April Queen (10 page)

Louis' kingdom was not just divided between north and south. There was no common system of law. Loyalties were local or regional at best. The Bretons in the north-west continued to use their Celtic language and the Flemings in the north-east spoke a Low German dialect, both of which survive to this day. Elsewhere in the northern half of Louis' realm his subjects spoke various dialects of the
langue d'oïl
.

This Babel was the source of much ecclesiastical power. The lowest clergy, living in villages with their concubines or ‘hearth-women' and broods of children, were forever being criticised for mumbling a few prayers and biblical quotations learned by heart. However, those in holy orders conversed and corresponded fluently in Latin with each other. Diplomacy and the civil service therefore became ‘clerical' business, a dual meaning that still survives.

It was thus a very serious matter when Eleanor's dominance caused Louis to fall out with the Church a second time. If the incident at Reims could have been passed off by a little episcopal diplomacy as an error on the part of a young and inexperienced monarch, there was no such excuse for him deliberately refusing to endorse the election of the new archbishop of Bourges in 1141 in order to install his own candidate – exactly as William IX had done.

The chapter had elected Pierre de la Châtre, a Cluniac who was in Rome on Church business. Invested by the pope, he found himself on return to France locked out of his own cathedral on the king's orders. Seeking asylum in the territory of Thibault of Champagne, he was ordered by Innocent II to return to Bourges and take up his duties.
At the same time, Innocent admonished Louis for behaving like a foolish schoolboy who should cease meddling in church affairs.

It was hardly a tactful way of reprimanding Eleanor's twenty-year-old husband. With her backing, he escalated the dispute by swearing on holy relics a solemn oath not to recant,
⁷
to which the pope replied by excommunicating him. Appalled that this should happen to a pupil who had been so promising in his youth, Louis' former teachers pointed the finger of blame at Eleanor.

Yet on their next visit to Poitou in the summer of 1142 he and she as count and countess confirmed all the gifts and privileges that their predecessors had granted to the churches and monasteries of Saintonge and Poitou and ordered some Limousin nobles to repair damage they had done to the abbey of Solignac. They arbitrated a dispute over the succession to the viscounty of Limoges, the most important of the four into which the county was divided and ordered a certain Gausbert de Nobiliaco to release one of their functionaries he had imprisoned.

Some petitioners never knew when to stop. Having succeeded in her first request, Eleanor's aunt the abbess of Saintes had a hundred others to make. The queen's charter granting them was approved not only by Louis but also by ever-present Aelith, which implies that she had some rights in the matter. The presence of Eleanor's chaplain Pierre, acting as her chancellor, shows that she had acquired a seal of her own.

This was the longest sojourn in Poitou of the entire marriage. After a few days in the royal palace at St Jean d'Angély, they travelled onwards to Niort, Louis' cousin Raoul de Vermandois acting as his steward as usual. From Niort, the household wended its way west for a holiday in the pacified Talmond hunting forest, where a less bellicose son-in-law of Guillaume de Lezay was now Louis' co-seigneur of the castle. Progress was interrupted repeatedly by petitioners waiting en route for a hearing. Abbots and abbesses requesting largesse alternated with a troupe of lepers playing flutes as a way of earning a living without actually begging or the distressed widow of a knight who had mortgaged all his property to go on crusade and never returned. For those with no chance of going or sending a petition to Paris, or even to Poitiers, it was a rare chance to seek justice or charity.

An incident during this idyllic interlude marks the beginning of the end of Eleanor's marriage to Louis. Aelith, who had caught the eye of Raoul de Vermandois at the wedding in Bordeaux, was now seventeen and in the full bloom of womanhood. Wealthy in her own right and with the poise and polish that came from four years of being treated as
the queen's sister, and travelling everywhere with her, she was a very desirable catch.

At some point on the trip through Poitou during the late summer of 1142, which the two spent in close proximity, Vermandois asked Louis' permission to marry Aelith
⁸
and thus unite her dower properties in Burgundy to his spread of fiefs between Flanders and the Vexin. That the king's cousin was more than twice the age of Aelith and already married cannot have seemed a great impediment to either granddaughter of William IX, but Louis should have taken pause for thought since his cousin's wife Eleanor of Champagne was a niece of Count Thibault. Instead, to please Eleanor, he consented, providing the canonical requirements for a divorce could be satisfied.

