April Queen (4 page)

The Frankish camp set up on the right bank of the Garonne was as large as many towns, with its own temporary market where food and other necessaries could be bought from the local peasantry, horses reshod by farriers and wagon-wheels damaged by the dry heat repaired by wheelwrights. Between it and the city lay the crescent of water busy with shipping that had given Bordeaux its title ‘Port of the Moon’. Reflected in it was the silhouette of the Roman city walls, marked at regular intervals by round towers. Above them projected the domed roof of the cathedral, the bell walls
¹⁶
of the churches and the towers and pointed gables of the ducal palace.

On the left or southern side of the city, but divided from it by the harbour in the mouth of the Peugue tributary, was the unwalled suburb called Borc St Elegi where the market was held and the new class of merchants and free artisans was rapidly establishing itself. On the right, in open ground to the north of the walls, stood the imposing columns of a Roman temple built to honour the tutelary gods of the city then known as Burdigala. Beyond that was the immense bulk of the amphitheatre capable of holding 15,000 spectators.

The nearest ford being a two-day ride upriver, Suger, Thibault and other important members of Louis’ court crossed by boats sent over to collect them, to begin the formalities which included Geoffroi de Lauroux presenting the keys of Bordeaux to the prince.

The walls of Bordeaux followed the rectangular Roman town plan, but enclosed far less ground than the imperial city had covered. Not every street was lined with houses. There were vineyards and gardens within the walls and grazing – necessary during a time of siege – with wasteland where animals brought in for slaughter could be penned overnight. The south-west corner of the city was Church property, surrounding the cathedral of St André and the archbishop’s palace where Geoffroi de Lauroux held his own court. Eleven other churches within the walls and a dozen or more outside the city also owned property in Bordeaux. Dominating the town, the market and the port, whose customs dues were an important source of revenue for the ducal family, was Eleanor’s palace.

From the vantage point of a window in her apartments that evening and with the sun in her favour, she could see the whole of the Frankish encampment on the opposite bank. The tents of the knights and men-at-arms were grouped around the pavilions of their barons with pennants floating in the evening breeze blowing in off the Atlantic. In the centre was the pavilion decorated with the lilies of France, where the monkish prince she had never met was giving thanks to God for his safe arrival. His compliant nature, which had accepted the translation from cloister to court, now accepted the obligation to marry a girl he had never met and provide the kingdom that would soon be his with an heir by her.

Girls’ births not always being recorded, Eleanor is thought to have been born in April 1122, either in the palace of L’Ombreyra or at the family castle in Belin, a small village lying about thirty miles south of Bordeaux on the pilgrim trail to Compostela. Her name, originally spelled Alianor, was composed from
alia Anor
, Latin for ‘the other Anor’, her mother being Anor or Ænor of Châtellerault.
¹⁷
She was described as friendly, gracious, strong and courtly,
¹⁸
but also of precocious intelligence.

Spring arrives in Aquitaine three or four weeks earlier than north of the English Channel. April showers are the
giboulées
of March and the old saying, ‘Never cast a clout till May is out’ translates there as ‘Don’t take off a stitch until the end of April’.
¹⁹
A song composed by an anonymous twelfth-century troubadour and probably sung to Eleanor by her favourite minstrels translates as ‘At the beginning of spring’.
²⁰
In it,
la reina aurilhosa
or the April Queen corresponds to the northern Queen of the May, whose fertility ritual of lads and lasses entwining their ribbons around the maypole until their bodies touch is her dance also. Eleanor epitomised the April Queen.

But the words of the last verse sound as though they were added on that day in the summer of 1137 when Young Louis, crown prince of the Franks, arrived with an army to claim as his bride the rich and beautiful young duchess of Aquitaine.

