April Queen (5 page)

Safety did not mean privacy. ‘Dining in hall’ as at some universities today meant that the nobles were seated at a table on a raised dais with everyone else in the body of the hall. All could see the newly-weds leave the table and enter the adjoining bedchamber, which was certain to be shared on such an important occasion so that no sleight of hand could counterfeit the bride’s virginity. Servants regularly slept in the same room as their masters and mistresses. In the retelling of the legend of Tristan and Isolde by Béroul, a Norman
trouvère
contemporary with Eleanor, the king and queen sleep in the bed, while Tristan, a dwarf and another person slumber on the floor of the chamber.

After another gruelling eighty-mile ride to Poitiers, Eleanor and her groom were lodged in the Maubergeonne Tower of the comital palace, now part of the law courts. Suger’s report that the inhabitants of the city received their new count and countess with a great show of joy may well be true, for the town-dwelling traders and artisans wanted the peace and stability in which business could prosper and the common people spoke a dialect of
la langue d’oïl
comprehensible to the Franks. However, before the year was out, the same townsfolk would have good reason to hate their new count. In any case, the proud Poitevin nobility, whose language of choice was Eleanor’s own
lenga d’oc
, were almost as hostile to Young Louis as the barons of Gascony had been.
²⁷

On 8 August, Eleanor’s husband was crowned with the coronet of Poitou in the cathedral of St Pierre during a ceremony staged by Suger in imitation of the coronation of the kings of France at Reims to show the world that a new dynasty ruled the county of Poitou and therefore by tradition the duchy of Aquitaine. Within hours of the ceremony came the announcement of Fat Louis’ death in Paris on the first day of the month. Clad in a monk’s shift and with arms outstretched in
symbolic crucifixion on a bed of ashes placed on the floor, the sick king had felt able to give up the ghost in the knowledge that his kingdom was as safe as it was ever going to be with his monkish son on the throne. Young Louis already having been anointed successor, the news automatically made him king of France.

In the space of a few days during her sixteenth summer, Eleanor had risen from being the vulnerable unmarried daughter of a dead duke to be queen of all France.

W
ithin hours of the news from Paris of his father’s death, Louis was confronted by the first crisis of his reign. Profiting from the brief window of opportunity in what they thought would be an interregnum, the citizens of Orleans had formed a commune to take over the government of their city. Splitting his forces, the young king departed with the cavalry and Suger at his side to restore order, leaving Eleanor and her sister to follow more slowly with the infantry under the archbishop of Chartres.

The medieval convention was to call noblewomen beautiful in the same way that courage was automatically ascribed to knights, wisdom to kings and piety to clerics, whether or not merited. However, although there are many descriptions of the appearance and clothing of kings, princes and lesser men in the twelfth century, women were of little interest to the celibate chroniclers.

The quest for Eleanor’s likeness is not easy because the later medieval passion for portraiture had not begun in her time. Luckily, in Aquitaine it was customary to have commemorative heads carved after a change of overlord and placed in churches where the people could
see what their new masters looked like. Three heads commemorating the July wedding are now set into the rebuilt wall of the nave of Bordeaux Cathedral. Hidden in the gloom high above an enormous wooden pulpit, Eleanor’s shows her filled with life and spirit on the threshold of a new life; Archbishop Geoffroi looks quietly pleased with his political coup; Louis looks worried already with his down-turned mouth – as well he might, given his hostile reception by the Gascons (plates 2, 8 and 9).

The young duchess wears the coronet of Poitou; the archbishop, his mitre; Prince Louis wears no crown, but what looks like a monk’s cowl. Unfortunately, the nose of the crowned female head has been broken in the distant past, it is badly lit and can only been seen at an angle and with difficulty. Yet this is the face of a strong, intelligent, well-nourished and confident young woman, excited at the great destiny ahead of her.

There are several other carved heads said to be of Eleanor. One is in the reconstructed medieval cloister of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but this is Romanesque sculpture, more symbol than portrait. A carved head at Oakham Hall in Rutland reputed to be of her tells us even less.

The Plantagenet effigies at Fontevraud Abbey, where she was buried sixty-seven years after the August wedding, are among the earliest known. Eleanor’s features there are smooth, with not a wrinkle in sight, because the noble dead were represented in their prime; it was reasoned that on the Day of Resurrection they would revert to the age of thirty-three – Christ’s supposed age at the Crucifixion.
¹
So how much this proud, intelligent face resembles hers at the age of eighty-two is impossible to guess; it may have been carved several years after her death from drawings or memory. But there is a clue in the open book she holds. This is not a closed missal piously clasped to the breast of an illiterate believer, but a book in the process of being read when she fell asleep for the last time (plate 29).

More informative is a statue at Chartres Cathedral, consecrated in 1260. The Royal or Western Portal
²
is older, having been built and carved for the Romanesque church that stood on the same spot until destroyed by fire in 1194. While no one can prove that the life-size queen in her mid-twenties carved here in fine detail is indeed a true likeness of Louis’ consort, the work is dated to 1142–50, when Eleanor was of that age and the only queen in France. The statue’s clothing belongs to the period and, despite a certain impassivity in the features, the high skill of the sculptor is beyond question (plate 3).

