April Queen (3 page)

Within an hour Eleanor learned he was dead. A vigorous and healthy warrior of thirty-eight, he had succumbed to food poisoning or drinking contaminated water on Good Friday. His companions had borne him to the cathedral of Santiago and had him buried close to the high altar in clouds of incense and to the chanting of Latin plainsong. Their prayer,
‘Sant Jacme, membre us del baro que denant vos jai pelegris …’
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– pray for him, Saint James, this pilgrim baron lying here – was echoed in all the languages of Europe by the thousands of pilgrims present.

In front of trusted witnesses shortly before dying, William X had orally bequeathed everything to Eleanor. Although Aquitaine’s Roman laws permitted succession by the female line, there was in Poitou a custom of
viage ou retour
, by which a feudal domain might pass to the
nearest collateral male relative in the absence of a direct male heir. Similarly, north of the Channel two years previously Matilda, the only surviving child of Henry I, had been deprived of the succession to the English throne by a majority of the Anglo-Norman barons preferring her cousin, Stephen of Blois, with the result that civil war divided the country. Eleanor’s father had therefore orally requested his overlord the king of France to take Poitou and Aquitaine under his personal protection, to confirm his elder daughter’s inheritance and to arrange both girls’ marriages to suitable husbands.

Since such wealth, power and beauty made Eleanor a highly desirable prey for any baron with the nerve by rape and a forced wedding to make himself the new duke of Aquitaine, William’s companions hurried back to Bordeaux, keeping the news of his death to themselves. The lack of a written testament being not unusual in those times of sudden death, Archbishop Geoffroi decided that his duty to the Church lay in executing William X’s instructions
⁵
and dispatched an embassy of discreet bishops and barons to the court of King Louis VI.

To Eleanor’s question as to what he looked like, the answer was that all princes were handsome and brave, great lovers of women.

In those days a royal court was not a building, but wherever the monarch and his chancery staff happened to be. King Louis was at his hunting lodge near Béthisy in the forest of Compiègne where he had gone to escape the noise, the stench and the fevers of Paris in midsummer – and to die. In his prime, when taking the field in a war that lasted twenty-five years against his vassal Henry Beauclerc, duke of Normandy,
⁶
or when fighting off external enemies like the German Emperor, he had been known as Battling Louis and ‘the king who never sleeps’. But his subjects changed this to Fat Louis as he fought increasingly bad health, rumoured to be the result of his mother attempting to poison him in childhood.

By the summer of 1137 his body was so swollen by fluid retention that he could no longer bend down to put on a shoe, never mind wield a sword or mount a horse. The doctors and apothecaries of Paris had tried every remedy they could think of. ‘He drank so many kinds of potions and powders … it was a miracle, the way he endured it’, as a contemporary wryly remarked.
⁷

The king of France was fifty-six, a ripe old age for the time. For twenty-nine years he had excelled at the balancing act which was the lot of a Capetian monarch, several of whose vassals controlled far more territory directly than the royal domains, which lay mostly in the area around Paris later known as Ile de France.

The Capetian royal domains.

Astute and far-sighted, Fat Louis had made his court a model of feudal justice and his capital a seat of learning, with Paris the only university in Europe until the expulsion of the English students in 1167 led to the foundation of a university at Oxford. Had his eldest son Philip been alive to succeed him, he would have accepted death as a blessed release, for Philip had been an accomplished warrior. But he had been killed in a banal traffic accident when a startled sow, foraging in the garbage that littered the unpaved streets of Paris, ran between the legs of his stallion, leaving him paralysed with a broken neck in the filth.

Subsequently anointed heir to the Capetian throne on the advice of the chancellor, Abbot Suger of St Denis, Fat Louis’ second son was a very different person. Never was De Loyola’s dictum
Give me a boy until he is six
… more true. Young Louis, as he was called, had been raised in the cloister of Notre Dame for high office in the Church until catapulted by a sow’s panic to a place in history he would not have chosen. For the rest of his life, he oscillated between trying to be a strong king and behaving like the credulous, mystical monk he would have preferred to remain. Usually the monk won. When his father lay dying in the torrid summer of 1137, he was a deeply religious youth of seventeen, in whom Fat Louis saw none of the attributes of monarchy in that turbulent time of transition.

It must therefore have seemed an answer to his prayers when he learned from his old school friend Abbot Suger that the messengers from Bordeaux had arrived. After hearing their news, one name that cropped up in his private discussion with Suger was that of the handsome Count of Anjou, Geoffrey the Fair, whose lands bordered Poitou on the north and extended all the way from there to the English Channel.

A great champion of the tournament circuit, he and William X had the previous year laid waste territory which Fat Louis claimed in the Vexin – a disputed border strip that divided the royal domains from Normandy. Should Count Geoffrey learn too soon about the death of Eleanor’s father, there was every chance of him swooping southwards and adding Eleanor’s possessions to his own by marrying her under duress to his four-year-old son Henry. Once master of all western France, his territorial ambitions would be unstoppable.

The archbishop of Bordeaux wanted rewarding for the part he was playing; it was not too late for him to change sides. On his behalf the archbishop of Chartres demanded complete freedom for the Church in Aquitaine from all feudal and fiscal obligations, with the election of future bishops and archbishops to be according to canon law and free of influence by any temporal overlord.

Eleanor’s inheritance of Poitou and Aquitaine

The right to appoint bishops was a contentious issue that was splitting Church from state all over Europe. Known as the investiture contest, it had been at the root of William IX’s excommunication, for to his mind and that of continental nobility, a bishop was a vassal like any other, to be chosen by his temporal overlord so that in return he owed advice in council and support in the field with his own armed forces when called upon to give it.