What were Eleanor’s thoughts on going to bed, the night before the wedding? She had known even before her brother’s death that her body was a tool of policy, to be used in the best interest of the duchy – for which it was far better she should meet the future king of the Franks in the bedchamber than on the battlefield. Girls of her class knew that they, their mothers and sisters, were human brood-mares, whose function was to merge the bloodlines of great ancestors – which is why the sexual integrity of a queen was so carefully checked on marriage and guarded thereafter to prevent any alien seed fertilising her, while for a king to spread his genes far and wide was seen as an ennoblement of the recipients and an enrichment of the race.

Almost as soon as she could speak, Eleanor had known that her high calling was to be the vessel through which the blood of her grandfather William the Troubadour and the nine other Williams who had been dukes of Aquitaine would be transmitted to posterity. Her model, if she needed one, was her ancestress Azalais, the widowed countess of
Toulouse who in 979 had saved her county from war and destruction by marrying another Louis, also a crown prince of the Franks.

It must have been difficult for the two teenage daughters of William X to stop talking and get some sleep that hot summer night with the Franks encamped just across the Garonne. Yet although she could aspire no higher than to be married to the future king of France, Eleanor knew that her independence would end at the moment of the wedding. From that moment, authority over her lands would be vested in her husband.

Expecting a warrior prince like her father and grandfather, her heart must have sunk when she set eyes on flabby, blond-haired Young Louis, his cheeks pale from vigil, his blue eyes unable to look a girl in the face. Against that, an entirely justifiable self-confidence must have inclined her to believe that she would soon wean him away from the priests surrounding him. Having been raised in a society with a frank attitude to carnal love – of which he, having been raised in the all-male world of the cloister, knew nothing – she was well aware of the power a woman can wield over the man who lusts for her. And even a few minutes’ formal conversation sufficed to tell her that her intellect far outstripped his.

Yet there was romance of a kind in the air. With all the knights, barons and bishops from the north paying attention to Aelith as sister of their future queen, she was – like any girl of her age in such a position – looking her attractive best. At thirteen she was older than many noble brides, with a fresh young beauty that caught the eye of Louis’ knightly cousin, Raoul de Vermandois. It was a
coup de coeur
that was to cost a thousand lives and more.

Normal feudal practice after the wedding would have been for the new duke and duchess to go on a tour of Aquitaine, meeting their subjects, confirming gifts and grants of the previous ruler, settling disputes and receiving oaths of loyalty. There were debts to claim and Young Louis’ administrators to be installed for the taxation and governing of the duchy. However, Fat Louis’ ill-health dictated a swift return north, so the vassals of Aquitaine were summoned to witness the marriage and to swear fealty to the new duke in Bordeaux.

To give them time to assemble, it was not until two weeks later – on Sunday 25 July – that the wedding was celebrated in the cathedral of St André.
²¹
Archbishop Geoffroi, flanked by two other archbishops and with Suger in attendance, united Eleanor and Young Louis in holy matrimony, after which the prince put on the coronet of the dukes of Aquitaine – an ornament that was to bring him in the long term little pleasure and great grief.

The dimly lit interior of the multi-domed cathedral was garishly painted and gilded floor to ceiling in the fashion of a Roman temple. Emerging into the daylight to the acclamation of the common people and the burgesses, the young couple walked back to the palace in procession through streets strewn with flower petals and bay leaves which filled the air with perfume when trodden on. Yet there were many who whispered that the groom, with the humble demeanour of a novice,
²²
looked more dove than hawk, and some who said outright as he passed that he was
colhon
– as stupid as a testicle.

At the wedding feast in the thirteenth-century romance
Flamenca
the guests ate bustards, swans, cranes, partridges, ducks, capons, geese, chicken and peacocks, bread and pastry, root vegetables and fruit, wafers and fritters, with iced and spiced wines to drink.
²³
Banquets in Aquitaine often included eighteen dishes of venison, wild boar, game birds, river and sea fishes washed down with spiced wine and ending with fritters and wafers.

