She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (22 page)

Louis, however, had other priorities. The crusade had originally been intended to liberate Edessa, which lay north-east of both Antioch and Aleppo. But now – almost a year and two thousand miles after he had first set out on his mission – Louis heard the devastating news that Edessa was no longer there to be saved. An Armenian-led revolt had been crushed with such vehemence by its Muslim captors that the city lay deserted, its walls in ruins. As a result, an alternative target would have to be found for a crusade that had been intended as a triumph, but threatened now to descend into farce. For Ramon of Antioch, who confidently presented his plans to the French king at a council convened for the
purpose in May 1148, Aleppo was the obvious answer; but Louis declared his intention instead to ride three hundred miles south to rendezvous once more with the German king, Conrad, who was now healed of his wounds and had just arrived in the holy city of Jerusalem.

Ramon was appalled and incredulous. Having come so far, how could Louis now turn his back on the enemy he had set out to confront? And as the political relationship between Antioch and its French visitors collapsed into recrimination, so too did Louis and Eleanor’s marriage. The young queen had revelled not only in the comforts of her handsome uncle’s court, but in the charms of his company. She sympathised with his plans, and had undertaken to press his case with her husband. But the long, laughing conversations between uncle and niece – their intimacy compounded by the fact that the French struggled to understand the Poitevin or Occitan dialect in which Ramon and Eleanor could choose to speak privately – sparked scandalised whispers that the relationship had gone further than could be explained away by the politics of queenly intercession or the joy of a family reunion.

It was a dangerous moment for Eleanor. The wife of a king was the means by which his bloodline would be propagated, and, if the legitimacy of his heirs were to go unquestioned, she herself needed to be beyond reproach. But strikingly, and remarkably, Eleanor was unabashed by the currents of gossip and rumour that swirled around Antioch and soon raced across Europe. She knew her own strength, as heiress to the vast duchy that had transformed her husband’s power within his own kingdom, and she showed no fear for either her position or her reputation. There is no way of knowing, now, whether her affection for her glamorous uncle had grown into a full-blown affair – a relationship which, in the minds of shocked contemporaries, would constitute not only adultery but incest. Almost nine centuries later and with limited and partial evidence, we cannot with any confidence sift fact from speculation and innuendo. But speculation and innuendo there certainly were. And not only did Eleanor do nothing to distance
herself from Ramon and his court, but when Louis declared his plans to leave Antioch for Jerusalem, she – astonishingly – refused to go with him.

It was an extraordinary public breach between France’s royal couple, and an unexpected and damaging crisis for a military campaign that already seemed destined for humiliation rather than victory. There could be no possible doubt, now, of how independent-minded Eleanor was; how brave – or perhaps reckless – in the face of convention; and how unhappy she had become with her husband. And when Louis tried to insist that she remember her duty, she showed just how far she was prepared to go to escape him. ‘When the king made haste to tear her away’, wrote John of Salisbury, a well-informed source who was then a clerk at the papal curia, ‘she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related in the fourth and fifth degrees.’

It was true that Louis and Eleanor were related within the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church – that is, they shared an ancestor within their families’ last seven generations. But then, so did almost everyone else within the royal and noble houses of Europe. The Church – faced with the need to choose between the extinction of the ruling classes for want of suitable marriage partners, and the prospect of turning a blind eye to the enforcement of ecclesiastical rules – had opted for the latter, and consanguinity had therefore become a prohibition to be invoked at the convenience, rather than for the discipline, of the aristocracy. Usually, it was an instrument wielded by powerful men to rid themselves of wives who were no longer politically convenient, and Eleanor had seen how useful it could be when Raoul of Vermandois had discarded Eléonore of Blois in order to marry her sister. But Eleanor also, it now appeared, saw no reason why this escape route should not be open to a troubled queen just as well as to an inconvenienced nobleman.

What Louis thought of his wife’s disaffection is much less clear. ‘The king was deeply moved’, John of Salisbury later remarked,
‘and although he loved the queen almost beyond reason he consented to divorce her if his counsellors and the French nobility would allow it.’ There are profoundly mixed messages here: Louis, by this account, was all but immobilised by the conflicting impulses of piety, passion and politics. And further confusion is added by the only strictly contemporaneous evidence we have. ‘Concerning the queen your wife,’ Abbot Suger wrote to Louis from Paris in 1149, ‘we venture to congratulate you, if we may, upon the extent to which you suppress your anger, if there be anger, until with God’s will you return to your own kingdom and see to these matters and others.’

