Authors: Lisa Hilton
John of Salisbury reports that Eleanor had raised the prospect of divorce at Antioch in 1148. Louis was apparently prepared to consider the proposal on the grounds of their consanguinity, but was advised against proceeding as it would be too shameful, on top of the ruinous crusade, if ‘the King was said to have been despoiled of his wife or to have been abandoned by her’.
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Since in 1148 the initiative lay with Eleanor, it has been frequently argued that the couple’s eventual divorce in 1152 was the outcome of a long-term plan of hers; that she ‘fashioned her marital situation to meet her own ends’.
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Eleanor, it is claimed, manipulated her husband’s conscience to gain her freedom. There are good reasons to doubt this theory, the first of which is that when the King explained the situation to the Pope, Eugenius, with whom he and Eleanor had a meeting at Tusculum on their return journey, he forbade them even to consider such a step. Eugenius threatened anathema on anyone who objected to their union and declared that it could not be dissolved on any pretext whatsoever. The Pontiff also offered some more intimate marriage counselling. He ‘made them sleep in the same bed, which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by kindly converse
to restore love between them’.
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Louis accepted the Pope’s judgement enthusiastically as, at this stage, according to John of Salisbury, he was still very much in love with his wife, and the birth of a second daughter, Alix, in 1150 shows that Eleanor had (whether graciously or not) submitted to her duty. It was the gender of this second child, rather than any protracted strategy of Eleanor’s, that pushed Louis towards divorce in 1152. It is important to understand that the desire to present Eleanor as an autonomous heroine has neglected to take into account the legal and customary background of the ending of her first marriage. Eleanor and Louis had now been together for fifteen years, and she had not produced a son.
One of the factors contributing to the lasting success of the Capetian dynasty was the handing down of the crown from father to son from the tenth century until the beginning of the fourteenth. In a culture that did not sanction divorce, the Capetians were skilled at manipulating the canon laws on consanguinity to their own ends, either to remain in marriages the Church considered illegitimate or to dissolve others that had not supplied the requisite male child. Consanguinity was ‘a marvellous excuse for cynics’.
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The
miracle capetien
, this unbroken line of succession spanning hundreds of years, looks less of a miracle, and the ‘scandal’ of Eleanor’s divorce less scandalous, when it is considered that every French king from Philip I (1060—1108) to Philip II (1180—1223) was divorced at least once. Both Louis’s father and grandfather had had their first marriages dissolved on the basis of the prohibited degrees and had gone on to produce heirs with new wives. After Alix’s birth, Louis was concerned that Eleanor might not give him a boy. Any suggestion that the King and Queen of France separated because of Louis’s concern for his soul is contradicted by the fact that first, he had full papal dispensation to continue the marriage and secondly, when he remarried, he did so to a woman even more closely related to him, Constance of Castile. Eleanor’s second husband was also related to her in the same degree.
The conservative Abbot Suger died in 1151, and it may have been the absence of his restraining influence that finally pushed Louis to move for an annulment. The archbishop of Sens was appointed to lead a council consisting of various barons, clerics and the bishops of Reims, Bordeaux and Rouen, which met at Beaugency in the county of Blois in March 1152. After three days of deliberation, the council predictably decided in favour of the King’s wishes. No adultery claim was produced, and the consanguinity argument was unchallenged by either Eleanor or Louis. Marie and Alix were declared legitimate, since the marriage had been undertaken in good faith, and both parties were permitted to retain their
lands intact. Eleanor and Louis had kept Christmas at Limoges after a tour of Eleanor’s territories in the south and they were together at Bordeaux in January 1152, but the next month Louis left Eleanor alone at Poitiers, in anticipation of the council’s ruling.
Eleanor had no means of independently instigating a separation from Louis, but she made it clear that the annulment was agreeable to her. After the crusade, William of Newburgh notes, she was ‘greatly offended with the King’s conduct, even pleading she had married a monk, not a king’. This allusion to Louis’s supposed lack of virility has again been taken at face value, as a rationale for Eleanor’s choice of second husband. The implication is that she was frustrated and needed a ‘real man’. Perhaps she was, and perhaps she did, but all we can know for certain of her motivations relates to her political position as both an immensely powerful landowner and a relatively vulnerable woman rather than to a heroine of chivalry who married for love.
