Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (28 page)
Eleanor’s position was extremely delicate on two levels. In her capacity as duchess of Aquitaine, she was a vassal of Louis’s, and as in the case of any vassal, protocol demanded that she secure his approval before marrying, though obviously this was one formality she could not afford to render. As Louis’s former wife, she knew intimately his feelings of dislike for Henry: aside from flouting his authority as her overlord, she was about to deliver a stinging personal blow by marrying his chief enemy, a factor that may well have been part of her initial attraction to Henry. In a sense, she was about to take a deadly revenge, both personal and political, for fifteen years of boredom and entrapment, but one false step now, and to her peril, she would find the king’s army pouring over her borders.
In mid-May, Henry and a few companions arrived in Poitiers, and on Sunday, May 18, barely eight weeks after Eleanor’s divorce, the marriage ceremony took place. No trumpets signaled their union. It was a subdued, almost surreptitious celebration, witnessed only by close friends, family, and household members. Although the occasion lacked the ostentation normally associated with the wedding of two distinguished persons, nevertheless precautions had to be taken in order to assure the validity of the marriage contract. Ironically, Eleanor was more closely related to Henry than she had been to Louis, their common ancestor being Robert II, duke of Normandy, and it was necessary to locate canonists who would issue the proper dispensations. The alliance so skillfully nurtured to fruition during the past seven months would have mighty and far-reaching consequences, but in May 1152, Eleanor was only concerned about the immediate ones, and the days following the wedding offered a temporary respite from the storm that she expected to break over her head.
Sexual attraction, her intuition that Henry would someday be the most formidable sovereign of his generation, a need for an efficient protector of Aquitaine, perhaps also her deep need to hurt Louis: These had been the main factors in her hasty selection of a husband. But she did not know Henry as a person. Now, during this honeymoon of sorts, she had an opportunity to scrutinize more closely the volatile man she had chosen. Basically she found that, though her judgment had been sound, he was a complex man with a host of contradictory qualities. Like herself, he had been given a first-class education, both at his father’s court and in the English household of his uncle Robert, earl of Gloucester. Both Matilda and Geoffrey, despite their personal animosity for one another, had apparently been in agreement that Henry should be educated in a manner befitting a future king. Under the direction of his tutor, Master Matthew, archdeacon of Gloucester, Henry learned a smattering “of all the languages which are spoken from the Bay of Biscay to the Jordan but making use only of Latin and French.” From his father he received the usual training in riding, jousting, falconry, and hunting, and as an adult, these arts were to be a consuming obsession with him; neither was his military education neglected, for Geoffrey was known to have owned a fourth-century Roman handbook on war. For a layman, Henry was well read, sometimes taking books to bed, and he sought out the company of intellectuals, with the result that he constantly squirreled away information. “Anything he had once heard worthy of remembrance he could never obliterate from his mind. So he had at his fingers’ ends both a ready knowledge of nearly the whole of history and also practical experiences of almost everything in daily affairs.”
From the earliest age, his head had been crammed full of tales about his illustrious ancestors: his great-great-great grandfather the legendary Fulk the Black, who had defeated an army of Bretons before the age of fourteen; his great-grandfather William the Conqueror, who had seized the throne of England after the battle of Hastings; his mother, who had escaped from beleaguered Oxford Castle by walking through Stephen’s lines in the dead of a snowy night. Inspired by these daring exploits, Henry himself had made an expedition to England when he was fourteen to snatch Stephen’s crown but, once there, realized that he had no money to pay his soldiers. In the end, Stephen had lent the young fighting cock the funds to return to Normandy.
Although Henry thought troubadours and games of chivalry a waste of time, he was not, Eleanor discovered, without refined tastes. His mother had taught him how to behave like a gentleman, and he was capable of great gentleness, courtesy, and at times even delicacy. In later years, on a windy day, he was out riding with a distinguished clergyman Dom Reric, when a Cistercian monk stumbled and fell in front of his horse. The wind blew the Cistercian’s habit over his neck, exposing his backside. “Curse that religion that reveals the arse,” muttered Dom Reric. Henry, however, looked away in silence and pretended to see nothing. Matilda also passed along a brand of cynical wisdom peculiarly her own, and in Walter Map’s opinion, “to her teaching we may confidently impute all those traits which rendered him unpleasant.” In one of her parables, she impressed upon her son that “an untamed hawk, when raw flesh is often offered to it, and then withdraw or hidden, becometh more greedy and is more ready to obey and remain,” a policy of tantalization that Henry would put to good use in his relationships with family, friends, and enemies. Another piece of advice that Henry liked to repeat was Matilda’s admonition to be “free in bed, infrequent in business.” His freedom in bed Eleanor no doubt counted as a blessing, at least in the early stage of their marriage, and in this respect he must have provided a startling and delightful contrast to Louis Capet.
