The Conquering Family (8 page)

In the warm months gardens were full of color along the water front and trees supplied touches of green, even in the densest parts. London kept an almost gay look from spring to autumn. In winter it looked dirty and depressing, and it was cold and raw. But the citizens, even to the poor fripperers who dealt in rags and old clothes and the rakerers who cleaned the streets, had warm cloaks. Wool was king and took that much care of its subjects!

And now we must have something to say about Eleanor, the loveliest, the richest, the most fascinating, the most notorious, and most talked-about woman of the age.

Extending along the western coast of France from Brittany to the wild barrier of the Pyrenees, taking in the fat meadows and the rich vineyards of Poitou, Lusignan, Angoumois, Saintonge, and Perigord, terminating in the south with that country of shrewd men and valiant fighters called Gascony, and then jutting far over into the midriff of France to include Limousin and Auvergne, was a land of fabulous richness which was then called Aquitaine. The kings of France, hunched over charcoal braziers in their drafty Paris palaces or smarting from the smoke of the
reredos
(fire pots without chimneys) in their gaunt castles thereabouts, had accepted the homage of the Duke of Aquitaine but would have changed places with their fortunate vassals who lived in this land where the cattle were fat and the trees were laden with figs and the evenings were warm and scented. Aquitaine had become the world center of Courts of Love.

Duke William ruled Aquitaine and he was very old. He had one son who had gone to the Crusades and who was so good that the people called him St. William. The old man had not been a saint by any means but had spent a large part of his life wandering up and down his broad domain looking for romance, and always finding it. He now wanted to abdicate and spend his last years as a pilgrim and penitent, having in full degree that fear of the hereafter and the torments of hell which motivated so much of what happened in those days. His saintly son had two daughters only, Eleanor and Petronille, both of whom took after their grandfather.

When Eleanor was fifteen and already recognized as Queen of the Courts of Love, her father died and the unsaintly grandfather would no longer delay his plan to balance a lifetime of lechery with a year or two of penitence. The question of a husband for the luscious little beauty became, therefore, an issue of international importance. The husband selected for her would assume the title of duke and rule the country in her right. Louis the Fat was King of France at this juncture, and his avoirdupois made it impossible for him to be lifted out of bed. The mind functioning in this mass of fatty degeneration was keen, nonetheless, and fully conscious of the necessity of finding a French husband for the vivacious Eleanor. He finally decided to marry her to his own son, who was to rule after him as Louis VII.

This Louis was a nice young prince with a great reputation for saintliness, although in reality his piety was more a love of ordered ritual. He had enough of worldly appetites to become enamoured of the dark-eyed, long-lashed Eleanor. It would have been hard for him not to fall in love with her, for the Lady of Aquitaine was lively and amusing as well. She dressed herself well, and the first time Prince Louis saw her she swept into the room in a skirt which was fifteen yards around at the hem, one for each year of her age, and which swayed and rustled voluptuously as she walked. For her part, she liked the idea of being Queen of France, and so on August 1, 1137, the marriage took place.

It was not a success, not even at the start. A saint in the nuptial couch was not Eleanor’s idea of a marriage. To make matters worse, her sister Petronille, who took after that philandering old grandfather even more than Eleanor, fell in love with a married man, the Count of Vermandois. He secured a divorce and married Petronille, and this led to a war in the course of which Louis led some troops against the family of the set-aside wife, on Eleanor’s urging, and it happened that more than a thousand innocent people were burned to death in a church. Louis, who was a man of much fine feeling, never did escape the sense of guilt which possessed him because of this. His persistent melancholy made him less and less a suitable match for Eleanor. She had borne him two daughters, however, when the saintly firebrand, Bernard of Clairvaux, began to preach the need for another crusade. Louis, now King, decided to go, and he was so
imbued with fervor that he gave in to Eleanor when she decided she would accompany him and take a troop of lady crusaders with her.

