Eleanor of Aquitaine (25 page)

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Authors: Marion Meade

BOOK: Eleanor of Aquitaine
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The wreck of the White Ship was as enormous a calamity in the twelfth century as the loss of the Titanic in the twentieth, even more so perhaps because it would shake the fortunes of England for the next thirty years. Prince William was Henry’s only legitimate son, but “instead of wearing embroidered robes, he floated naked in the waves, and instead of ascending a lofty throne he found his grave in the bellies of fishes at the bottom of the sea.” Henry had fathered at least twenty bastards, but despite a hasty second marriage, he was never able to produce the needed male heir. Aside from the prince, he had one other legitimate child, his daughter, Matilda, the widow of the German emperor. Determined to pass on the crown to a member of his immediate family, the king recalled Matilda from Germany, and in January 1127 publicly recognized her as his successor and required his barons to swear fealty to her. It was an extraordinary decision, one that drew immediate criticism from all sides, but a few months later, before the shock waves had even begun to subside, he jolted the sensibilities of his barons anew by marrying his daughter to young Geoffrey of Anjou.
These unusual arrangements satisfied no one but the king himself. Most appalled was Matilda, “a young woman of clear understanding and masculine firmness,” who had been dragged home from Germany much against her own inclinations. She was twenty-five, the daughter of a king and the widow of an emperor; Geoffrey was fourteen and the son of a count. But Henry would hear of no objections; he wished her wed to Geoffrey, an alliance of political importance, he said, and he would have his way. From every angle, Henry’s barons found his schemes repugnant. Matilda was a stranger to them, and from what little they knew of her they had formed a patently unfavorable impression. Strikingly handsome but haughty and domineering, she had been sent to Germany at the age of eight, where she had been groomed in a rigid court etiquette alien to Norman tradition, though of course her greatest handicap was her sex. The Normans knew of no precedent for the rule of a woman. As for Matilda’s marriage to Geoffrey, the idea was totally distasteful. The Normans believed the Angevins to be barbarians who desecrated churches and ate like beasts. According to a widely accepted tale, their ruling family had descended from demons and were shameless enough to tell this story on themselves. Worse, they laughed about it. In no way did Geoffrey, a beautiful adolescent boy, resemble a demon, but blood would tell, and the Normans feared that Geoffrey would rule for Matilda. The idea of an Angevin on the throne of England was intolerable.
Predictably, the unlikely liaison of Matilda and Geoffrey turned out to be miserable for both of them. There was no denying Geoffrey’s learning and charm, but as Matilda soon discovered, the charm was shallow and his cleverness devoted to the promotion of Geoffrey. He made no secret of the fact that he had married Matilda only to gain control of Normandy—evidently he realized that he would never be accepted as king of England—or that he impatiently awaited the death of her father. Or that he disliked her. She was, he complained, rude, arrogant, and unfeminine, and once, in a temper, he sent her back to England. For these reasons, it took the couple seven years to have their first child, a son who would be known as Henry FitzEmpress, after his mother.
Two years after the birth of his grandson and namesake, King Henry returned from a day of hunting in Normandy and, ravenous, wolfed down a dish of lampreys, “a fish which he was very fond of, though they always disagreed with him and the physicians had often cautioned him against eating them, but he would not listen to their advice.” A few hours later he was dead. Now that the moment had arrived for Matilda to claim her throne, it became clear that Henry had grossly misjudged his people. When his nephew Stephen of Blois heard of the death, he raced across the Channel from France and claimed the throne for himself. That he had been one of those who had pledged allegiance to Matilda was irrelevant, although Stephen did have the grace to excuse his defection by saying that he had vowed homage to the empress under coercion. No excuses were really necessary “All the bishops, earls, and barons who had sworn fealty to the king’s daughter and her heirs gave their adherence to King Stephen, saying that it would be a shame for so many nobles to submit themselves to a woman.” Such a turn of events, as Henry should have known, was inevitable.
