She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (23 page)

Without a son, however, Eleanor had an ace to play. Louis needed a legitimate male heir to inherit his kingdom (a necessity demonstrated only too convincingly by the bitter conflict still festering between Stephen and Matilda on the other side of the Channel). And if his wife refused him access to her bed, he stood no chance of fathering one. The odds must be that this is what
Eleanor did, once their enforced reunion between papal sheets was over. The king and queen were still young – thirty-two and twenty-eight respectively – and baby Alice provided very recent proof of their fertility. But less than two years after Alice’s birth, Louis was prepared to let Eleanor go, and Aquitaine with her – a huge political and territorial sacrifice that was worth making only if he saw no other way of securing the future of his dynasty.

Louis made a last-ditch attempt to cling on to what he had lost, politically if not personally, by continuing to style himself ‘duke of the Aquitainians’ for two years after Eleanor had left. But by then, the success of Eleanor’s strategy was clear for all to see, since, whatever he might call himself, her former husband no longer held any semblance of power in her lands. And it also transpired that the timing of her departure from the French court – seven months after the visit of the young duke of Normandy – had not been entirely coincidental. No one, in March 1152, could mistake the fact that the newly divorced duchess of Aquitaine was once again a great catch for the unmarried magnates of Europe; she had plenty of childbearing years still ahead of her, and whoever fathered her sons would add Aquitaine to his family’s lands in perpetuity. A chronicler from Tours reports that Eleanor narrowly evaded two ambushes on her journey to Poitiers as a free woman, both laid by ambitious young noblemen intent on winning her hand by kidnap rather than diplomacy: one was Thibaud, the new count of Blois after the death of his father and namesake; the other, Geoffrey of Anjou, teenage son of the Empress Matilda. But once Eleanor eluded their grasp, it emerged that her hand had already, secretly, been taken – and that the man who would become her second husband was Geoffrey’s older brother, Duke Henry of Normandy, whom she had met in Paris the previous summer.

That, at least, is the most plausible conclusion to be drawn from the speed with which Eleanor and Henry married. Only eight weeks and two days after the bishops had proclaimed her divorce, Eleanor, at twenty-eight, made new vows to a nineteen-year-old whose boundless energy and charisma as a soldier and a leader
marked him out, in personal terms, as the polar opposite of her first husband. Politically, though, the two men had more in common: each had stood to gain immeasurably from the addition of her lands to his own; and Henry, no less than Louis, could offer her a crown. The diadem was not yet quite in his hands in the spring of 1152, since, across the Channel in England, King Stephen still clung to the hope that his own son Eustace might succeed him. And Henry’s chance to press his claim to the throne on English soil was further delayed by the need to defend his French possessions against Louis’s furious reaction to the news of this provocative wedding. A French army swarmed across the Norman frontier; but Henry set in motion a counter-attack that was swift, violent and irresistible. In little more than two months, Normandy was secure. A year later, with Eustace dead and Stephen’s resistance finally extinguished, Henry was formally recognised as the heir to the English throne. One more year after that, on 19 December 1154, Eleanor sat by Henry’s side in Westminster Abbey as they were crowned king and queen of England.

Eleanor had effected an extraordinary transformation. For fifteen years she had been queen of France – a focus of personal loyalty for her Aquitainian vassals, but afforded no place in the formation of royal policy, dominated as her husband’s government was by the monastic influence of Abbot Suger. Nor, on the other hand, had she fulfilled the expected role of a royal consort. In fifteen years perhaps three pregnancies had produced only two daughters, not the male heir France needed, and when she had accompanied her husband on crusade her incautious behaviour had scandalised Europe.

Now she had a second chance to be a queen, beside a very different man, in a very different realm. And one of the most striking aspects of this transfiguration was how much it owed to Eleanor’s own agency. Admittedly, Louis was following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, who had both separated from their first wives. (His father’s short-lived first marriage was annulled on the predictable grounds of consanguinity, for political reasons, it
seems; his grandfather, on the other hand, repudiated the mother of his eldest son to pursue an outrageously irregular union with the wife of the then count of Anjou, and was excommunicated for his pains.) But neither had risked losing territory on the immense scale of the duchy of Aquitaine as a result of divorce. And, crucially, it was Eleanor who had first raised questions about the validity of her marriage; Eleanor, in all likelihood, who had brought the issue to a head in 1152; and Eleanor who, before she had even left the French king’s side, had found herself a new husband whose power could rival Louis’s own.

She had done so with determination, fearlessness and an utter lack of concern for the world’s verdict on her conduct. After the reverses she had suffered at Antioch, she had played her hand with acuity and skill. In leaving her first husband, and marrying her second, she had decisively shifted the balance of power in France. Together, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry of Normandy and Anjou now ruled lands that stretched from Barfleur in the north to the Pyrenees in the south – a territorial realignment that relegated Louis in Paris to the sidelines, and helped to overwhelm Stephen’s resistance to Henry’s claims in England. Henry could offer his bride the prospect of a crown, but there is no doubt that she helped him to secure it for her.

While he was doing so, Eleanor immersed herself in those elements of a royal wife’s role that she had so signally failed to fulfil at her first attempt. Within six months of marrying Henry she was pregnant, and in August 1153 – adding insult to injury for her ex-husband – she gave birth to a son, William, a name that conveniently celebrated the dukes of Aquitaine and the Norman conqueror of England simultaneously. Within a year she had conceived again, and was heavily pregnant when she was anointed and crowned at Westminster in December 1154, two weeks after enduring a stormy Channel crossing to set foot in her new kingdom for the first time. Her second son, named Henri after his father, was born in London in February 1155. Three more babies followed in the next three years: Matilda in 1156, Richard in 1157
and Geoffrey in 1158. Thereafter the rate at which she produced more children slowed, but it did not stop altogether. Eleanor, her own namesake, was born in 1161, and Joanna in 1165, and by the autumn of 1166 she was pregnant again for what was to prove the last time.

