She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (20 page)

And so, just three months after her father’s death, Eleanor married Louis, the heir to the French throne, in Bordeaux’s magnificent cathedral. In accordance with Capetian custom, her young husband had already been crowned king at Reims six years earlier
(by Pope Innocent II, no less, for whom the French court was temporarily providing refuge from the challenge of a schismatic rival in Rome). This consecration in childhood was designed to safeguard the prince’s right to succeed his father, and it was therefore for the second time that Louis was crowned alongside his bride in Bordeaux, in the course of a specially devised coronation ceremony which emphasised that the people of Aquitaine were now numbered among the subjects of the French king. Only days later, Eleanor became queen in fact as well as in name. Louis the Fat died on 1 August 1137 – killed by an attack of dysentery in the intense heat of an oppressive summer – and on 8 August the young Louis VII and his new wife were crowned yet again, definitively this time, amid cheering crowds in Eleanor’s city of Poitiers.

The repeated coronations were intended, in part, to counteract the fact that the young man Eleanor had married had not been born to be king. Louis the Fat’s namesake and successor was his second son, who had been destined from an early age for a life in the Church. But in 1131 the boy’s elder brother, Philippe – a fifteen-year-old whose response to his own coronation-in-advance had been to defy his father with adolescent arrogance – tripped over a stray pig while riding through a Parisian street. The sudden, catastrophic fall of horse and rider left the young man bloodied and broken, in a coma from which he did not recover. He was buried in the abbey church of Saint-Denis, the Parisian necropolis of the French monarchy; and it was from the cloisters of Saint-Denis that eleven-year-old Louis emerged, wide-eyed, to find his future transformed.

His gaze was scarcely less innocent at seventeen, when he acquired his queen and his kingdom at almost exactly the same time. According to later gossip, Eleanor would one day remark that her husband was more monk than king – a judgement that captures Louis’s assiduous piety, and a certain unworldliness that remained from his years in the cloisters, but conveys little of his enthusiasm for either his bride or the business of ruling. Possession of Eleanor’s vast domains gave Louis more hope than any
of his predecessors of extending his authority across the length and breadth of France, and soon he set about pressing her claim, inherited from her grandmother Philippa, to the
comté
of Toulouse beyond Aquitaine’s south-eastern borders. He was also, by all accounts, besotted with his wife, offering her an infatuated, puppyish devotion.

Eleanor herself was much less impressed. From the start, this union between a boy raised by monks (even monks under the acute eye of Abbot Suger) and the granddaughter of a licentious troubadour was not a meeting of minds. We have only scraps of information with which to piece together the royal couple’s relationship, but the overwhelming impression is that the young queen had worldly, sophisticated tastes, a sharp wit and an appreciation of the subtle ambiguities of politics, while her gauche husband conducted himself with an awkward combination of self-denying religiosity and judgemental inflexibility. Certainly, too, Eleanor in Paris was a stranger in a strange land: not as obviously and manifestly far from home as eight-year-old Matilda had been in Germany, but nevertheless an orphaned teenager housed within a forbidding fortress in a crowded, jostling city whose inhabitants spoke with the unfamiliarly rounded tones of the
langue d oïl
, the language of the French north, rather than in the hybrid frontier dialect of Poitou or with the lively musicality of Occitan itself.

Of course, this cultural isolation was the eternal condition of a royal bride, transported miles from her homeland as the incarnation of an alliance or treaty, a weaver of peace or a conduit of power. But the knowledge that Eleanor was not alone in her fate offered little in the way of comfort. The contrast in style between north and south in France was all too apparent forty years later to the troubadour Bertran de Born, lord of Hautefort in the Limousin, who professed himself unimpressed by his stay at the English king’s court in Normandy: ‘a court where no one laughs or jokes is never complete; a court without gifts is just a paddock-full of barons. And the boredom and vulgarity of Argentan nearly killed me …’ Paris was not Argentan, but neither was it Poitiers or
Bordeaux. And if Eleanor felt any of the alienation expressed in her countryman’s song, it can only have been compounded by the effects of her failure to perform the eternal function of a royal bride: the provision of a male heir to safeguard the succession of the dynasty into which she had married.