One delicacy Eleanor’s guests would have been offered was oysters from the coast of Médoc, praised in verse by Ausonius, the fourth-century Prefect of Aquitania, who judged them fit for the tables of the Caesars. But the atmosphere on her wedding feast was uneasy. The independent barons of Gascony deeply resented their new duke being a foreigner. To them, Young Louis was
lo princi del nord
– a prince who spoke an alien language, dressed like a monk and was neither warrior nor poet, either of which would have earned him some respect in their eyes. To them, Eleanor’s wedding was a betrayal; she ought to have married one of their kind, a valiant troubadour like her grandfather or at least a man who spoke their own language.

For their part, Louis’ Frankish retinue must have suspected even the food they were offered, seasoned with spices strange to their palates. With bay leaves, mustard, mint, ginger and vinegar they were familiar, and with the use of olive oil and honey to preserve fruit and savoury delicacies, but coriander, saffron, mace, cinnamon and cloves from nearby Spain were new tastes that might conceal more dangerous flavours. How could they trust the cooks when they certainly mistrusted Eleanor’s vassals who had obeyed the summons to attend?

The Pilgrim’s Guide
, written in Latin between 1139 and 1173 for pilgrims to Compostela, summed up the northern view of Eleanor’s Gascon subjects as talkative, boastful, lustful, greedy drunkards, who dressed in rags, ate without tables, all drinking from the same cup – and shamelessly slept together, with servants, master and mistress all lying on the same thin and rotten mattress.

The southern image of northerners was even worse. According to the troubadour Bernart Sicart de Maruejols:

Weddings are a favourite device of dramatists to provoke outbursts on both sides. Whether the mutual mistrust of north and south erupted into blows and bloodshed on this occasion is unknown. Suger keeps a diplomatic silence, but had there been good news to report, he would have included it in his account. What particularly worried both him and Thibault of Champagne was the absence from the wedding of the rebel count of Angoulême.

Was there some fracas in the streets of Bordeaux, or had rumours reached Suger and Thibault of an ambush in force being planned by him on the journey north? It is hard to account otherwise for the precipitate and furtive departure from Bordeaux of the new duke and his duchess after Arch-bishop Geoffroi had obtained Louis’ charter confirming his father’s grant of freedoms to the Church, now sealed by him as duke of Aquitaine by marriage to Eleanor.
²⁴
Bride and groom spent little time at the table, and must have left before their subjects had finished feasting, for they slipped out of the palace and across the Garonne by boat to where Young Louis’ tented camp had already been struck.

The short route back to Paris via Bourges would have enabled Louis to be installed as count of Poitou in Limoges on the way. But either Suger thought it important to win over the citizens of Poitiers, who could turn out to be useful allies of Louis and Eleanor in the struggles with their vassals that he foresaw, or else the count of Champagne had reason to fear an ambush on the road to Limoges. So they rode north along the old Roman road to Poitiers, crossing the Dordogne and pressing on past Bourg to Blaye.

The image of a gracious duchess elegantly mounted aside is misleading. The three-pommelled side saddle was invented for nineteenth-century ladies who wished to go hunting. Although there were earlier women’s saddles facing sideways, these were rigid boxes
on which the lady perched with her feet on a board or
planchette
while the horse was led at walking pace by a groom. This would have been impractical and dangerous for the sort of mileage that Eleanor frequently covered in a day, so she rode astride.

And this was no pleasant day’s ride in the country. Leaving Bordeaux at midday, they covered eighty miles at breakneck speed, changing horses at each river crossing
²⁵
or more often, to reach at dusk the safety of the castle of Taillebourg on the north bank of the Charente a few miles past Saintes. There, the young couple could relax and consummate the marriage,
²⁶
installed in the private quarters of Taillebourg’s master, Geoffroi de Rancon. It was ironically he, the most loyal of all Eleanor’s Poitevin vassals, who would be the cause of her great disgrace in Turkey on the Second Crusade.