For the first fifteen years of her second marriage, then, she was almost constantly occupied with the physically demanding business of childbearing. The royal household was well equipped with wet-nurses, attendants and tutors to wait on the royal children’s every practical need; it was hardly that Eleanor’s days were consumed by the minutiae of motherhood. But repeated pregnancies, combined with her formal responsibilities as the consort of a king who never stopped moving around his vast territories, meant that she had little scope for political initiative at the highest level. She appeared at Henry’s side at ceremonial gatherings of the court throughout his empire, and she embodied one facet of his authority, at the head of a government managed with increasing administrative sophistication, when he was absent on campaign with his army. But the main female influence in Henry’s counsels during these years was that of his mother, the Empress Matilda, an experienced and astute presence at her home in Rouen. Eleanor, meanwhile, was absorbed in the vitally important but altogether less cerebral task of stocking the royal nursery.

All that was to change in 1167. In September of that year, Henry’s mother Matilda died. Nine months earlier, Eleanor had given birth to her last child, a boy named John. Her years as a silent madonna were over. She was ready to step into her mother-in-law’s place as a political force to be reckoned with. And Henry, like Louis before him, was about to discover that loyalty to her spouse was not the foremost of his wife’s many qualities.

 

In 1167, the Norman conquest of England was a century old. The wider empire of which Normandy and England were now part, on the other hand, had been in existence for less than a decade and a half. Henry had welded his disparate territories together through a characteristically overwhelming combination of brute force and sharp political judgement. He had overpowered a rebellion led by his own brother Geoffrey in Anjou, and extended his influence westward into the independent duchy of Brittany, as well as consolidating his power in England, Normandy and Aquitaine. He had set his government in order, so that in England, for example, the chaotic after-effects of civil war, played out in disputes over landholding and inheritance, could finally be put to rest in his law courts without the need for his constant presence. And he had gathered around himself a group of able advisers, of whom only one had proved anything less than an asset to the regime: Thomas Becket, once his closest friend, whom Henry had promoted to the see of Canterbury only to find that his new archbishop took his duties to the Church, rather than the crown, much more seriously than the king had anticipated.

By 1167 his breach with Becket over the relative powers of ecclesiastical and royal authority had become overt and irretrievable. The archbishop had escaped into exile in France where Louis, always delighted by any opportunity to make trouble for Henry, gave him sanctuary. But, despite this increasingly bitter and, for Henry, profoundly irritating dispute, there could be no mistaking that the king of England was now the most powerful man in western Europe. He ruled a great deal more land and commanded more men and money than his nearest rival, Louis of France. Louis had
grown a little into his own authority since his desertion by his first wife and the deaths of his mentors, Abbot Suger and the venerated Bernard of Clairvaux, in the early 1150s. He had also, at last, after the births of two more daughters by his second wife, fathered a son by his third. But, as he lightheartedly remarked to Henry’s clerk Walter Map, ‘Your lord the king of England, who lacks nothing, has men, horses, gold, silk, jewels, fruits, game and everything else. We in France have nothing but bread and wine and gaiety …’ And, however much Louis’s political standing had developed, the joke remained too close to the truth for French comfort.

Having so comprehensively mastered the present, Henry was now confronted with the challenge of the future. How was his empire, bound together for the moment by the sheer force of his own dynamism, to be managed when he was gone? And how was his growing family of sons to be accommodated within the territories he had amassed? Henry sought to answer both questions at once in early 1169 when he concluded a comprehensive peace treaty with Louis at the border town of Montmirail, between his own city of Le Mans and the French king’s capital at Paris.

Henry’s lands would be divided, he declared, between three of his sons. The eldest of Henry and Eleanor’s children, William, had survived for only three years, dying in December 1156. But the rest of their large brood had proved as hardy as their unstoppable parents, and their second son, Henri, was now a strapping fourteen-year-old, tall, blond, charming and charismatic. In the usual manner of international diplomacy, the complex pre-history of the kings of France and England and the queen who had married each of them in turn had been swept to one side when the young prince’s marriage was arranged: at the age of just six, the son of Eleanor and Henry had made his vows to Marguerite, the toddler daughter of Louis of France by his second wife, Constanza of Castile. And at Montmirail, for the first time, King Henry confirmed what inheritance the now teenage couple would one day rule. Young Henri would shoulder his father’s mantle, taking over the territories that made up the king’s personal inheritance –
the cross-Channel realm composed of the kingdom of England, the duchy of Normandy and the county of Anjou.

His mother’s duchy of Aquitaine, meanwhile, would go to his eleven-year-old brother Richard, who – as the junior partner in this double marriage alliance – was betrothed to Marguerite’s younger sister Alix. Aquitaine would therefore retain its independence from the kingdom of England, an arrangement explicitly confirmed by the fact that Richard would do homage for his duchy to his French father-in-law Louis, rather than to his own father or brother. And for ten-year-old Geoffrey, Henry and Eleanor’s third son, there was Brittany, where the exhausted and browbeaten duke, Conan IV, finally abandoned all attempts to hold off Angevin domination. Conan’s only daughter and heir, Constance, had already been betrothed to Geoffrey in yet another dynastic alliance forged in the nursery. Now it was confirmed that the young man would one day rule Brittany in the name of his wife, and that the duchy would be formally subjected to Angevin overlordship, since Geoffrey, it was agreed, would perform homage as duke to his elder brother Henri.