If Louis was angry – and it seems, at the very least, a plausible reaction to such a dramatic affront – he did not express it publicly. What we can be sure of is that Eleanor wanted a way out of her marriage, and that her behaviour was the talk of Europe, while her husband – susceptible though he might be to suggestions that their union was sinful – did not want to let her go, whether because he loved her, because he needed her lands, or because he could ill afford the embarrassment of being deserted by his wife in the course of a crusade that was already shaping up to be a humiliating failure. And, despite her uncle’s support, Eleanor was unable to hold out in the face of her husband’s insistence that she stay by his side. When the French army left Antioch by night, at speed and with none of the fanfare that had greeted their arrival, the queen, however reluctantly, was with them.

The rumours that sprang from Eleanor’s self-assertion in Antioch pursued her for the rest of her life. Later, sympathetic chroniclers would find themselves unable to resist alluding to the scandal with an unmistakable frisson of excitement, even as they ostentatiously drew a veil over the episode. ‘Many know what I would that none of us knew…’ wrote Richard of Devizes forty years later. ‘Let no one say any more about it; I too know it well. Keep silent …’

But, while the whispers about Eleanor and her uncle persisted, silence descended instead over the queen’s experiences for a year after her enforced removal from his court. The French marched south to Tripoli and then south again to Jerusalem, where Louis and
his army were welcomed with cheers and the singing of hymns. A few weeks later, at the end of June 1148, a magnificent gathering of the kings and nobles of France, Germany and Jerusalem took the decision that their thwarted crusade should now besiege Damascus, the great Muslim city almost 150 miles to the north-east; but only a month later, after a promising attack through the walled orchards that made up the city’s outer defences, their combined forces were driven off by impassable blockades and the imminent prospect of starvation. Riven by argument about who was to blame for the fiasco, they trailed disconsolately home. And of the French queen’s whereabouts during this damp squib of a campaign, the chroniclers recorded nothing at all.

We do know that, when Louis decided to remain in Jerusalem while his nobles made the long journey home in the autumn of 1148, Eleanor stayed with him. If he had fallen short as a crusader, he was determined that he would not fail as a pilgrim, and the king and queen made an elaborate tour of the Holy Land’s most sacred sites, culminating in the celebration of the Christian calendar’s holiest feast at Easter 1149. Shortly afterwards, the royal couple at last set sail from the port of Acre on the kingdom of Jerusalem’s Mediterranean shore.

Eleanor, it had to be said, did not make as likely a pilgrim as the monkish Louis, and she had already made it clear that she no longer welcomed his company. Whatever her mood after their long sojourn in the east, it was unlikely to have been improved by their voyage home. They took ship in two Sicilian vessels, one carrying the king and his household, the other the queen and hers. But, by taking passage as guests of one ally, Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, they fell foul of another. Roger was engaged in protracted hostilities with the forces of Byzantium, since the Emperor Manuel Komnenos saw him as the usurper of lands in southern Italy that should by rights be in Byzantine hands. And, as Eleanor gazed out from the deck of her Sicilian ship across the brilliant blue waters of the Mediterranean, a Byzantine fleet hove menacingly into view.

She had wished for a separation from her husband, but not in this frightening form. As the little Sicilian convoy scattered under the Byzantine attack, enemy ships closed round the queen’s vessel to corner and capture it. Eleanor’s time as a prisoner of the Greeks was brief, since rescue was close at hand in the form of Sicilian reinforcements; but by then the king’s galley was far out of sight, while storms drove Eleanor’s ship south towards north Africa. It was two long months before either made landfall again, Louis on the shore of Calabria in southern Italy, and Eleanor at Palermo in Sicily. There, finally, her health gave way under the strain of an already gruelling voyage compounded by the debilitating effects of isolation and uncertainty. It took three weeks before she was well enough to leave her bed and join her husband on the Italian mainland. And her convalescence can hardly have been helped by the arrival of the horrifying news that Ramon of Antioch, to whom she had said goodbye so unwillingly, had lost his life a few weeks earlier in battle with Nur ad-Din, the new ruler of Aleppo. Ramon’s head was hacked from his body, his good looks finally obliterated by this butchery, and sent in a silver box as a trophy for the caliph of Baghdad.

