowed the king’s every move; Louis, prayerful as ever, visited Vitry-le-Brûlé, where he planted some cedars that he had carried home from the Holy Land. The fabric of the royal couple’s relationship patched together with the flimsiest of thread, they kept to their separate beds, and despite Louis’s solicitude when they met, they had nothing to say to each other. In those winter days when her hands and feet were half-paralyzed with cold and her body swelled under her robes, Eleanor experienced a special kind of anguish. Never before had life seemed so worthless, so devoid of warmth and joy. Even in her darkest moments in Jerusalem, she had deluded herself into believing that Pope Eugenius would confirm the consanguinity, but instead he had prepared a terrible trap into which she had permitted herself to be flung. Now, like a butterfly frozen in a cake of ice, she was thoroughly immobilized. She was twenty-eight, and nothing about life pleased her anymore.
In the early summer of 1150—the exact date has not survived—Eleanor gave birth to a girl, who would be christened Alix. That day a few church bells chimed softly, but there were no public demonstrations to honor the new princess, no bonfires in the squares of the Île-de-France. The queen, that exasperating Poitevin, had failed again. The only demonstrations of joy were those made by Eleanor herself, in the privacy of her chamber with the bed curtains drawn, for she knew that, in failing, she had won.
It is interesting to speculate what might have ensued had Eleanor borne a son. Certainly the history of Europe would have been vastly different, because a male child would have been an heir not only to the Frankish throne but to Eleanor’s dower land of Aquitaine as well, thereby creating a unified realm larger than any that had existed for the Franks since the time of Charlemagne. That had been the picture in Louis the Fat’s mind on the day he learned of Duke William IX’s death, that had been the vision that had sustained Abbot Suger these many years. As both of them understood, however, William’s generous bequest would only be a first step; technically, Eleanor’s dower lands could only be officially incorporated into the Frankish kingdom when she had borne a son and, moreover, when the son succeeded Louis on the throne.
Just as Eleanor’s pregnancy had been a state affair, so now her incompetence in childbed became a national concern, and after she had proved her perversity a second time, the more uneasy members of Louis’s council began to voice fears that the queen might continue to produce princesses, that is, if she ever conceived again. Until this point Eleanor’s struggle for release from the bonds of marriage had been a private one, but after the birth of Alix she saw the emergence of barons who began urging Louis to divorce her. Of course these unwitting allies were utterly unconcerned with the queen’s personal wishes and, in point of fact, regarded her as no better than a cart that had failed to function properly.
Louis, now thirty, looked older than his years. Certainly he no longer resembled the willowy blond youth who had appeared on the banks of the Garonne to claim his bride, and although by medieval standards he could be called neither young nor old, still he had been married fifteen years with nothing to show for it. Until now, fortune had always smiled upon the Capetians; every king since 987 had left a male heir to succeed him, and continuity of the dynasty never lay far from any Capetian’s mind. If luck failed, they were not averse to taking other measures, and it was recalled, as a matter of precedent, that in the late tenth century, Robert the Pious had been forced to set aside two wives in order to assure the succession.
The one person in the kingdom who seemed least troubled by the unexpected appearance of Princess Alix was Abbot Suger. Optimistic, he pointed out that Eleanor and Louis, still young, might anticipate more offspring, hopefully one of them male. More importantly, it was unthinkable to speak of giving up Aquitaine, that rich dower that Louis the Fat had clutched with so much satisfaction on his deathbed. Those who pressed for annulment argued that Eleanor’s duchy, the most turbulent in Europe, had never added any substantial revenue to the crown. In truth, even had Louis been a stronger personality, he lacked the resources to subdue Aquitaine—even future masters with greater assets would be unable to do so—and in the mid twelfth century the Frankish monarchy was not psychologically ready to assimilate such a huge piece of property. Nevertheless. Suger’s will quietly prevailed, and the knotty problem of the succession was shelved for the time being. During the coming months it would be he who held the marriage together, for he alone in the kingdom had the foresight to understand that the real consequences of a divorce would be, not France’s loss of Aquitaine, but in the case of Eleanor’s remarriage the addition of her lands to some other lord, thereby lifting this unknown someone to a position of greater power than that of Louis. Precisely who this someone might be Suger had no way of knowing.
