April Queen (57 page)

That is what it looks like at first sight, but then one recalls that the woman who fought Henry’s will for fifteen years of captivity never weakened herself with vain regret or self-pity. It is more likely that the anonymous sculptor has captured the old queen at the very moment she was bidding farewell close to that very spot to Princess Blanca, on her way to wed Prince Louis at Port-Mort.

Chisel has conspired with stone to convey the anguish of all the noble and royal girls dispatched to foreign lands to bear children in loveless marriages – for Eleanor knew exactly the loneliness, the pain and the hostility to which she was condemning this granddaughter of twelve so like herself at the same age in looks, intellect and spirit. If there was one thing worse than being such a pawn, perhaps it was to be a mother or grandmother trapped in a system which gave her no alternative to sending her own girls to the fate she knew all too well.

O
ne of the frustrations for an author researching a character born early in the twelfth century lies in the hunt for a true likeness. The later medieval passion for portraiture had not begun, and that less reliable source, the beautifully illuminated capital letter in hand-copied manuscripts, was in abeyance as a result of Cistercians like Abbé Bernard of Clairvaux, who thought that to use more than one colour in a capital distracted the eye from the text and therefore the mind from God.

Although no documentary confirmation exists, the statues of the royal couple in the south-west portal at Chartres (plates 3 and 6) have for many reasons always been accepted as portraits of Eleanor in her early twenties, together with Young Louis before the Second Crusade. The high skill of the sculptor inclined researchers to consider these accurate portraits.

From that age until her effigy at Fontevraud there was only one other accredited and photographed representation of Eleanor: an ambiguous double portrait possibly of her and Henry in the reconstructed Romanesque cloister of New York.

Luckily, in Aquitaine there was a tradition of sculpting commemorative heads at each succession. Used on capitals or set into church walls, they were a way of reminding the common people who were their new masters. The three heads in Bordeaux Cathedral (plates 2, 8, 9) are examples of this, but are darkened by time and unlit, of less than life size and have been reset long ago into the wall of the nave about nine metres high. To complicate photography even more, a hugely hideous wooden pulpit makes a frontal view imposs-ible. By using a 102 zoom lens and a very powerful flash, it was something of
a triumph for me to see them at last for the first time, thanks to some Adobe software. At last I could see what bride, groom and Geoffroi de Lauroux looked like on the day of Eleanor's wedding to Louis. And if the sculpture is not of the best quality, it still conveys the beauty, the spirit and lively intelligence of Eleanor.

In 1964 two amateur historians working in the ruined rock-cut chapel of St Radegonde on the Falcon Rock above Chinon town removed a flake of limewash to discover a finger painted directly on the rock. The finger led to a hand which became a sad-faced woman on horseback with four other riders and parts of their mounts in a fresco measuring 1.15 2 2.65 metres (plate 16). The fresco, of superior quality but fading from exposure and partly destroyed by moisture seeping through the rock in places, was dated to the later twelfth century and the richly dressed and crowned figures identified as red-bearded Henry of Anjou and Eleanor, with Joanna, Richard and Geoffrey.

Since the scene depicted is just after the failed rebellion of 1173–4, the captive queen was fifty-two at the time. While not exactly a portrait, her bold chin, hair colour and lack of wimple concord with the other known likenesses and verbal descriptions.

On the evening after photographing the fresco, I was staying nearby in the old leper hospital of the abbey of Fontevraud – the Hostellerie St Lazare. As a guest, I was able to stroll through the abbey gardens alone after they had been closed to the public for the night, hunting for I didn't know what. It was very frustrating to be in a place that Eleanor had visited many times and where she spent the last years of her life: you feel near to something, but there is nothing to see except the effigy in the abbey church.

I had visited the abbey before, but never late in the evening. It was the angle of the setting sun that drew my eye to one of the ornamental corbels just below the roof of the nuns' kitchens, the construction of which was financed by Eleanor and Joanna (plate 28). By searching for the images of Eleanor's time in hundreds of twelfth-century buildings on both sides of the Channel, I had learned to decode some of the messages that sculptors leave in their work. Most corbels are in-your-face; the obscene and erotic ones would lose their impact otherwise. Yet this finely carved old woman's head with the stylish turban headdress (plate 5) was unusual in its twisted posture, the head gazing with palpable feeling at … A cloud passed across the sun and like a spotlight a single shaft illuminated a beautiful and very familiar young girl's head further round the curved wall (plate 1). This had to be another angle of the face I knew so well at Chartres.…

It was a moment that would excite any biographer who had been hunting years for likenesses of such an elusive subject. The first corbel had to be of Eleanor aged seventy-eight when she retired to Fontevraud; the other must either be herself when young and beautiful or Blanca of Castile, her granddaughter who so closely resembled her as a girl – which in a sense was the same thing.