Eleanor was still trying to make a warrior out of Louis. While the royal household mixed business and pleasure in the Talmond, his army had been marching north from Toulouse. The feudal obligation of knight service for forty days a year was already going out of fashion. Louis, like so many other overlords, preferred
scutage
or shield-money in lieu of service, which enabled him to hire reliable professional mercenaries – the word ‘soldier' meaning originally anyone who serves for pay.

Joining the army at Tours, whose citizens had dug defensive ditches and fortified the walls without permission, he set up camp outside the city. From this position of strength he made a deal very different from his reaction to the uprising in Poitiers. In return for payment of a fine of 500 marks, which enabled him to pay off his mercenaries, Tours was permitted to keep its walls and ditches. After the return to Paris, three compliant bishops were found outside the see of Sens to dissolve Raoul de Vermandois' marriage on the usual ground of consanguinity, after which the bishop of Noyon – who was his brother – joined with the prelates of Laon and Senlis to unite the disparate couple in holy matrimony.

Count Thibault, as befitted a grandson of William the Conqueror, was not a man to take lightly the humiliation of a niece who, deprived of her dower lands, placed herself and her children under his protection. He enlisted Bernard of Clairvaux in her cause, the land on which Clairvaux stood having been given to the Order by Thibault's father, Hugh of Champagne. No sooner had Bernard's letter reached the pope than the three offending bishops were excommunicated at the council of Lagny-sur-Marne in Champagne, Aelith's marriage was declared invalid and Vermandois was ordered to take back his lawful wedded wife. He refused and was also excommunicated.

With the Vermandois domains placed under interdict, Eleanor persuaded Louis that Thibault needed to be taught a lesson. The month of January 1143 saw the royal army laying Champagne waste in a campaign that culminated in the torching of the lath-and-plaster houses with thatched roofs in the town of Vitry on the River Marne. The only military target was the wooden motte-and-bailey castle, which was attacked with fire arrows and set alight. From his vantage point on a nearby hill, Louis watched as the mercenaries also set fire, whether by accident or design, to the houses around the castle. The terrified civilians fled to the sanctuary of the church, whose roof too caught fire from wind-borne embers. When this fell in on the mass of people beneath, 1,300 unarmed men, women and children died.

While it was inevitable that the masses suffered in every campaign, such a blatant transgression of the Peace of God earned excommunication for Louis. Denied the consolation of confession, absolution and the Blessed Sacrament, torn between his fear of the Last Judgement and his puppyish devotion to Eleanor, he fell into a deep depression, which she could neither understand nor cure.

To repair the royal finances, diminished by the campaign in Champagne, was an immediate priority. The expanding economy of the cities all over Europe required venture capital, which was hard to obtain because lending money at interest was forbidden to Christians. Informed that the progressive citizens of Tours were nevertheless making a very lucrative business out of usury, Louis returned there in August 1143 – not to put a stop to it, but to name his price. In return for a payment of 30,000
sous
, the banking activities were legalised and repayment of loans made legally binding.

After Pope Innocent died on 24 September, his successor Celestine II lifted the interdict on the royal household at the instigation of Bernard of Clairvaux.
⁹
His guilt still unassuaged, Louis fell ill. On his recovery, he became even less kingly and more monkish, wearing a gown and sandals and having his head shaved into a tonsure.

