Lionheart (3 page)

The divorce had been arranged by negotiation between Louis’ bishops and her vassal, Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux. The more worldly of Louis Capet’s churchmen, like Archbishop Suger of St Denis, who had also served the late King Louis VI as chancellor, were reluctant to see the taxes of her immense dowry of Aquitaine and Poitou lost to the royal purse. They also considered it dangerous that one-third of France would revert to her personal control in the absence of a husband. Against that, the more pious of Louis’ prelates, like Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted from the Sermon on the Mount, when Christ said that an eye that sinned should be plucked out and thrown away, for it was better to lose a hand or eye than for the whole body to be cast into hellfire. These bishops agonised over the state of the king’s soul and wanted him separated as swiftly as possible from ‘the whore of Aquitaine’, suspected of gross misconduct including an affair with her uncle Raymond of Toulouse during her stay in the Holy Land while on the pointless Second Crusade with Louis. They saw a divorce as the only way to save Louis’ soul from further sin by removing from his bed – not that they often slept together – the obstreperous consort who had briefly weaned him away from the influence of the Church, for high office in which he had been raised until called to supreme temporal office by the accidental death of his older brother.

In March 1152 the archbishop of Sens, who had presided over the condemnation of the teacher Peter Abelard, castrated in punishment for his scandalously illicit sexual relationship with his adolescent pupil Heloïse, convened the most important churchmen and lay nobles of Louis’ territory at the castle of Beaugency, between Orleans and Blois. Louis, with charity rare among royalty, refused to accuse his queen of anything that might be prejudicial to her and decreed that the marriage be dissolved on the grounds of consanguinity alone. Being a woman, Eleanor was not allowed to speak. Her advocate, Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux, who had negotiated her marriage to Louis fifteen years earlier, stipulated the return of her dowry lands in the same condition as at the time of the marriage, in consideration of which she would remain a faithful vassal of King Louis. After arrangements were agreed for an audit to ensure that this condition was observed, Eleanor was free – at the price of a recent unwanted pregnancy forced on her by the pope and the loss of her two daughters by Louis, who remained the property of their father.

Twelfth-century France showing Eleanor’s territorial inheritance

Eleanor departed from Beaugency in a cortège of her vassals, the richest woman in the world by far but a potential prey for any noble with the nerve and force to kidnap and forcibly marry her. This nearly happened twice in the next few days during the journey home to her own lands. Near Blois, 16-year-old Geoffrey Plantagenet attempted an ambush that failed.
⁹
On the Loire crossing at Tours another ambush by Thibault of Blois, son of the count of Champagne, likewise failed when Eleanor’s route was changed at the last minute.

Once safely installed in her own quarters in the Tour Maubergeonne of the comital palace at Poitiers, 30-year-old Eleanor lost no time in repudiating all the charters appertaining to her lands that she had been obliged to sign with Louis. Taking stock of her situation, she had no illusions. Her position was the same as it had been fifteen years earlier after inheriting title to the duchy of Aquitaine on her father’s death. So rich an heiress, while unmarried and therefore unprotected by a father or husband, was constantly at risk of having her territory invaded, and being obliged to wed the invader. Although just released from a marriage that had bored her for years, she had therefore swiftly to remarry a powerful noble, whose territories added to hers would make the couple a force to be reckoned with. Her choice was dictated not by love, but
realpolitik
. It fell on a neighbour whom she had met at the Capetian court when he and his father came to do homage to King Louis.

On 6 April Geoffrey Plantagenet’s older brother, the 19-year-old Count Henry of Anjou, whose county abutted on the northern border of Poitou, announced to his assembled vassals that he was going to marry the 30-year-old ex-wife of his overlord Louis Capet. He had previously sought the hand of one of Louis VII’s daughters, but abandoned that suit for Eleanor’s far richer dowry.
¹⁰
Feudal custom demanded that two vassals of Louis must request his approval to their match, but this was something that neither Henry nor Eleanor had any intention of doing. They also chose to ignore the even closer ties of consanguinity between themselves than those which had justified Eleanor’s canonical repudiation by Louis Capet. In addition, Henry ignored a new slander being circulated to blacken the name of the woman who had rejected the king of France: that she had slept with Henry’s own womanising father, Geoffrey the Fair.

Negotiations on Eleanor’s behalf were again conducted by Archbishop Geoffroy of Bordeaux. On 18 May 1152 in the grandeur of Poitiers Cathedral, which lies a short walk from the comital palace, the knot was tied with due ceremony
¹¹
amid excitement and apprehension among their vassals, for the refusal of the two spouses to seek Louis’ approval constituted grounds for his military intervention, should he be able to assemble a sufficiently powerful army to come and punish them.

Eleanor and Henry’s combined lands

Through his mother Empress Matilda – so called by virtue of her first marriage to the German Holy Roman Emperor Henry V – Count Henry was also duke of Normandy and overlord of Maine and Touraine. Allying Eleanor’s lands to his made him the most powerful man in France. Together, they controlled more than half the country, which was far more than poor Louis Capet could claim as his own domain. The icing on the cake for Henry was that the acquisition of Eleanor’s dower lands also increased immeasurably his chances of recovering what the Empress Matilda regarded as part of her birthright: the disputed kingdom of England. For that, Henry of Anjou surely owed his new wife a debt of lifelong gratitude. Did Eleanor know that Henry’s gratitude never lasted? She can hardly have guessed then that, two decades later, he would be her implacable enemy, against whom she would raise their adult sons in armed rebellion.