By the end of the summer the Crusade, while not forgotten, had nonetheless begun to fade from people’s minds. What had happened could not be changed and even for Louis, architect of its failure, life had to go on. Upon his return the previous autumn, he had been carefully briefed by Suger on the various shifts in political alignment among his vassals during his absence. The name that arose most frequently in these conversations was Plantagenet, not a real surname but a nickname for the count of Anjou, whose habit was to wear in his helmet a yellow blossom from the broom plant, the planta genesta. Geoffrey Anjou might have been a prototype for the chivalrous medieval prince. Dashing, incredibly good looking, highly educated, he impressed his contemporaries with his charm, courage, and above all, cleverness. Like all the Angevins, Geoffrey was a great believer in self-help, a fact that had no doubt been responsible for the mammoth strides he and his family had made in recent years.
Looking back to the eleventh century, there had been four important feudal empires in France, the most formidable being the house of Blois because of their family ties with the counts of Champagne, who controlled the commercial city of Troyes. Normandy, poor and badly situated, could not have been called a major power, while the house of Anjou, with its command of the rich Loire valley, showed potential, but the Angevins were undisciplined and its counts known to be unstable. Each of these houses, however, presented obstacles to the ascendancy of the Capets, the only ones who could boast of being anointed kings. Then in 1066 the whole power structure suddenly blew to pieces when William, duke of Normandy, successfully conquered England. All at once the Normans, those poor cousins, possessed newfound wealth, and worse in the eyes of the Capetians, they had wangled themselves a crown. In the shuffle, the balance of power shifted drastically, with the already insignificant Angevins shoved farther down the ladder. Certainly by the time Geoffrey was born in 1113, his family counted for relatively little. In fact, Geoffrey’s father, Fulk V, thought so little of his inherited fief that, at the age of forty, he abandoned it to marry Melisende, the heiress of Jerusalem, the title king of Jerusalem holding an infinitely greater appeal for Fulk than that of count of Anjou. From small beginnings, then, he was able to increase his heritage by marrying an heiress, a strategy of proven success that would not be overlooked by his descendants.
The event most critical to the rise in Geoffrey Anjou’s fortunes took place in 1120, when he was only seven years old. At twilight on November 25, Henry I, youngest son of William the Conqueror, king of England and duke of Normandy, prepared to make a routine crossing of the English Channel. With him at Barfleur on the Norman coast were his entire household, including his seventeen-year-old son and heir, William, “a prince so pampered,” wrote Henry of Huntingdon, that he seemed “destined to be food for the fire.” The king embarked before dark, but the younger members of the royal entourage, “those rash youths who were flown with wine,” lingered to carouse on the shore. In any event, they felt no pressing need for haste, since they were sailing on the White Ship, the swiftest and most modern vessel in the royal fleet, and would easily be able to overtake the king. Loath to break up the party, they did not launch their vessel until after nightfall. It was a perfect evening for a crossing, with a gentle breeze and a sea as calm and flat as a pond, and they soon might have caught up with the king had not a drunken helmsman rammed the ship into a rock in the bay. Panic broke out. Attempts to push free with oars and boathooks failed, and the ship rapidly began to fill with water. Throwing a dinghy overboard, Prince William and a few companions abandoned ship, but at the last moment he went back to rescue his illegitimate sister, the countess of Perche. The small boat, “overcharged by the multitude that leapt into her, capsized and sank and buried all indiscriminately in the deep. One rustic alone, floating all night upon a mast, survived until morning to describe the dismal catastrophe.”
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