The expression on the face is regal, challenging and untroubled, exuding self-confidence and intelligence. Seeing this statue in profile, the damage to the head in Bordeaux Cathedral is doubly regrettable, for the strong nose at Chartres is very distinctive. The hair is elegantly coiffed, but constrained by no modest veil or wimple, as one might expect of a married woman. Its luxuriant femininity must have disturbed the clerics by whom Young Louis was surrounded. The saintly Bernard of Clairvaux refused to look even at his own sister Humbeline, the prioress of Jully, so deep was his horror of sex that caused mankind to be ‘begotten in filth, gestated in darkness and born in pain’.
³

Beside this proud queen standing in the Royal Portal as though she owns it and holding an open book to symbolise the literacy of which she was proud, the anguished king is dressed like a monk, his cheeks gaunt from fasting. It is a face racked by guilt, as Louis’ was after the massacre of Vitry – an outrage during his first major campaign after the marriage, to expiate the guilt for which was his main reason for going on crusade. And – it is only a detail, but details count in a search for which records are few – his mouth is definitely down-turned, as in the head at Bordeaux.

In her second marriage, Eleanor was depicted in a stained-glass window she and Henry of Anjou donated to the cathedral being built at Poitiers, but in a very stylised fashion which tells us little; the hair is covered and repairs to the glass obscure much of the facial detail.

Discovered in 1964 in a ruined chapel at Chinon, a short walk from Henry’s treasure castle, is a contemporary mural depicting her on horseback (plate 4). The artist has painted her thirty years older than at Chartres, which would make sense, for the setting is just after the rebellion of 1173–4. While the painting is crude in comparison with the finesse of the carving at Chartres, the face is boldly intelligent, the hair free-flowing and auburn. The colour could be the most important detail, for Eleanor’s granddaughter Blanca of Castile resembled her grandmother and was described as having long brown hair and cool classical looks.

A carved head on the wall of the nuns’ kitchen at the abbey of Fontevraud, whose construction was partly paid for by Eleanor, shows her as an old woman of eighty gazing at another carving either of herself as the girl who married Louis or of Blanca going off to marry another Prince Louis two generations later, which amounts to the same thing (see plates 1 and 5).

So, the nearest description of the bride on her wedding day in 1137 is that she was as tall as Prince Louis and quite broad-shouldered,
as befits an accomplished horsewoman. Her face was humorous and alert, framed by long auburn hair flowing freely from beneath the coronet. Her eyes, according to legend, were green and fearless. Indeed, Eleanor’s courage was never in dispute. Nor was her willingness to confront the Church.

After his return from the disastrous First Crusade, her troubadour grandfather William IX had taken for his mistress the countess of Châtellerault, well named La Dangerosa, causing his second wife Philippa to retire to the nunnery in which his first wife Ermengarde already lived! Undeterred by excommunication and the reprimands for this and other outrageous behaviour from the papal legate Giraud, he commented that hairs would grow on the prelate’s bald pate before he would give up the woman he loved, and made his point by bearing La Dangerosa’s portrait on his shield in tourna-ments – in return, he said, for her bearing him in bed.

In what he called
An Embarrassing Poem
, he explained the problem of choosing between wife and mistress in terms any knight would understand:

In that horse-obsessed age, the selective breeding that worked well for the most noble of animals was thought to produce the best results in humankind too. William IX therefore ordered his legitimate son to marry his mistress’ daughter by her estranged husband. In this case the breeder’s expectations were fulfilled, with the first-born daughter of that union being of the same independent character and physical toughness as her grandfather. Eleanor’s brother William, who should have inherited the ducal title, was born a year or two later. The second sister, Aelith or Petronilla, was born a year after that.

Eleanor was five when William IX’s death placed her one heartbeat away from wearing the coronet of Aquitaine that she watched her father put on for the first time in Limoges Cathedral. When she was seven, her mother and young brother died. As their father’s feudal
duties and military campaigns took him away from home for long periods, a strong bond grew up between the two sisters, with Eleanor becoming very protective towards Aelith. One of her less glorious distinctions is to be the only woman recorded as having unleashed a war in support of a sister’s right to marry the man she loved.

Ruling Aquitaine called for a warrior chieftain perpetually on the move, using diplomacy, bluff and armed force to keep refractory vassals in their place. The southern culture treated women as men’s equals, but this was
paratge
– an equality of dignity, not power. In practice, a duchess ruling a province so vast and unruly would require a very powerful husband to keep her vassals in order. From the age of seven Eleanor had known that she would one day be the virtual queen of what had once been an independent kingdom, and that while a warrior-duke might have redeemed its former greatness by force of arms, her duty lay in sacrificing her personal freedom in marriage to the most powerful suitor available.

The education she received following her brother’s death was wide-ranging. From her father and his vassals in council she learned statecraft and how to tell a good horse, dog, hawk or man from the bad ones. From her clerical tutors she also acquired literacy in Latin, which was the language of diplomacy and the Church, and in the official language of the duchy,
la lenga d’oc.

It says much that the Romans had no word for ‘yes’. The affirmative could be indicated in Latin by ‘thus’;
sic
has become
si
in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The slightly pedantic
mihi placet
– literally, ‘it pleases me’ – survives at high tables in a few universities. But commonly the phrase
hoc ille
, meaning ‘that’s it’, was used. In the language spoken in the north of France, this was corrupted to
oïl
and later to
oui
. Hence the correct name of the northern language:
la langue d’oïl.
In the south of France,
hoc ille
became simply
oc
and the language is therefore known as
la lenga d’oc.
Sister to Catalan and first cousin to Spanish and Italian, it is not a dialect of the northern tongue, but a separate language.