April Queen (21 page)

The counts of Anjou were said to be descended from an ancestress named Mélusine, whose satanic origins were proven by the fact that she never remained in church to take communion. Being a son of the late
King Fulk of Jerusalem and thus well aware of the realities of the Latin Kingdom, Count Geoffrey had remained aloof from the crusading fever (plate 10). More important to him was keeping a firm control over his own domains.
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Geoffrey the Fair was still in his forties, handsome, brave, courtly and exceptionally literate. His equally literate son was known as Henry fitz Empress. The
fitz
prefix of noble Norman names being a corruption of the Latin
filius
, meaning ‘son of', he owed the grand surname to his mother Matilda, the daughter of England's Henry I who had previously been married to the German Emperor Henry V. After his death she had at the age of twenty-six married Count Geoffrey, then aged fifteen. For a decade and a half afterwards, she had been one of the two principal belligerents in the civil war that ravaged England after the death of her father. Although courageous and militarily competent, the Empress Matilda was a hard and bitter woman who had raised her eldest son to be as scheming and devious as herself. Her philosophy modelled on the sport of venery, the main lesson she imparted to him was to show the reward to the hawk but always take it away at the last moment to keep the bird hungry. It was a policy that Henry used throughout his life.

When Eleanor met him for the first time, the young duke of Normandy was no courtly fop, but a swaggering, barrel-chested young man with freckles, grey eyes and short reddish hair, so toughened by continual exercise that he disdained wearing a glove when out hawking, but accepted the bird's sharp talons on his bare wrist. Recently knighted by his cousin the king of Scotland,
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he had already proved himself in battle although only nineteen years old. Through his mother's bloodline he had Normandy and claims on the English throne; through his father he was heir to Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Thanks to his mother, he was also remarkably well educated for a layman, having been tutored in boyhood by Matthieu of Loudun and William of Conches, who dedicated to him a treatise on moral philosophy. During his years in England the great scientist Adelard of Bath had also dedicated a book to him.

All this made him quite a catch, politically speaking – which is why the idea had been mooted before the crusade of marrying him to Princess Marie to guarantee a strong new dynasty on the throne of France, should Louis die in Outremer without an heir. Abbé Bernard had vetoed the idea on the grounds of consanguinity,
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but Louis had rejected it because he favoured the claim to the English throne of Henry's rival, Eustace of Blois.

Later it would be said that the saint of Clairvaux had predicted a bad end for Henry when seeing him for the first time as an infant,
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but this sort of retroactive prophecy was often invented in hagiographic biographies. Certainly, when Henry of Anjou rode across the Petit Pont onto the Ile de la Cité with his father to pay belated homage for the duchy of Normandy, no one in Paris would have prophesied other than a brilliant future for Count Geoffrey's son.

The two Plantagenets – the family nickname derived from Count Geoffrey's use of a sprig of bright yellow broom, or
planta genista
, stuck in his helmet as an identification in the mêlée of battle – had not come all the way from their domains in the heat of midsummer just to do homage on bended knee. Henry needed the king's formal assent to his installation as duke of Normandy. In addition, Geoffrey had brought with him a prisoner, for laying hands on whom Bernard of Clairvaux had excommunicated him on the grounds that the man was a servant of Louis and therefore protected at the time by the crusader's immunity of his master.

In this tangled story, the seneschal for Poitou, through whom Louis governed Eleanor's Poitevin domains, had been allegedly caught red-handed laying waste some of Henry's territory. Only the Peace of God, swore the count of Anjou, had stopped him taking his own vengeance on the ruffian. Refusing Abbé Bernard's offer to lift the excommunication in return for the seneschal's release, Count Geoffrey hauled him before the king and demanded justice, declaring to all who cared to listen that if holding such a captive were indeed a sin, then God would pardon him for it.
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The blasphemy must have amused Eleanor as much as it amazed the Franks because this sort of behaviour was so like that of her father and grandfather. These neighbours were her kind of people. She could talk to them.