The still-exiled archbishop of Bordeaux was one of many prelates present at the council at Corbeil, called early in 1144 to settle the dispute with the count of Champagne. The bishop of Laon had changed sides and drawn up a genealogical table proving what everyone knew: that Aelith and her husband were within the prohibited degrees. Bernard of Clairvaux was tirelessly active behind the scenes, corresponding with Louis and Pope Innocent, among many others.
¹⁰
To Bishop Stephen of Palestrina, he wrote of Louis, ‘What right has this man to break up the marriage (between
Vermandois and his first wife) on the grounds of consanguinity when, as all the world knows, he himself married a woman to whom he is related in the fourth degree?'
¹¹

The council ended in stalemate, with the matter transferred to the abbey of St Denis as a court of appeal. Eleanor went there herself to plead the cause of her sister, but without success. No longer was the abbey of St Denis a combined chancery and war office, as it had been during Fat Louis' reign. In response to Bernard's nagging, Suger had reduced the pomp and circumstance of his personal life and was devoting himself to the construction of his new basilica.

Abbé Bernard had no doubt about the true cause of Suger's exclusion from the councils of state, and warned the king by letter not to listen to the counsel of the devil.

It was saintly Bernard's way to admonish Louis while praying for his soul; Suger the statesman, dismissed by his king, devised a more practical solution to the problem of bringing Louis back into the bosom of the Church by inviting him to play an important part in the imminent inauguration of the partly built basilica, in the hope that this would stimulate his hunger for the religious life in which he had been so active before Eleanor came on the scene.

Not since the dedication of Cluny by Pope Innocent twelve years before had there been a consecration on this scale in France. On 10 June 1144 Louis arrived at St Denis in time to share the all-night vigil of the monks. Reconciled for the occasion with her son and Eleanor, Adelaide de Maurienne was in the royal party. Next morning the magnificent gleaming bronze doors of the basilica depicting the Passion and Resurrection opened wide for the greatest in the land. Above them, as a
memento mori
, the carved tympanum showed Christ enthroned in judgement over the elders of Israel. Inside, eyes used to the thick columns and round arches of the Romanesque style were literally opened wide by the new perpen-dicular style, with soaring columns topped by broken arches and the ribbing of the roof floating far above the worshippers' heads.

On every side, precious metals gleamed in the light shafting down from the slim and elegant windows that retold biblical stories in rainbow-hued stained glass for the edification of the illiterate majority gaping at the riches on display. The floor could have been strewn with gold dust or ashes, for all anyone could see. There was not an inch of unoccupied space. Louis, accorded no regal respect in his anonymous penitent's gown, had to beat a passage through the throng with a staff.
¹³
In contrast, Eleanor was dressed in a costly gown of damask and wearing a queenly diadem.

A total of nineteen prelates, including the archbishops of Paris, Rouen, Canterbury and Bordeaux asperged the still incomplete building with holy water and consecrated the many altars. Hymns were chanted, blessings pronounced, prayers offered up like the clouds of incense writhing higher and higher through the beams of light. In Suger's scenario, the king and a dozen knights played the parts of Christ and the Apostles.
¹⁴
To proclaim his rehabilitation, Louis was entrusted with carrying in the procession the holiest reliquary of all, a bejewelled chest containing –
pace
Abelard – bones reputedly of Dionysius the Areopagite.

To the chanting of the choirs and the obeisance of the congregation, he bore it to the shrine of porphyry and marble with its retable of gold encrusted with gemstones. In front of that towered the huge golden cross of the transept, studded with cabochon-cut gems. Standing there, only a few paces from the tombs of his brother and the preceding Capetian monarchs, Louis could not fail to reflect on the mortality of kings, of which Bernard had reminded him.

‘No one,' said Gervase the chronicler, ‘would have taken the king for that scourge of war who had recently destroyed so many towns, burned so many churches and shed so much blood. The spirit of penitence shone in his face.'
¹⁵

For the occasion, Eleanor's gift was an antique vase of rock crystal set with gold from the family treasury in Poitou, for use at the high altar of St Denis. One of the few objects extant that are known to have been handled by her, it is today in the Louvre Museum, the subject of a twofold mystery. First, Suger diplomatically distanced himself and the Church from the donor by having it engraved, ‘This vase Mitadolus gave to an ancestor of Aanor [Eleanor]; she, his bride, gave it to King Louis; the king gave it to me; and I, Suger, gave it to the saints.'
¹⁶
Second, old things then had no especial value and a more appropriate present from Eleanor would have been an altar-piece in the intricate enamelwork for which Limoges was famous.