Louis’ advisers counselled him to summon Henry of Anjou to Paris to answer to a charge of treason for marrying without his suzerain’s consent. Although Eleanor was equally guilty, the king refused then or at any other time to make any move against his ex-wife. Since Henry showed no sign of putting in an appearance to be judged, Louis gathered together a host, partly by pardoning vassals like Robert of Dreux, who had joined a coalition of usurping nobles while Louis was absent in the Holy Land on crusade. Others, like Thibault V de Blois, were bribed – in his case by betrothal to Eleanor’s 2-year-old second daughter by Louis. Her other daughter abandoned in Paris, 7-year-old Aelith, had just been married to Count Henry I of Champagne, enlisting him and his vassals to the royal cause by bringing to the House of Champagne the child bride’s tenuous claim to her mother’s duchy of Aquitaine.

Normally, the Church would have supported Louis in his intention to punish Henry and Eleanor, but the French prelates and the pope were too busy playing another political game to get involved in this squabble: Pope Eugenius III had instructed Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury not to crown Eustace of Boulogne as the future successor to his father Stephen of Blois on the throne of England. Henry of Anjou’s recent marriage thus made him the strongest contender for the throne of England after Stephen’s death. On Midsummer Day, a little over one month after the May wedding and in the hope of weakening Henry’s position in the competition for the crown of England, Stephen also sent a contingent to join Louis’ forces invading the Plantagenet possessions. The motives of the other members of Louis’ coalition, like young Geoffrey of Anjou, were simpler: to grab and hold on to whatever part of Henry and Eleanor’s territories they could conquer and occupy. There was indeed so much territory at stake that each could easily have acquired a county or two for himself, if victorious.

N
OTES

1.
  Latin adjective
hodierna
, meaning ‘of today’.

2.
  Also spelled Necham and Nequam. The latter being Latin for ‘worthless’ was possibly a play on words, or a comparison with his more famous milk-brother.

3.
  See, inter alia, F. and J. Gies,
Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages
(New York: Hudson and Row, 1987), pp. 176–203.

4.
  See at greater length D. Boyd,
Eleanor, April Queen of Aquitaine
(Stroud: The History Press, 2011), pp. 179–82.

5.
  Originally christened Edith and also known as Maud.

6.
  Walter Map, ed. M. Rhodes James,
De Nugis Curialium
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 238.

7.
  A. Kelly,
Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 6–7 (abridged by the author).

8.
  Stubbs, W.,
Roger of Howden Chronica
, Vol 2, p. 335.

9.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire des Comtes de Poitou
(Paris: Picard, 1903), Vol 2, p. 108.

10.
  Kelly,
Eleanor of Aquitaine
, p. 193.

11.
  William of Newburgh,
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
, ed. R. Howlett in
Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I
, Rolls Series 82 (London: Longmans, 1884), Vol 1, p. 93.

2

Duke to King, Duchess to Queen

I
t seemed, briefly, that Henry had been caught unawares because he was heavily involved with preparations to invade England and reclaim the kingdom lost by his mother in the protracted civil war against Stephen of Blois – a time of strife in which, it was said, ‘Christ and his angels slept’ while the country was ravaged by Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries and even the palace of Westminster was turned into a doss-house. In fact, Henry had been preparing for Louis’ move ever since the council of war on 6 April. The speed and savagery with which he now led his forces to lay waste Robert of Dreux’s lands caused the Church to beg for a truce, at the chance of which Louis leaped after falling psychosomatically ill. Ignoring both, Henry rode south with his customary speed to capture the castle of Montsoreau from a castellan who supported his brother Geoffrey. One by one, his other enemies fled the field, leaving Eleanor and her husband the strongest force in France and in a stronger position to invade England the following year.

They spent that autumn
en chevauchée
– literally riding the length and breadth of her lands together to impress on every vassal, both lay and religious (for an abbot was required like any other baron to lead his contingent of armed men in the field in support of his overlord) that the new duke would ruthlessly crush any attempts at secession during his absence the following year when Henry intended invading England. Just one example was needed to impress all the other vassals. It came when the couple arrived at Limoges for Henry’s coronation as duke and were at first greeted with acclamation by the populace and the abbot and his community. Following feudal custom, Henry demanded accommodation and food for his retinue but the abbot of Limoges refused, pleading that the custom only covered a modest ducal party lodged within the walls, whereas Henry’s retinue, expanded by many of his vassals and vavasours who had come to witness the ceremony, was encamped outside them. It is probable that the dispute had more to do with the numbers involved than where exactly they were sleeping but, when fighting erupted between his soldiery and the resentful townsfolk, Henry ordered that they and the abbot be taught a lesson. The newly built bridge across the River Vienne was torn down, as were the recently rebuilt city walls,
¹
making Duke Henry’s point that his retinue was no longer ‘without the walls’ which no longer existed, and therefore should be fed.