Geoffrey was looking for a well-endowed wife for his son. After the divorce she had so long been denied, but which was now being actively promoted by all her enemies at the Capetian court, Eleanor would be obliged immediately to marry a new husband powerful enough to defend her birthright, or risk seeing it snatched away by force the moment she was no longer protected by being Louis' wife. It is true she was eleven years older than Henry, but the same age-gap had not stopped his father marrying the Empress Matilda
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and Eleanor still had her beauty and a decade or so of childbearing years ahead of her.

The clincher for Henry was that, the stronger he was in France, the greater was his chance of succeeding his mother's cousin Stephen of Blois to become the next king of England. As to an heir, it was common
knowledge how rarely Louis had slept with his wife, so the lusty young duke of Normandy had no fears that he would be able to get Eleanor pregnant again and again until she bore him a son. And if she didn't? To the Plantagenet way of thinking, should she have failed to do so by the time of her menopause, Henry would still be in his early thirties and able to find a way of dumping her and keeping his hands on her dowry. Or so he thought.

Normally, sounding out the ground in a situation like this would have been done through clerical intermediaries. However, Suger was dead and Bernard no friend of the queen. Surrounded by enemies, Eleanor had no alternative but to conduct negotiations with the Plantagenets herself. A lesser man than Geoffrey might have found it impossible to talk with her in secret among the ears and eyes in the corridors and courtyards of the Ile de la Cité, but the count who had defied Bernard of Clairvaux's anathema had no qualms about frightening away anyone trying to eavesdrop on his private talks with the queen of France in the palace gardens. It was these conversations without witnesses that provided ‘the proof' for a second set of slanders after her remarriage – in this case that the Whore of Aquitaine had slept with the father before marrying the son.

Abruptly, Count Geoffrey released the captive seneschal and abandoned any claim for damages in respect of his misconduct. He also ceded to the king his claims to the disputed border territory of the Vexin, standing witness as his son swore fealty for the duchy of Normandy
sans
Vexin. The vassalage ceremony had three elements by this time: the enclosing of the vassal's hands within those of his overlord, the kiss of peace given on the lips and the swearing of the oath. After kneeling before Louis and pledging himself to defend his liege lord against all his enemies, the young duke of Normandy received the kiss of peace.
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There is no record of what had calmed Geoffrey's anger, but for two arrogant and ambitious vassals like the Plantagenets to knuckle down so swiftly and quietly go away implies a clandestine plan.

The city of Angers, with its original twelfth-century stained-glass windows in the cathedral of St Maurice, lies almost two hundred miles from Paris. It was a long, hot ride home for father and son in the first days of September. Pleased with the outcome of their trip, they halted at the River Loir near their own city of Le Mans and stripped off to cool down in the water. Spending the night at the nearby castle of Le Lude, Geoffrey went down with a high fever – probably from swallowing contaminated river water. Three days later, he was dead, the devout believing it his due for defying Bernard of Clairvaux.

His last thoughts were to advise Henry to govern each of his possessions appropriately and not impose a single code of law throughout. He also instructed his followers not to bury him until his stubborn son had taken an oath that, if and when he became king of England, he would yield Anjou, Maine and Touraine to a younger brother also called Geoffrey. This Henry refused to do until his companions persuaded him that it would be a scandal to keep his father's corpse above ground any longer in the midsummer heat. Weeping with rage and frustration, he complied despite knowing that he would never honour the oath.

With his twentieth birthday still ahead of him, Henry buried his father in Le Mans and hurried to Angers, where his vassals recognised him as their new count.
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A few days later, Eleanor set out for Aquitaine to make a comprehensive survey of her domains. Louis' large retinue in the cavalcade included her arch-enemy Galeran and Suger's successor, Hugues de Champfleury. Escorting the queen were many of her bishops and other vassals, with Archbishop Geoffroi of Bordeaux as her chief spokesman. The entire period of the vintage was spent in negotiation in the privacy of her personal estates, after which a tour of inspection of the duchy lasted until Christmas.

This was no routine progress from castle to castle and city to city checking accounts and hearing grievances. Although no public announcement had yet been made about divorce, the long tour was nothing less than a handover audit, with the bishops on both sides keeping tally so that each party received what was due. To avoid a power vacuum, the withdrawal of Louis' garrisons and administrators from her dower lands had to be synchronised with the installation of Eleanor's machinery of government prior to the public announcement of the dissolution of the royal marriage.
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The Christmas court was held at Limoges and a plenary council at St Jean d'Angély while celebrating Candlemas in the first week of February. Behind the scenes the midnight candles burned as the men of God busied themselves undoing the knots of Eugenius' validation in perpetuity of the marriage, given at Tusculum. Eleanor's unlikely ally in this was Bernard of Clairvaux who, unlike Suger and Hugues de Champfleury, cared nothing for political considerations. In his view the value of Eleanor's dowry to the Capetian kingdom was but dross, compared with the need to dissolve Louis' incestuous marriage to a woman in whose veins flowed the blood of William IX, the adulterous troubadour, and his son who had corrupted bishops and defied excommunication. Was it not she who had led Louis to the massacre
of Vitry, and her fault that God had not blessed the Second Crusade with success? Christ had said in the Sermon on the Mount that an eye which sinned should be plucked out and thrown away, for it was better to lose a hand or an eye than for the whole body to be cast into hellfire.

On the Friday before Palm Sunday, which would have been 21 March 1152, the Archbishop of Sens – who had presided over the condemnation of Abelard – convened a synod in Louis' castle at Beaugency, midway between Orleans and Blois. Present were his fellow archbishops of Reims, Rouen and Bordeaux, other senior churchmen and numerous barons and other nobles. Louis, with a genuine nobility and charity rare among royalty of any period, still refused to accuse Eleanor of anything that might be prejudicial to her. It was therefore agreed for the dignity of the monarchy that his representatives should present the case for consanguinity. All Eleanor had to do was to sit and listen. Acting as her chief spokesman Geoffroi de Lauroux, who had arranged the marriage fifteen years before, received the other side's assurance that all her lands would be restored to her as they were at the time of the marriage on condition that she remained a loyal vassal of the king.

The decree was read out
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and that, for Eleanor, was that. The prize of release from the marriage to Louis, which she had sought for so long, had been obtained at the cost of a year of her life, plus a pregnancy she had not wanted. But she was free, at a price. Her daughters were the property of the house of Capet; it was extremely unlikely she would ever see them again and if she did, they would be strangers.

Having conveniently forgotten Eleanor's outburst in Tusculum, John of Salisbury later described this annulment as her ‘repudiation'. Later writers would fictionalise the event, casting her as the wife discarded because she had produced no heir, and describing her departure from Beaugency, tearful and distraught.

The cheapest way to tarnish the reputation of the queen who had outwitted the house of Capet to regain her own freedom was to allege that she was an adulteress. Which is exactly what happened. The slanders to prove that Louis had repudiated an unfaithful wife had a long life. In the mid-1990s the audio-commentary at Chinon castle still averred that she had been ‘unfaithful to the king in front of the whole court'.
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It would have taken a lot of arranging on the Ile de la Cité, where she had been spied upon since the day of her arrival by hostile courtiers, priests and servants. As to what she had done with the inevitable results of her illicit liaisons, it was after the separation at Beaugency that the rumours about Belin churchyard began to circulate.

Generations of historians have repeated the calumnies against her, but Henry Plantagenet certainly knew the situation better than they. He was paranoid and had been raised by his mother, the former German Empress, for the highest of royal destinies. Yet he was eager to marry Eleanor at the risk of a war with Louis. One has to ask, would such a man have taken as wife to provide his heirs a woman who had – in the forensic view of the time – soiled her ‘female semen'? And the only sane answer to that question is ‘no'.

Eleanor rode away from Beaugency with a small escort of her own vassals, once again, at the age of thirty, fair game for any noble with the nerve to kidnap her and marry her by force. Near Blois, she came near to being ambushed by men commanded by Henry of Anjou's younger brother Geoffrey, an upstart of sixteen who had all the Plantagenet nerve, but little else in his favour.
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Another ambush by Thibault of Blois, second son of Louis' vassal the count of Champagne, had been prepared where she was to cross the River Loire near Tours, as the shortest way to safety on her own territory.
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A last-minute change of route left him empty-handed, and saw Eleanor at long last mistress of her own possessions.