That Fat Louis immediately acceded to Geoffroi de Lauroux’s demands shows how crucial for the precarious Frankish monarchy was Eleanor’s vast inheritance – the south-western third of France, extending from the Atlantic coast inland to the extinct volcanoes of the Auvergne in the Massif Central. Any magnate who added this to his own possessions would destabilise the kingdom;
⁸
on the other hand, if anything could give so inadequate a prince as Young Louis a chance of governing the kingdom, it was a wife whose dowry made him the richest man in France.

Eleanor and Young Louis being fourth cousins and therefore within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, a prelate willing to marry them without first seeking a papal dispensation deserved reward. A charter granting all Archbishop Geoffroi’s demands was therefore prepared and witnessed by ‘Louis, our son already made king’
⁹
and by Geoffrey of Chartres as papal legate, Bishop Stephen of Paris and Abbot Suger.
¹⁰
And so the marriage between Eleanor and Louis was arranged as an affair of state without either of them being consulted.

To avoid the risk of Eleanor being abducted on the 400-mile journey to Paris, Fat Louis gave instructions for a royal cortège to travel to Bordeaux, making a show of force that would warn off the barons of Aquitaine. That Bordeaux was chosen for the wedding and coronation, rather than Limoges where the dukes of Aquitaine were traditionally crowned, suggests that it would have been dangerous for Eleanor to travel even that far unprotected. Or maybe Geoffroi de Lauroux was too shrewd to allow her to leave the city his knights and men-at-arms controlled until everything was doubly confirmed in writing.

Too ill to travel himself, Fat Louis decided not to billet the cortège by feudal right in the lands through which they travelled, but to pay for food, accommodation and forage for the animals. Although speed was important, the treasury was bare and such an expedition required financing by an especially promulgated
auxilium
or aid-tax on his vassals, which took time to raise.
¹¹
So it was mid-June when the prince set out with 500 Frankish barons and knights under Count Thibault of Champagne and Raoul de Vermandois, Young Louis’ cousin who served
as steward of the princely household.
¹²
Travelling with them to sort out any canonical problems were three of the best legal brains in France: Abbot Suger, Archbishop Hugh of Tours and the abbot of Cluny.

Behind the bishops, barons and knights rode the squires, leading the highly bred and trained
destriers
or warhorses. With the wagons of the sumpter train and the packhorses and mules laden with armour, weapons, food and tents, they constituted a small army of several hundred men and animals on the move. In addition there was a corps of foot-soldiers, but what limited the speed at which they proceeded across the drought-parched centre of France was the pace of the draught oxen. Each day billeting officers were sent ahead to find grazing or fodder and water for man and beast. Frequent rests were necessary, for neither horse nor ox could be driven hard in such hot weather and during the full moon the cortège travelled at night.

They crossed from Frankish territory onto Eleanor’s lands near Bourges in central France, where their numbers were swollen by the retinue of Archbishop Pierre of Bourges and the counts of Perche and Nevers with their personal entourages. Three weeks elapsed before they encamped outside Limoges on 30 June, in time to celebrate the feast-day of Aquitaine’s patron St Martial. Present for the occasion was Count Alphonse Jourdan of Toulouse – another neighbour with every incentive to kidnap Eleanor, had he known in time of Duke William’s death. But with Louis’ little army encamped beside the River Vienne within a few days’ ride of Bordeaux, neither he nor Geoffrey of Anjou would have dared kidnap the young duchess at that stage.
¹³

From Limoges, the army continued past Périgueux. Emerging from the virgin oak forests above Lormont on Friday or Saturday, 9 or 10 July,
¹⁴
Young Louis led his cortège through land cleared by slash-and-burn where cattle and sheep grazed. The first cut of hay was drying for the winter. In the sheltered side valleys leading down to the plain of the River Garonne, small fields of millet ripened in the sun. Male peasants worked stripped to their
brais
– a cross between loincloth and underpants. Their womenfolk laboured alongside them, ankle-length skirts hitched up for convenience. Few horses were in use; although the padded shoulder collar had been invented towards the end of the previous century, making it possible for horses to pull ploughs, oxen were cheaper and more resistant to disease. The poorest peasants had to drag harrow and plough themselves.

The windmill, that landmark of the later Middle Ages, had not yet reached south-western France, so corn was ground by water-mills and at home by women using hand-mills or by blindfolded mules walking
round and round a hollowed stone two metres wide, harnessed to a beam that dragged a wheel crushing the grain, afterwards scooped out by hand. If the peasant was obliged to use his lord’s mill, a tax was deducted for the service, as well as a tenth or tithe for the Church. The surplus was stored in raised wooden silos, out of reach of field rodents, or carted off to safer storage behind castle or city walls.

This bucolic scene belied the back-breaking labour of the peasants gaping at the long train of squires and servants with the baggage-laden ox-carts lumbering after them. Of greater interest than the rich apparel of the Frankish knights and nobles were their caparisoned palfreys and mettlesome warhorses, for people then judged wealth and social standing by the quality of one’s mount.
¹⁵
Yet if the illiterate peasants, whose memories went back no more than three generations, were marvelling that their teenage duchess Eleanor was to marry a king’s son and go off to live in such splendour herself, the lettered monks on Church lands who watched the cortège ride past had only to consult their chronicles to recall how often a band of armed men from the north had signalled slaughter of man and beast and widespread devastation of lay and Church property.