However much the fault lay at Louis’s door – and the suspicion was that the monkish king was not a frequent visitor to his wife’s bed – the blame, in contemporary eyes, rested only with the queen. By 1144, after seven years of marriage, it is possible that Eleanor had had one miscarriage, but it is certain that she had produced no living heir. She was not a woman to be cowed by unhappy circumstance, and her position was protected from serious threat by Louis’s devotion, by her youth and by the power of the lands she brought to the French crown. But something of her frustration, as well as her fiery temperament, may be apparent in her fraught relationship with some of her husband’s closest advisers. One in particular, a eunuch named Thierry Galeran, she hated so much (according to John of Salisbury, the future bishop of Chartres who was then a student in Paris) that she subjected him to relentless mockery and ridicule.

At least Eleanor had the support of her sister, Petronilla, a companion who shared her language, her culture and her memories of their former life in Aquitaine. But Petronilla’s presence at her side precipitated the most horrifying incident of Louis’s kingship, one that cast a long shadow and set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead Eleanor away from Paris for ever. It began in 1142, when a husband was found for Petronilla from among the great noblemen of France. The king’s cousin Raoul, count of Vermandois, forty and one-eyed, was a champion of the French crown, his battle-damaged sight a badge of the devoted service he had given Louis’s father. He was the perfect political match for the queen’s sister in every way but one: he was already married. That, it seemed, was a minor inconvenience, and his wife of twenty years, Eléonore of Champagne, was rapidly put aside.

But the repudiated countess had two brothers, who might not be
content to see her so publicly humiliated. One, Stephen, was otherwise engaged across the Channel in the battle to keep hold of the English crown; but the other, Thibaud of Blois and Champagne, was one of the most powerful magnates in France, who had ridden alongside Raoul of Vermandois in the young king’s retinue on the road to Bordeaux to meet his queen five years earlier. Raoul’s matrimonial rearrangements now set him on a collision course with his former brother-in-law, and massing ominously in support of the insulted Thibaud was the collective might of the Church. Despite his ostentatious piety, King Louis, like many another monarch, had already clashed with the pope over the vexed question of the right to elect and invest bishops. Now – in spite of the fact that three tame French bishops had been found to annul Raoul’s first wedding and sanction his second – Pope Innocent II decided to act to defend the sacrament of marriage from the vagaries of royal whim and political convenience. By the end of 1142, both Louis and his cousin Raoul had been excommunicated and their lands placed under interdict, and Innocent had witheringly denounced the young king as ‘a boy in need of instruction’.

For Louis, the need to demonstrate that he was no longer the child whom Innocent had crowned at Reims won out over religious obedience or political judgement. He blamed Count Thibaud for the reverses he had suffered, and in January 1143 he marched into Champagne at the head of an army, determined to bring his vassal to heel. At Vitry, a poorly defended town a hundred miles east of Paris, the king watched with grim satisfaction as the inhabitants fled in terror before the onslaught of his troops. Thirteen hundred men, women and children barricaded themselves into their church while their homes were torched around them. And then, as they prayed desperately for salvation, the flames spread to the roof-timbers of their sanctuary. Before Louis’s gaze, the building was engulfed. Amid unbearable heat and the deafening uproar of fire and falling masonry, the air filled with acrid smoke and the nauseating, cloying stench of burning flesh. From the holocaust of Vitry, no one emerged alive.

It was a massacre of innocents, and visceral in its horror. Even this, however, could not immediately check Louis’s obstinacy, and his army continued its advance across Thibaud’s lands. But the conflagration did plant seeds of doubt in the king’s mind about the justice of his cause, uncertainty that was rapidly compounded by the strictures of Bernard of Clairvaux, the most venerated and uncompromising of Europe’s spiritual leaders. At fifty-two, Bernard’s influence was felt far beyond the walls of the abbey he had founded in a densely wooded valley only fifty miles from Vitry. His example was the driving force behind the rapid spread of the new Cistercian order, an austere re-imagining of the Benedictine rule, which Bernard embraced with such single-minded asceticism from his tiny cell in the angle of the roof at Clairvaux that he pushed himself to the brink of his physical endurance, existing on the barest minimum of food and sleep. But from his gaunt frame issued a voice that thundered across Europe.