One learns in pursuing the long trail of research to beware the danger of believing what is convenient. Fortunately, my friend Norman Douglas Hutchinson has spent many years studying faces professionally as a portraitist whose sitters include two queens – Elizabeth II of Britain and the late Queen Mother. The different angles at which I had been obliged to take the various photographs at Bordeaux, Chartres, Fontevraud and Chinon gave him less problem than I had thought, because he was looking for the concordances of eyes, brow ridges, nose and mouth – which still betray the subject whether painted by Modigliani or drawn by a media cartoonist.

One incongruent detail was the smallness of the mouth in the head at Bordeaux Cathedral. Possibly, Norman thought, it was fashionable at the time for girls to have small mouths, so the unknown Bordelais sculptor had cheated a little to flatter his young Duchess. The effigy is stylised and the fresco is, like most frescoes of the period, a painting with a message and not intended as a portrait. In all other respects, he was satisfied that we were almost certainly looking at the same person as she aged through more than six decades and great suffering.

T
he compositions written and performed at Eleanor's courts in London, Angers and Poitiers were far from being all love songs. The 1,100 texts in medieval Occitan still extant, attributed to 450 poets, are the legacy of a cultural explosion that influenced all subsequent European lyrical poetry and might well have stimulated the Renaissance three centuries earlier than was to be the case, had not Simon de Montfort's genocidal Albigensian Crusade effectively stamped out the fires of the southern civilisation shortly after Eleanor's death.

The forms of the verses are as varied as the subjects.
L'amor de lonh
, or love from afar, is the yearning for a lady whose charms are withheld or distant, and becomes her would-be lover's overlord by unattainability. In mystical love she is the Virgin Mary, whose praises were sung by the monk Marcabru.
La canso
is a love song, generally of five or six short verses and a refrain.
L'alba
is a song in which a watcher warns the lady that dawn approaches and she must leave her lover or risk discovery by an informer who will tell her husband.

Of other popular themes, the
pastorela
tells of a pretty shepherdess being surprised by a knight, who pays her court; sometimes she yields, but she can refuse and call the other shepherdesses to her aid.
La balada
is a song to dance to,
la romança
an account of an amorous adventure,
la tenson
or
joc partit
a philosophical dialogue.
Lo sirventès
is a satire on human nature, religion or politics.

L'ensenhament
is literally a lesson in verse on morals or behaviour, for the troubadours were preaching a whole philosophy, vaunting the qualities of
leialtat
or loyalty and
drechura
, which is sincerity – and
pretz
, meaning a proper self-esteem.
Valor
is a sense of values,
melhorament
self-improvement, and
jòi
not just a transient emotion but the sense of
moral well-being that comes from leading an honourable life. Perhaps strangest of all for feudal times was the ideal of
paratge
, meaning equality – not of wealth or power, but of personal dignity.

If yearning for the beloved and the pain of separation are themes common to
trobador
and
trobairitz
, some themes are peculiar to the female view. In the masculine
planh
, the poet laments the death of a hero such as Richard Coeur de Lion or William IX; the poetess laments her unheroic beloved who has died. Among other typical themes were prayers for the Virgin's intercession, like this one by the
trobairitz
Na Bieiris de Romans.
Na Maria, prètz e fina valors
is a profane rewrite of the
Hail Mary
, recently approved by Urban IV:

Another poetess, Na Castelosa of Auvergne, expressed the anguish of being abandoned by her lover:

The troubadour's romantic compositions are masculine and self-centred; the pain that hurts is always his, but the
trobairitz
relates to other women in her situation, as in this anonymous warning ‘not to make the same mistakes I did':

Troubadours and
trobairitz
both gave advice, but usually the men were positive, while often the ladies, like this anonymous Catalan poetess, were saying
don't
.

And a young
trobairitz
could ask an older woman for advice:

The
trobairitz
Contesa Beatrix de Dia wrote of the heartache when betrayed by her lover: