April Queen (23 page)

His curiosity was insatiable. Never accepting another man’s word for anything, he had to see, touch and try it out for himself, whether a horse, a dog, a jewel or piece of material offered by a merchant, a vassal’s hawk, a weapon or an idea.
⁷
A genial enough companion for the few with the intellect to amuse him, he rapidly lost interest when they could no longer be of service or entertainment value. If thwarted or defied, he went literally berserk, foaming at the mouth and hurling himself at anyone within reach, or falling to the floor and rolling in the soiled reeds and refuse of an audience hall, groaning like an animal in agony.

Yet there was nothing haphazard about his apparently erratic habits. His hectic itineraries were an important factor in his later ability to govern very successfully the enormous spread of territory on both sides of the English Channel known as the Angevin Empire. While keeping everyone around him in the dark, he himself knew exactly what he was about; he was simply too paranoid to tell anyone else.

During the long
chevauchée
with Eleanor that lasted well into the autumn of 1152, he showed that England was never far from his mind by taking a close interest in the large number of ships and men employed in fishing along the Gascon littoral, who could be useful in crossing the Channel. However, before facing the risks of that invasion he wanted to teach Eleanor’s vassals the same lesson he had given to Louis’ coalition, and so lessen the likelihood of a rebellion in the south-west during his absence the following year. On the journey north, in Limoges for his coronation as duke of Aquitaine, the opportunity he wanted presented itself.

The Limousin capital was composed of the lower town, including the abbey of St Martial and the viscount’s palace, and the upper town or citadel with the cathedral and the bishop’s palace. After being welcomed by the populace and in great pomp by the abbot and his monks, the new duke of Aquitaine demanded by feudal right provisions for all his retinue. The abbot refused on the grounds that his obligations were to provide food and lodgings while the duke was inside the walls, whereas Henry was encamped outside the town with his followers.
⁸
The dispute had more to do with the numbers involved than where they were actually billeted, but fights broke out in the streets of the town between the citizens and Henry’s soldiery, some of whom were wounded.

The outraged duke gave orders for the recently built walls of the town to be razed to the ground so that it was impossible to be inside them or outside. The new bridge over the River Vienne was likewise torn down.
⁹
His depredations were only stopped by encouraging news from Matilda’s supporters in England that caused him to hurry north. On 8 January 1153, he defied the winter storms by setting sail from Barfleur with a small fleet of twenty-six vessels,
¹⁰
leaving Eleanor pregnant in France.

The following day he landed an army of around 3,000 men in the country where he had spent part of his childhood acting as figurehead to Matilda’s supporters in the civil war with Stephen of Blois and being groomed to wear the crown of England. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the raping and looting of Stephen’s Flemish
mercenaries, Henry’s position as the most powerful man in France was not enough to bring the Anglo-Norman nobility as a whole over to his side. With the same tenacity his mother had shown, he settled down to a long campaign, considering that he had little to fear from a rebellion in his French domains with her in control of Normandy and Eleanor acting as regent for his other domains.

The two women kept their distance. Regarding Normandy as hers, Matilda was not prepared to quietly step aside as Adelaide de Maurienne had done when Eleanor arrived on the Ile de la Cité. A pious autocrat, she accepted the political necessity for her son’s marriage, but had no welcome for a daughter-in-law fresh from another man’s bed and within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. Nor was Eleanor inclined to curry favour from so hostile a mother-in-law.

Leaving her uncle Raoul de Faye to govern Aquitaine, she moved into Henry’s territory by setting up in his capital city of Angers the first of her own courts where comfort and pleasure meant not just good food and wine but all the other civilised pleasures of the day. In Rouen, all was sobriety and pious learning at the empress’ court; in Angers, men played the gallant or were sent away until such time as they learned to. However valiant they might be in the field, Eleanor required them to speak eloquently, dress well and have their hair properly cut when in her presence.

Western Europe was still groaning under the heavy taxes to repay the borrowing of the Second Crusade. In Normandy and Anjou, much good land had been laid waste during the brief war with Louis’ coalition, leaving the knightly class impoverished and the peasants once again facing starvation after the drought of the long hot summer of 1152. Those great patrons of the arts Henry Beauclerc, Thibault of Champagne, William IX and Geoffrey the Fair were all dead. To rid himself of one more memory of Eleanor, Louis had banished from his court the
trouvères
and other entertainers she had employed and whom he accused of distracting men’s minds from their faith.
¹¹

In these conditions, it was not hard for the largesse of the richest woman in France to attract the most talented troubadours to flatter and amuse her with their verse. They could not have found a more appreciative employer than the granddaughter of William IX, who had seen for herself the settings in Byzantium and the Holy Land of the great
chansons de geste
and whose catholic appetites in music and poetry covered everything from the Arthurian legends to love songs and
sirventès
.

At her court in Angers, she and her intimates were entertained by the best of European poetry and music.
¹²
The code of courtly love may or may not have originated there, but never was it better practised. As equal partner in the marriage with Henry, Eleanor reigned supreme in his absence. What better way of demonstrating this than by turning upside down the convention that every woman of whatever rank owed deference to her father, brothers and husband? At Angers it was men who were the supplicants and the ladies of the court who sat in judgement on them, and set convoluted tasks to test their admirers’ sincerity.

It used to be thought that the cult of courtly love spread from Eleanor’s courts at Angers and later in Poitiers through her daughter Marie de Champagne being called to run the household in Poitiers during 1168–73. Recent studies indicate that mother and daughter probably never met or even corresponded after the divorce from Louis. If their courts had much in common, it was because the two women exemplified the many twelfth-century noblewomen who evolved their own lifestyle during the absence of their husbands on campaign, pilgrimage and crusade. The role-reversal of courtly love, the poetry and songs, were an antidote to the emotional aridity of their lives, spent in politically arranged marriages, with sons sent away to be brought up by others and daughters dispatched as child brides, never to be seen again.

Since Eleanor’s troubadours were writing to please her, their verses represent an indication of her personal feelings, particularly valuable in the case of a twelfth-century character who left no personal letters. Though she could be as tough and ruthless as the Empress Matilda, Eleanor was not all piety and politics like her mother-in-law. She had another side to her personality that yearned for all the joys forbidden by her station in life – the joy of imagining herself the April Queen, abandoning herself to the caress of an adoring lover.

Who were these troubadours? The image of a penniless songsmith making his way from castle to castle with nothing but his voice, an ear for a good tune and a lute slung over his shoulder is misleading. Itinerant minstrels or
jonglars
scratched a living by travelling from one castle to the next, singing traditional and popular songs of the day, but the troubadours
¹³
who composed the songs and poetry were mostly of knightly families. What counted, however, was not noble birth, but nobility of soul. Guilhem Figuera was a tailor’s son and Bernat de Ventadorn the son of a sergeant-at-arms and a kitchen maid working in the bakery of the castle of Ventadorn.

Lowly birth did not mean they had anything to learn from the rules of courtly love as later codified by Andreas Capellanus at the court of Marie de Champagne. Rule XV: Every lover turns pale in the presence of his beloved. Rule XVI: When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved, his heart palpitates. Bernat knew this by instinct:

And the mistress for whom he wrote his first poems replied:

It was at some point during Eleanor’s journey through the Limousin with her new husband that Bernat first attached himself to her household, not that Henry Curtmantle would have spared him much attention, for he was no lover of troubadours and preferred the company of learned clerics and laymen attending his court as counsellors or ambassadors.

At that moment Bernat needed a patroness badly, having been banished from Ventadorn for becoming too close an admirer of its versifying countess. Being a man who lived dangerously, he did not let the experience prevent him becoming Eleanor’s intimate. Roughly her age, he was endowed with a fine voice, poetic talent and handsome good looks. For her part, how could the duchess, who had been brought up both to know about the transports of love, and also that its joys were not for her, fail to respond to a poet who wrote
Quand vei la lauseta mover de joì sas alas contre’l rai
– likening her to a swallow, its wings joyously silhouetted against the sun, so delicate, so elusive, yet so powerful as it soared so impossibly high above him in station?

The eventual reward for Bernat’s devotion was cruel. Rumours of his intimacy with Eleanor having reached Henry’s ears in England, the poet was summoned there and went unwillingly:

After singing different songs for his supper for the amusement of Henry’s hectically peripatetic court in England, Bernat contrived to sneak back across the Channel and turned up again in Angers to address new compositions to Eleanor, ignoring his master’s orders to return. But Eleanor had more important matters on her mind and left him behind in Angers to pine in verse for his lost love when her court moved on.

On 17 August 1154 she gave birth to a son, her relief doubled by the knowledge that she had erased forever the stigma of having given Louis only daughters. She christened the boy William, after her father and grandfather and all the other Williams in her family, and honoured him with the courtesy title duke of Aquitaine
¹⁵
without asking Henry’s opinion. Learning of the birth in Paris, Louis saw it quash the last chance of either of his daughters inheriting the title to Aquitaine through her mother.

Never had Eleanor felt more secure, having every reason to believe that she had forfeited none of her independence in return for her new status. Many minor events bear this out. When signing in her own name for Abbot Robert of Vendôme a charter confirming the liberties of his priories in the Saintonge that had been harassed by her agents, she included no mention of Henry in the way that Louis’ decrees during their marriage had carried a line indicating her assent. Second, when
Pope Anastasius IV confirmed by a papal bull the privileges of the foundation of Notre Dame de Saintes on 29 October of that same year, the list of donors includes Geoffrey of Poitou, Louis of France, Eleanor and Aelith, but of Henry there is no mention. Even that wily churchman Geoffroi de Lauroux, forever sniffing the winds of change, went on record by stating in a charter of 25 September 1153 that Aquitaine acknowledged only the authority of its duchess.
¹⁶

A few days after the birth of William, Eleanor received news that King Stephen’s son Eustace of Boulogne had choked to death during a meal near Bury St Edmunds on 18 August. Worn out with strife, and in the hope of avoiding another civil war, the grieving king of England formally accepted Henry fitz Empress as his legal successor after protracted negotiations that dragged on into mid-November. At Christmas of that year Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury enshrined the arrangement in a treaty witnessed at Westminster by fourteen bishops and eleven earls of the realm. Since Stephen of Blois was in his late fifties and thus an old man by the standards of the time, Henry was certain to be the most powerful monarch in Europe within a few years. It was a wonderful stroke of good luck for an ambitious young man of twenty-two.