It has been suggested that Eleanor had come to a secret understanding with the man who would become Henry II of England when, in 1151, as Duke of Normandy, he accompanied his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, to Paris to pay homage to Louis: ‘It is said that while she was still married to the King of the Franks, she had aspired to marriage with the Norman Duke … and for this reason she desired and procured a divorce’
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In the summer of 1151, the French were at war with the Angevins in Normandy, and according to this argument, Geoffrey of Anjou, knowing of the clandestine arrangement, made the otherwise surprising decision to cede part of the Vexin to Louis. Leaving aside the fact that any ‘secret understanding’ could only have been reached in Paris when Geoffrey and Henry were there — that is, after they had agreed to the Vexin annexation, the confirmation of which was part of the reason for their trip to the French capital — a look at the situation in Normandy at the time shows that there were good tactical reasons for Geoffrey’s concession at this point which had nothing to do with Eleanor.
England was in the last stages of the civil war that would see Henry FitzEmpress crowned as the heir to the Empress Matilda. In 1151, Louis was allied with King Stephen of England against the Angevins, and was campaigning in Upper Normandy with Eustace of England, the husband of his sister Constance. Geoffrey of Anjou was fighting in the south, but was saved from a full assault by the French when Louis fell ill in Paris and was unable to join the army mustered in the Mantois. Louis had already lost Montreuil-Bellay to the Angevins, which had been the primary motivation for his offensive, and the Angevins were keen to reach a truce
as they aimed to take the conflict out of Normandy and back to England. The stall in Louis’s alliance with Stephen caused by his illness meant a peace was acceptable to both sides, and Geoffrey and Henry left Paris in the belief that Louis was temporarily mollified and planning to launch a new invasion across the Channel. Geoffrey’s ‘otherwise inexplicable’
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change of heart is thus explained. Further, in 1151, however much Eleanor may have desired a divorce, she was hardly in a position to plot a new marriage unless she knew for certain that the annulment would proceed. Since she was still living with Louis until early the following year, this was prospective, not definite.
Still, Aquitaine was too precious to be left to the mercy of fortune-hunters, and Eleanor does seem to have decided very quickly what she needed to do. After saying her farewells to Louis at Poitiers in February, she appears to have withdrawn to Fontevrault, from where she set off for her own capital once the annulment was announced. On the very first night of her freedom, 21 March 1152, Theobald of Blois attempted to seize her on her southward journey. She escaped by travelling by water to Tours, but when she tried to cross the River Creuse at Port des Piles, she was warned of another ambush, this one set by Henry’s younger brother, the junior Geoffrey of Anjou. She had to rush to the safety of Poitiers by back roads and once she arrived there she lost no time in sending to Henry in Normandy, asking him to come immediately to marry her. The speed of this development does suggest the existence of some kind of understanding between them, as by 18 May Henry was in Poitiers, where he and Eleanor were married discreetly at the cathedral of St Pierre. Misguided extrapolations from the political situation in Normandy do nothing to explain the alliance. A more measured account of Eleanor’s career proposes simply that ‘physical attraction and love of power seem to have drawn Eleanor and Henry together’
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That they met in Paris and that Eleanor kept Henry in mind in the event of achieving her freedom is perhaps the most that can be said of what transpired between February and May.
Eleanor’s divorce meant that in principle, Aquitaine would now be released from French overlordship. After her marriage to Henry, the recovery of her beloved duchy was Eleanor’s first priority. Her first independent charter as Duchess after her marriage is a reconfirmation of the rights of the abbey of St Jean Montierneuf in Poitiers, dated 26 May 1152. This was a standard act for any new lord coming into his lands, and Eleanor used it as a gesture to emphasise that she had regained sole control, stressing that her benefactions to the house followed in the tradition of her great-grandfather, grandfather and father. The next day, she revoked
a grant of the forest of La Sèvre to the abbey of Saint-Maixent, which she had co-signed with Louis in 1146, then regranted it in her own right. These two acts are largely symbolic, indicating Eleanor’s determination to govern her inheritance herself, but if she hoped to enjoy a degree of autonomy in Aquitaine with her new husband, that hope was short-lived. Louis, concerned for the rights of Marie and Alix, refused initially to relinquish his claim on Aquitaine and continued to use his ducal title until 1154, even though Henry assumed it in 1153. Eleanor continued to be a figure of power in the duchy, but by 1156, at which point Henry had settled his dispute with Louis and sworn fealty to him for his Continental possessions, Eleanor’s position of independence had been eroded between the contending demands of both of the men who claimed the right to act on her behalf. At their Christmas court at Bordeaux, Henry accepted homage from Eleanor’s Aquitainian vassals, and for the period 1157—67, she is not mentioned in any of the duchy’s charters.
It was the same story in England. After the death of Eustace of Blois in August 1153 and the signing of the treaty of Winchester in November, Henry was finally poised to achieve his mother’s thwarted ambition and inherit the English crown. In 1154 he and Eleanor travelled to Normandy to wait for news from England. On 25 October King Stephen died, and the new King set sail from Barfleur on 7 December. Eleanor was crowned at his side on 19 December at Westminster. After that, until 1168, she appears in the sources as little more than an ornament. Her reputation as a great queen stems from her later activities in Aquitaine and in the government of her sons. By contrast, the period she spent by her husband’s side as queen of England is one of virtual invisibility. True, she did act as regent of the kingdom in Henry’s absence until 1163, issuing writs and documents and presiding over at least one court at Westminster, as well as in Normandy, but in comparison with her predecessors Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Scotland and Matilda of Boulogne, who ‘exercised all the prerogatives of sovereignty’,
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evidence of Eleanor governing and managing her household and lands is scant. Her role was ceremonial and, in these years, reproductive: ‘Summer and winter, crossing and re-crossing the Channel, almost always expecting another child; here she is, severely reduced to the strictest obligations of a feudal queen: other than the duty to produce numerous offspring for her husband, she must be present everywhere, at every moment, showing herself to the vassals at the plenary courts of Christmas or Easter, riding, sailing, riding again.’
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This picture of Eleanor in the first phase of her English queenship highlights its two dominant demands: travel and childbirth. Eleanor and Henry had eight
children between 1153 and 1166. William, their first son, died aged three in 1156, but Henry, Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Leonor, Joanna and John all survived to marry.
After William’s death, Henry II focused his aspirations on his second son, known as the ‘Young King’ to distinguish him from his father. Young Henry underwent two coronation ceremonies in his father’s lifetime, the French-style confirmations of inheritance that Matilda of Boulogne had failed to obtain for her son Eustace. In 1159, Henry married two-year-old Marguerite of France, King Louis’s daughter by Eleanor’s replacement, Constance of Castile. Despite a stipulation in the 1158 betrothal agreement that Marguerite would not be brought up by Eleanor of Aquitaine, the little girl entered Eleanor’s household after her marriage. After Constance died giving birth to another daughter, Alys, who was betrothed to Eleanor’s son Richard, Louis took a third wife, Adela of Blois. In 1165 she presented him with his yearned-for son, Philip Augustus. Like her sister, the Young Queen, Alys came to live with her new family. The previous year, Eleanor’s daughters by Louis, Marie and Alix, had been married to two brothers, Henry and Theobald of Champagne, and though Eleanor had no part in these arrangements, she convened a council with the archbishop of Cologne at Westminster in 1165 to confirm the marriage of her daughter Matilda to Henry of Saxony. The next year mother and daughter travelled together to Dover, where Matilda embarked for her new life in Germany, and around the same time her brother Geoffrey was betrothed to Constance, the heiress to Brittany. Eleanor’s involvement in her husband’s marital strategies for their offspring, as well as the birth of her last child, John, in 1166, suggests that relations between them were at least functional at this juncture, but romance was about to distort her reputation once again.
In 1165, Henry II fell in love with Rosamund de Clifford, the daughter of a minor Norman knight. Their affair lasted a decade, and although Henry was only in England for three years or so during this period, it provided ample and enduring raw material for the weavers of Eleanor legend. From September 1165 to March 1166, the King stayed mainly at Woodstock, uncharacteristically for such an habitually peripatetic man, and failed to keep Christmas with his wife. He later built a garden at Everswell, near the royal palace, featuring ponds and bowers. The chroniclers were off. The besotted King had reputedly constructed a fantastic maze of ‘Daedalus work’ for his beloved (a description that appears for the first time in Higden’s fourteenth-century
Polychronicon)
and the neglected Queen was murderously enraged. The rivalry between the two
women was immortalised in stories and songs such as ‘The Ballad of Fair Rosamond’, though very little indeed is known of the real Rosamund and there is no evidence that the fantastic maze was ever built or that the Everswell garden had anything to do with her. In appropriately melodramatic style, Eleanor is supposed to have poisoned her rival, a tale that has received an unreasonable degree of attention given that Rosamund lived until 1176, by which time Eleanor had been in prison for three years.