Stephen of Blois, like Louis Capet, lacked the necessary qualities for kingship. “He was,” wrote Walter Map, “a man of great renown in the practice of arms, but for the rest almost an incompetent, except that he was rather inclined to evil.” A weak man, soft and indecisive, he began many things but never finished them, and though he reigned for “nineteen long winters,” he left little behind except a chapel at Westminster and the memory of anarchy. Not until 1139 did Matilda invade England, and for the next eight years the country reeled with civil war. Stephen’s claim to the throne was, some thought, as good as Matilda’s, but what rankled the empress most strongly were those Norman barons who had blithely disregarded their oaths of fealty. Not completely devoid of insight into the realities of her situation, she made it clear that she did not want the throne for herself but for her son, Henry; even so, she managed to immediately justify the worst fears of those reluctant to accept her claims. Headstrong, intolerant, unbelievably tactless, she was “always breathing a spirit of unbending haughtiness.” In 1141 her battle almost appeared to be won when she succeeded in taking King Stephen a prisoner, but then she ruined it—and lost any goodwill she might have gained from the English—by keeping Stephen in chains at Bristol Castle. In her efforts to claim her crown, she had no help from her husband, who seemed to regard her actions as none of his business. When once she begged him for help in 1142, he ignored her request for reinforcements and instead sent to England their nine-year-old son as a morale booster for her partisans. It was neither callousness nor political naivete but his intense dislike for his wife that directed Geoffrey’s attitude. Never happier than when parted from Matilda, he took every opportunity to erase her from his mind. Moreover, during these years he was involved in a conflict of his own; in Matilda’s name, he had the satisfaction of waging war against his family’s traditional enemy, Normandy, and by 1144 he would win for himself the title of duke of Normandy. What happened to Matilda, or for that matter England, did not concern him.
In England, the barons were torn between two sovereigns claiming their allegiance, with the result that some threw in their lot with Stephen, then switched to Matilda, and finally went back to Stephen. After seventy years of strong monarchical rule and royal justice, they were now forced to live with the chaos of private wars so familiar on the Continent but almost forgotten in England. “Men said,” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mournfully relates, “that Christ and his angels slept.” In the north country, hordes from Scotland and Wales, “that execrable army more atrocious than the whole race of pagans,” marched into the Yorkshire valleys, massacring the villagers and taking away the women, roped together naked, as slaves. In the Isle of Ely, foreign mercenaries held men for ransom, hanging them over bonfires by their feet, casting them in dungeons crawling with snakes. The best description of the universal turmoil during Stephen’s reign is offered by Henry of Huntingdon:
Food being scarce, for there was a dreadful famine throughout England, some of the people disgustingly devoured the flesh of dogs and horses, others appeased their insatiable hunger with the garbage of uncooked herbs and roots. There were seen famous cities deserted and depopulated by the death of the inhabitants of every age and sex, and fields white with the harvest but none to gather it, all having been struck down by the famines. Thus the whole aspect of England presented a scene of calamity and sorrow, misery and oppression.
 