In personal appearance, however, Henry was anything but heroic, and as Eleanor now had a chance to observe, he was slightly bowlegged, a characteristic that would become more pronounced as he aged, and he complained incessantly about ingrown toenails and blisters on his legs. Although fairly slender for a stocky person, he had a phobia about growing fat, saying, whether true or not, that he possessed a natural tendency to corpulence. As a result he was forever dieting, fasting, or wearing himself out physically through violent exercise.
But his most remarkable characteristic, the one that amazed his contemporaries and must even have startled Eleanor, who herself possessed an abundance of vitality, was his demonic energy. In the twentieth century, he surely would have been diagnosed as a classic case of hyperactivity. Constantly in motion, he rose before cockcrow; seldom sat down except on horseback or at meals, which he ate quickly; and to the dismay of his subjects, he transacted all business standing up. While talking or listening, his eyes and hands were incessantly moving, touching birds, dogs, armor, hunting spears. Even during Mass, which he attended every day more out of duty than piety, he paid no attention to the service but could be seen talking business to his clerks, doodling, or looking at books. Never wasting a minute, he sometimes worked through the night and, wrote Ralph Niger, “shunned regular hours like poison.”
To Eleanor, hearing him shout in his hoarse voice his favorite oath “By the eyes of God!” it must have seemed as though a tornado had descended on the Maubergeonne Tower. Had she ever been inclined to think of him as a raw, inexperienced youth whom she could dominate and advise, she would have realized her mistake during this period. Moreover, as distressing as it may have been to acknowledge, his behavior plainly indicated that he was not helplessly in love with her, or perhaps in fairness to Henry, he had bigger things on his mind at the moment. What need had he to tarry with a bride when there was an island to conquer, a throne to win? Eleanor, a realist, was also a romantic, and this realization must have hurt. Nevertheless, she understood that unforeseen circumstances had forced him to postpone his invasion of England several times. His father’s death had obliged him to visit Anjou in order to take possession of his heritage and assure the fidelity of his vassals. Growing impatient, his supporters in England had sent Earl Reginald of Cornwall to implore haste, and on April 6, after a meeting of Henry’s barons at Lisieux, preparations had moved forward, only to be canceled due to his wedding trip. Now he was in a fever to be off. Since we know that he was at Barfleur on the Normandy coast about the middle of June, he could not have stayed longer than two weeks with Eleanor, perhaps less, because nine days after the wedding, attending to business again, she granted a charter to the Abbey of Saint-Maixent.
Meanwhile, the tidings of Eleanor’s marriage had exploded like a series of strategically placed bombshells in various cities of Europe. Among the disgruntled was Henry’s brother, Geoffrey, so lately thwarted in his own ambition to marry Eleanor and still smarting at the disappointingly small inheritance—three castles—he had received from his father. Henry of Champagne, betrothed to Eleanor’s seven-year-old daughter, Marie, and dreaming of acquiring Aquitaine in her name, saw his prospects melt away. And King Stephen’s son, Eustace, clinging to the hope of being crowned king of England someday, could only gnash his teeth when he learned that his rival pretender now owned half of France.