His spiritual standing was such that in 1130, when Innocent II was driven into French exile after the contested election of a rival pope, Louis the Fat had given the arbitration of Innocent’s claims to the Holy See into Bernard’s hands. The stern judgement of the abbot of Clairvaux not only decided French support for Innocent but, as he travelled indefatigably on a scrawny donkey at the pope’s side, secured the backing of Germany, Spain and England for Innocent’s eventual restoration to Rome. Now neither rank nor birth, wealth nor power, offered a shield against Abbot Bernard’s critical gaze. Kings and bishops, noblewomen and nuns – all could be judged and found wanting, the cure for their errors contained in excoriating letters despatched from a pen that scarcely seemed to rest.

Abbot Suger, the king’s greatest confidant and counsellor, had felt compelled to lay aside the luxurious trappings of power, adopting a simple woollen habit and taking up residence in a single small room in Saint-Denis’s cloister, after a rebuke from Abbot Bernard some years earlier. After Vitry, it was Louis’s turn to feel the stinging lash of Bernard’s tongue: ‘… from whom but the devil can I say that this counsel comes which adds fire to fire and
slaughter to slaughter; which lifts the cry of the poor, the groaning of captives, the blood of the slain to the ears of the Father of the fatherless and the Judge of widows?’ The abbot, as always, spoke with the assurance of absolute spiritual certainty, and he left the king in no doubt of the reckoning he faced:

Louis had no matching certainty of his own, and he crumbled before the abbot’s assault. By 1144, the king had collapsed into a state of wretched penitence, and was ready to make terms with both the pope and Count Thibaud. The royal army withdrew from Champagne, and the interdict was lifted. Meanwhile, Abbot Suger saw an opportunity to cement this fragile peace in the ceremony to consecrate the extraordinary new choir he had built for the basilica at Saint-Denis, a breathtaking confection of soaring arches and gorgeously coloured light. Abbot Bernard, for his part, deplored lavish ornament in church architecture, as in everything else: a misuse of earthly riches, he said, that could better be used to succour the poor, and a worldly distraction from the contemplative inwardness of the soul’s quest for God. But, in that at least, he had not persuaded Abbot Suger to follow him. For Suger, the overwhelming beauty of his building was a path to grace, a radiant, transcendent space that gave earth-mired sinners a glimpse of heaven.

On 11 June 1144, therefore, a uniquely powerful congregation of sinners passed through the gilded bronze doors of Suger’s church to see the bones of St Denis, France’s patron saint, placed in a golden shrine at the centre of the choir. King Louis was there, contrite and remorseful. Abbot Bernard had swallowed his revulsion at the opulence of his surroundings to be present in the cause of peace. And there too, weighed down by heavily embroidered robes amid the press of the crowd, was Louis’s wife, Eleanor.

It seems unlikely that Bernard was much impressed by this encounter with France’s queen. He had known her father – who had been a supporter of the schismatic anti-pope in the days when Abbot Bernard was Pope Innocent’s chief hope of regaining the throne of St Peter – and had brought the duke to his knees, literally, it was said, in a confrontation at Parthenay, just west of Poitiers. It was for the sake of Eleanor’s sister that Louis had watched more than a thousand souls burn at Vitry. And now here she stood, a woman – her sex in itself a source of anxiety and repugnance from the perspective of the ascetic Cistercian ideal – decked out in the kind of superficial magnificence that the abbot deplored.

But neither was Eleanor overawed by the emaciated figure dressed in the coarse white wool of the Cistercian habit. Throughout her life she would display a judicious piety, conventional in form and expression, but she was not about to bow her head to a spiritual philosophy by which she herself would be written off as an embodiment of worldly vanity. Instead, this unlikely pair recognised, each in the other, a formidable will and an imposing personality. The result was a bargain. Eleanor would do what she could to steer her husband in the ways of peace; in return, Abbot Bernard would petition the queen of heaven on behalf of the queen of France, in the hope that Eleanor might conceive an heir to her husband’s throne.