There was a scramble to join the Queen’s detachment. She wanted young ladies only, and it was necessary, of course, for them to be noble and married. The Countess of Toulouse joined and Sibyelle of Flanders and the Duchess of Boulogne. They were to be a mounted division and they drilled in public and created a great deal of admiring comment. There was much consultation and secret discussion over the question of uniforms. When the King and his military advisers came to inspect them finally, it was found they had adopted something so distinctly masculine that the advisers gasped. They were wearing over-all white tunics, slit up the sides to permit freedom in walking and riding, and with a red cross stamped in front and back. Over their tight-fitting hose they had red leather shoes which came to the knee and turned over to show the orange shade of the lining. Eleanor, as their leader, had some special touches of her own, the royal crest on her arm and a plume in her hat.

The dismay of the King and his officers must have been hard to conceal. There was nothing to be done about it, however. The King’s word had been given; they were all ladies of high degree and not to be offended; they had to be allowed to go with the army, in their amazonish hose and their gay red shoes. There was, to be sure, much shaking of heads and muttering, all of which was fully justified in the light of subsequent events.

Queen Eleanor’s Guard, as they called themselves, proved a drawback from the start. They had so much luggage that they slowed up the marches, and the younger knights were always so conscious of their presence that they paid too little attention to duty. They were directly responsible for one great military disaster. Finding a cool, green valley much to their liking, they insisted on camping there. The King and his generals were weak enough to give in, even though they knew the place might be a deathtrap. The valley was surrounded by high wooded slopes on which a hostile army could lurk unseen. The wooded slopes
were
filled with Saracen forces, who waited until the French were engaged in pitching tents, setting up the horse lines, and drawing water. Then they struck, coming down on the startled Crusaders like an avalanche and shouting their battle cry of “Allah! Allah!” The French were caught off guard so completely that it seemed they might be wiped out, Queen Eleanor’s ladies with the rest. However, they managed to pull themselves together, and Louis fought with considerable courage in his fervid desire to atone for the great error he had been cajoled into making, and finally the screeching white-turbaned hordes were beaten off. Seven thousand Frenchmen had been killed.

Eleanor seldom saw the King, who was kept busy in futile efforts to drive the Saracens back far enough from the coast to relieve the strain on
Christian-held Jerusalem. It was inevitable that she would get into trouble. She discovered that her uncle Robert, who ruled in Antioch, was a handsome man of impeccable manners and ingratiating address, and very little older than herself. Robert, in fact, had inherited all the bad qualities of his father, the wicked old rogue of a duke. He and his beautiful niece were in each other’s company a great deal. Robert had grandiose ideas and had been hatching a scheme to weld all of the Near East into one strong confederation (with himself at the head, of course), and to aid in working this out he wanted to get his niece free of the good Louis and marry her to the Sultan of Iconium, as the price of that potentate’s support. From the reports which were current, Eleanor would have preferred to remain in close relationship with the handsome Robert to being head wife in the harem of a heathen ruler. At any rate, the gossip about them became so great that it even reached the ears of the fatuous Louis. There was also a Saracen sheik who saw her and was so ensnared that he came to the French camp many times in various disguises and was always admitted to see her. Some historians say this was the great Saladin himself. Inasmuch as the future opponent of her still unborn son Richard was then barely out of swaddling clothes, it must be assumed that the mysterious visitor was someone else.

Through one cause and another the Crusade was an unqualified failure. When Louis and his disgruntled army and Eleanor and her complaining guard (their cheeks tanned to leather, their hands rough and broken, their tempers short) turned about to slink back to France, it was thoroughly understood from Louis down to the lowliest scullion scraping grease in the kitchen tents that there would be a divorce.

In such an exalted place, however, there were grave difficulties attached to getting a divorce. If it were granted for adultery, neither of them would be allowed to remarry. Eleanor would not have wanted it on those terms, nor would Louis, who had not yet been blessed with an heir. Under the circumstances they decided to patch things up, and if the next child she bore him had been a boy, the whole face of history would have been changed. She would have remained Queen of France, and the Hundred Years’ War might not have been fought. But the child was a girl.

It was during this period of indecision that Henry came to the court of France with his father Geoffrey, who was renewing his oath of fealty to the French monarch. Geoffrey was still a handsome man, and the Queen coquetted with him openly. She even looked under her long lashes at the son, who was only seventeen but a well-set-up fellow with an eye bold enough to look back at a queen. Two years later Henry returned alone. His father was dead and, although Louis was giving Stephen’s son Eustace a somewhat halfhearted advocacy, it was generally expected that the next King of England would be Matilda’s son. Eleanor now saw him with new eyes and with a sudden intentness. Young men find beautiful wives
of other men attractive, especially when they are older than themselves, and Henry’s interest in Eleanor was at least the equal of hers. An agreement was made between them that as soon as she could achieve her freedom they would be married.

It may seem hard to believe that a woman would thus arrange to take as her second husband a man nearly twelve years younger than herself, but the explanation is clear enough. Eleanor did not want to relinquish her crown as Queen of France unless something equally good was obtainable. She would not have married Henry unless she had been sure he would be the next King of England.

Henry had seen in Eleanor more than a beautiful and willing woman. She represented to him the chance for an empire. All of Aquitaine and its allied provinces, added to England and Normandy and Anjou, would make him ruler over lands twice as extensive as those of Louis of France. Her tarnished reputation meant little to him under these circumstances, her greater years even less.

The marriage between Louis and Eleanor was finally dissolved on March 18, 1152, at Beaugency, the grounds being consanguinity. Her patrimony was returned to Eleanor without any restrictions. This was a surprise, for she now became again Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right and the greatest catch in Europe. If Louis had entertained any suspicion of what was coming, he would not have acted with such generosity, for France could not tolerate willingly the union of this great territory with the kingdom of the north. The news when it came was like a thunderbolt.

Disguised as a private gentleman and with a small train of attendants, Henry crossed French territory into the domain of his lady and arrived at Bordeaux in time to marry her on the first day of May. A stunned world heard that the ceremony had been solemnized with great pomp and a lavish display of ducal wealth. The news caused alarm, chagrin, and fear in French high circles. The councilors of the King wanted Louis to invade Aquitaine immediately and dislodge the errant duchess and her youthful bridegroom before any trouble for France could be planned. Louis, however, shared the unreadiness which had made Ethelred of England such a failure as a king. He fumed and raged and did nothing. The next disturbing piece of news to reach his ears was that the bridal couple were in Normandy and that Eleanor had assembled a fleet of thirty-six ships with which Henry would invade England. The invasion was successful, as has been told, resulting in the Treaty of Wallingford.

At Rouen on August 17, Eleanor gave birth to a son who was named William, after the Conqueror, it is to be hoped, and not the old gander of Aquitaine.

The Eleanor who came to England was not the vivacious girl who presided over the Courts of Love in her own warm southland, nor was she the vain and passionate woman who had kept the household of Louis in such turmoil. She had not changed entirely. Her temper was still high, she was as vain as ever, she thought more of the adornment of her person than of the state of her immortal soul. But she had steadied in purpose and she meant to comport herself as a queen should. Like the astringent persimmon which becomes sweet after the ripening period or a touch of frost, Eleanor of Aquitaine was showing signs of mellowing. In addition to her more obvious and material reasons for marrying Henry, there was certainly another one: that she hoped to recapture her youth and live over the years she had wasted with a man for whom she had nothing but contempt. She was in most respects a good wife to her youthful spouse, presenting him with eight children. The infidelities were all on his side, and he was at least equally to blame with her for the differences which led to her confinement at Woodstock. When he left her in the role of regent while he went to the Continent, she acquitted herself well. At any rate, she did not interfere with the Norman officials he placed beside her to make sure she did nothing wrong, such being Henry’s way.