The man most stunned, however, was Louis Capet. If he had considered the possibility of Eleanor’s remarriage, it would have been to some inconsequential baron of his own choosing, not to Henry Plantagenet. The conspiracy perpetrated by his former wife and her new husband, the scope of their perfidy, their contempt for every tenet of feudal custom and law, overwhelmed him. The bitter sting of humiliation lay, however, in the realization that Eleanor, his vassal, had married without his permission, that Henry only last year had sworn fealty and received the kiss of peace. But other aspects of the disaster simply confused him: Had Eleanor forgotten that a marriage between Henry and the Princess Marie had been declared unlawful? How could the woman who had nagged him with her scruples about consanguinity from Antioch to Beaugency have now married a man to whom she was even more closely related? Burning with hatred of the crafty Plantagenet who had “basely stolen” his wife and, for the first time, with an equally intense hatred of Eleanor, Louis huddled with his advisers in an effort to surmount these calamitous developments. Solutions—revocation of the annulment, excommunication—were suggested and discarded. When a letter ordering the appearance of the duke and duchess in the French court to answer charges of treason failed to bring a response, Louis settled on more practical means of dealing with the situation. Provoked beyond endurance, he acted quickly for once and formed a coalition of all those who had a grievance against Henry. Backed by his brother Robert, Theobald of Blois, Henry of Champagne, Eustace, and Geoffrey Plantagenet, Louis decided against attacking Aquitaine, which the coalition had resolved to divide among themselves, but instead charged into Normandy to confront Henry directly. Immediately it became apparent that he had chosen the wrong tactic.
At a furious rate, Henry bore down from Barfleur to the Norman-French frontier, and so rapidly did he move his forces that, it was said, several horses fell dead on the road. He ignored Louis’s troops and, like a whirlwind, began to ravage the Vexin and the lands belonging to Robert of Dreux before turning west to Touraine, where he deftly relieved his brother of those three castles that had comprised his miserly inheritance. Attacking here, counterattacking there, within six weeks he had routed each of his opponents. To Louis, it must have seemed that he could do nothing right. Bereft of hope, bewildered, he came down with another fever and retired to the Île-de-France to brood upon the irretrievable loss of Aquitaine, which, in his opinion, should have been the lawful inheritance of Marie and Alix.
These were anxious weeks for Eleanor as she waited for the attack that never came, but as news of Henry’s successes filtered back to Poitiers, she must have been relieved at this confirmation of his abilities as a soldier. At the same time, however, she had reason for continued apprehension. By the end of June she had been forced to accept the disheartening fact that she had not conceived. Even though Henry desired sons with no less passion than Louis, he had married her despite her poor record as a breeder. Somehow she must have convinced him that those two lone pregnancies in fifteen years had been due to Louis’s lack of libido, but now, desperately anxious to prove her fertility and give him an heir, she realized that conception might be equally difficult with Henry, for entirely different reasons. If Louis had rarely made use of his conjugal privileges, Henry simply was not present to share her bed. Under the circumstances, it was unclear when she might see him next, for once he reached England there was no way of telling how long he would remain. For the moment, all she could reasonably do, however, was live her own life as duchess.
About this time she had a seal made, which gives us a fairly good impression of her majestic beauty. On one side is the full-length figure of an extremely slender woman, bare-headed, arms outstretched, holding in one hand a falcon and in the other a fleur-de-lis; the inscription reads, “Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine.” On the seal’s obverse side, inscribed with her newly acquired titles—duchess of Normandy, countess of Anjou—she wears a form-fitting gown with tight sleeves and, over her head, a veil that falls to the ground. Her charters and official proclamations in the early days of June 1152 convey a sense of her authority as well as pride in her new marital status: “I, Eleanor, by the grace of God, duchess of Aquitaine and Normandy, united with the duke of Normandy, Henry, count of Anjou ... ” Unlike most charters, these are strongly colored by emotions, positive as well as negative. To the Abbey of Montierneuf, for example, she reextended all the privileges granted by her great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, but she made no mention of her ex-husband, who had also accorded benefits to the monks. At the Abbey of Saint-Maixent, however, acknowledging the fact that she had taken back the woods that Louis had donated to the abbey, she renewed their rights to the lands “with a glad heart” now that she was joined in wedlock to the duke of Normandy. It was at Fontevrault, though, that her exhilaration shines through most clearly. To this abbey, which had meant so much to her grandmother Philippa and which would have enormous significance in her own life, she confirmed “with heartfelt emotion” all their existing privileges and added a personal donation of five hundred sous. In this particular charter, in which she mentioned her divorce and recent marriage to “my very noble lord Henry,” she expressed her feeling that she had come to Fontevrault “guided by God,” and certainly the deep impression made upon her that day would be confirmed by her continuing preference for Fontevrault above all other religious establishments.
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