Out of the disorder eventually grew a great longing for peace, and despite Matilda, eyes slowly began to turn toward the young Henry Plantagenet. The demons from which he had supposedly descended could not have been any worse than those presently ravaging England.
 
 
The Plantagenets were certainly not strangers to Eleanor. Nor to Louis, for Geoffrey, a familiar figure at court, had once held the post of seneschal of France. Although the two men had been on fairly good terms, Geoffrey had declined to accompany Louis on the Crusade, despite the fact that his half brother was the boy-king Baldwin of Jerusalem. Geoffrey, always looking to his own interests first, had recently overpowered Normandy and wished to keep a watchful eye on his newly acquired property. In contrast, any possible glory to be won on the battlefields of Palestine paled into insignificance.
Neither was Henry Plantagent a totally unknown quantity to the king and queen. In those hurried days before the departure of the Crusade there had been talk of a betrothal between Henry and the Capet’s infant daughter, Marie. Judging from a letter that Abbot Bernard wrote to Louis about that time, it was Geoffrey who had proposed the marriage, possibly anticipating a day when Aquitaine, or some substantial portion of it, would fall into Plantagenet hands as Marie’s dowry. “I have heard,” wrote Bernard, “that the Count of Anjou is pressing to bind you under oath respecting the proposed marriage between his son and your daughter. This is something not merely inadvisable but also unlawful because, apart from other reasons, it is barred by the impediment of consanguinity. I have learned on trustworthy evidence that the mother of the queen and this boy, the son of the Count of Anjou, are related in the third degree.” Accordingly Bernard warned Louis “to have nothing whatever to do with the matter,” and the idea had been dropped. For whatever reasons, Bernard distrusted both Geoffrey and his son. Once, he had met Henry as a boy and, after studying his face closely, predicted that he would come to a bad end. If Henry had come to Paris with his father during the betrothal negotiations, Eleanor surely would have met him, but even so it is unlikely that much converse passed between the queen and a thirteen-year-old youth who was being inspected as a potential son-in-law. At that particular period she was much too engrossed in preparations for the Crusade to be interested in a barely pubescent boy.
When Louis left France in 1147, Geoffrey’s son had been little more than a child; by the time he returned, the younger Plantagenet had become a person to be reckoned with. Suddenly the king was faced with the startling and dismaying prospect of Normandy, Anjou, and England being united under one ruler, for after 1149 nobody in England cared what King Stephen did; they were concerned with Henry Plantagenet. Never, apparently, had Louis seriously considered the possibility of Geoffrey Anjou’s son becoming king of England. It was unthinkable. In the struggle between Matilda and King Stephen, Louis’s sympathies leaned firmly toward Stephen, who happened to be the younger brother of Count Theobald of Champagne. Despite Louis’s former conflicts with Champagne, the friction had been dissolved some time ago, and Theobald’s son, Henry, who had accompanied him on the Crusade, would eventually marry his daughter, Marie. However, Capetian family ties with Stephen were closer yet because recently Louis’s sister, Constance, had married Stephen’s son, Eustace, who was to someday succeed his father on the throne. These growing interconnections between the Capets and the house of Blois/Champagne automatically ranged Louis against the Plantagenets. Ever since January 1150, when Geoffrey had turned over the duchy of Normandy to his son, it being tradition among the Angevins to invest their heirs with responsibility before their own deaths, Louis had begun to show signs of concern, especially since Henry disdained to pay him customary homage for his fief. This impolite young man, he decided, needed to be taught a lesson.
In the summer of 1150 Louis, joining forces with King Stephen’s son, Eustace, began to position his troops along the Seine near the Norman border. Before hostilities could begin, however, Suger stepped in. The abbot may have been old and ill, but what little energy remained to him he used to thwart another of Louis’s futile wars. On the grounds that the king could not declare war without his barons’ approval, a consent that he knew would never be obtained as long as he had a voice in the matter, the abbot managed to arrange a truce. Louis and his army returned to Paris without encountering Henry Plantagenet, but it was a confrontation postponed rather than canceled. Of all the humiliations that Louis would have to face in his lifetime none would be more personally painful than those dealt to him by the son of Geoffrey Anjou.
Stalking the Planta
Genesta
 
By the summer of 1151, Eleanor had psychologically poised herself for flight. Developments in recent months had helped set the stage in her own mind for an escape from the hated Île-de-France, and she was busy dreaming of her return to the Maubergeonne Tower in Poitiers. At this moment, no definite date had been established, but she knew that her release was now only a matter of months.
In January, Abbot Suger had died and with his passing had crumbled the last remaining barrier between Eleanor and her liberation. Renewing her demands with greater urgency, she found Louis in a more receptive frame of mind, and while he still professed to love her, his protestations had grown considerably weaker. Perhaps he himself acknowledged that loving her had become a luxury he could ill afford. By this time his ardor had been greatly corroded by the nervous fear that he might die without an heir, and even had he and Eleanor been compatible, he might have entertained thoughts of divorce by now. As for those who reiterated Suger’s arguments in protesting the loss of Aquitaine, Louis might well have retorted, “What good is Aquitaine to a king without a son?” After more than a century and a half of Capetian rule, was he to be the last of his dynasty? Eleanor, after all, had failed him. He had never been able to satisfy her, and as beautiful and exciting as she undeniably was to him, as magnificent her heritage, it was almost with a sense of relief that he agreed to relinquish the most highly prized heiress in Christendom. But with Louis, maddeningly hesitant and slow moving, a decision was rarely implemented with speed. Doubtless he must have pointed out to Eleanor that they were not persons of ordinary circumstance who could go their separate ways without careful preparation. There were Frankish garrisons in the major towns of Aquitaine, and now, in this delicate situation, they must be withdrawn in peaceful, orderly fashion before a divorce could take place. Then the queen could return to her lands without anxiety about possible conflict between the king’s men and her own vassals. This was an argument certain to sway Eleanor, who gave Aquitaine precedence in everything; indeed, as time passed, she would give the impression of being willing to level Europe if she thought it would benefit her homeland.

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