Weary, grieving and despondent, Eleanor made her way north at her husband’s side to Tusculum, a hill-town fifteen miles south-east of Rome, to accept the hospitality of the pope en route home to Paris. Eugenius III had last seen the couple in the glorious setting of Saint-Denis, at the ceremony to launch the crusade towards inevitable and triumphant victory. Now it seemed as though their marriage, just like the crusaders’ hopes, was fractured beyond repair. But the pope was determined to save this, if nothing else, from the ruins of the campaign. He issued a stern prohibition on any mention of the issue of consanguinity as a threat to the legitimacy of their marriage, confirming the validity of their union ‘by word and writing’, and threatening anathema against anyone who sought to dissolve it. And he sweetened compulsion with encouragement, ordering that the bed prepared for Eleanor and Louis to share should be protected from the
autumnal air by some of his own priceless hangings.

Louis was delighted by this papal blessing, since (John of Salisbury reported) ‘he loved the queen exceedingly, in an almost boyish fashion’. The reaction of Eleanor – about whom there was no longer anything girlish, and whose affection for her husband had long since been exhausted – is not recorded. There could be no doubt, however, that the pope’s pronouncement had closed the door on any hope that she might imminently escape her marriage. And Eleanor did not waste her energy by struggling further. It seems clear that she had resigned herself for the time being to her future in France: she became pregnant soon after their return to Paris, and gave birth in 1150 to a second daughter, Alice.

For two years thereafter, the chroniclers paid little attention to France’s newly domesticated queen. While Louis threw himself into war against Duke Henry of Normandy, the seventeen-year-old son of the Empress Matilda, Eleanor remained in the background, and she stayed there when this fiery young man arrived at the French court at the end of August 1151 to confirm a peace brokered by the doughty Bernard of Clairvaux.

But only seven months after Henry’s visit, Eleanor found herself again the talk of Europe when – despite the pope’s prohibition – her marriage was once again dragged into the glare of public scrutiny. On 21 March 1152, having given the matter their formal consideration, an august assembly of French bishops declared that the impediment of consanguinity rendered the marriage of their king and queen null and void. This was the same blood relationship that Eleanor had first raised in Antioch as a reason for separating from her husband, and which the pope had so sweepingly dismissed in confirming the legitimacy of their relationship. Something, clearly, had changed.

Most contemporaries, and historians since, have looked for the answer to Louis, who until now had refused to accept that he might part from his wife, whom he loved, and who had brought him such powerful territories as her dowry. The king, it is usually assumed, must have tired of Eleanor’s coldness towards him, or
suddenly become overwhelmed by doubt about her ability to bear him a male heir. But that conclusion perhaps underestimates the strength of the cards Eleanor held in her hand, or the way she chose to play them. She had been forced to acquiesce in the rapprochement brokered by Pope Eugenius in 1149, but there is no mistaking that her disenchantment with her marriage endured nonetheless. Certainly, the bishops’ pronouncement came as no surprise to her: she uttered no word of protest at the annulment, instead riding immediately towards her own city of Poitiers, and leaving forever her two daughters, the younger of whom was not yet two.

In fact, Alice’s birth in 1150 had, in retrospect, been a lucky break for Eleanor. Her status as the mother of girls has usually been seen as a position of weakness; it was mothers of boys, so the assumption goes, who could hope to assert their own power in their sons’ names. But, for Eleanor in 1152, the exact reverse was true. If she still wanted to escape her husband – and there is no reason to suppose that papal blandishments had done anything to change her mind – it was essential that she should not give birth to a son. If she bore Louis a boy, then the uncontested legitimacy of the heir to the kingdom of France would depend on the validity of his parents’ marriage. Escape, at that point, would be near-impossible (unless perhaps to a convent, which Eleanor had so far shown no sign of finding an attractive prospect). And, even if she could find some acceptable way of extricating herself without casting any hint of a shadow over her offspring, any son she had with Louis would be the heir not only to France but to Aquitaine as well – a fact that would undermine her chances of regaining control of her own duchy, as well as radically reducing her appeal to potential new suitors once she was free.