Eleanor Of Aquitaine (13 page)

As the Count of Anjou and the Duke of Normandy went down from Paris toward Angers, they may have been in some dudgeon over the concessions they had made in the matter of the Vexin, but the ultimate prospect solaced them As they rode through the heather of Maine in the early September days, they rehearsed their plans and uttered treason against their overlord. The riders came at last to the river Loir, which lay across their way at no great distance from their city of Le Mans. The days were hot and clouds of dust rose from their stallions' heels. They stepped aside to swim in the stream which near Château du-Loir offers tempting wayside pools, and then lodged nearby for the night, perhaps in the castle of Le Lude. There Geoffrey was seized with chills and fever, and three days later, as if to vindicate the predictions of Abbé Bernard, he, "paid the debt to nature," without time to see the culmination of his designs Henry, upon whom, by reason of this calamity, the gravest responsibility now sat, accompanied the count's body to Saint Julian in Le Mans, and having given him hasty burial there, pressed on to Angers, where he was at once received as heir of his father's provinces of Maine and Anjou.

*

It is significant as evidence that some understanding reassuring to the queen had been reached in Paris between her and the Angevins, that the first decisive steps were taken for the royal separation almost immediately after the departure of the Count of Anjou and the Duke of Normandy from the Ile. In September 1151, the King and Queen of the Franks made their last progress together through Aquitaine Their escort was so important as to indicate that this was no occasional
chevauchée
upon the routine of administration The king was accompanied by Thierry Galeran and other business advisers, by Hugues de Champfleury, who had succeeded to the ministerial office of Abbé Suger, and by various other magnates The queen had in her train the Archbishop of Bordeaux, into whose grasp the critical affairs of Aquitaine had largely come, and many bishops of her southern provinces, along with several of her chief vassals and sundry relatives. This retinue spent the whole season of the vintage in the queen's estates. The sovereigns held their Christmas assembly in Limoges, and for Candlemas convened a plenary court in Saint Jean d'Angély, over which the Archbishop of Bordeaux presided. In the course of this progress Eleanor's domain was undoubtedly set in order for the withdrawal of Louis's administration and his garrisons.
²⁰
At the end of the
chevauchée
the king and the queen seem to have taken final leave of one another in northern Poitou. On his return to his own lands Louis avoided Poitiers, where as the bridegroom of the duchess he had put on the coronet of the Counts of Poitou. It was therefore doubtless to Poitiers that Eleanor retired in the early spring of 1152.

No step so critical to the destinies of France as the divorce of the king and queen could be considered without the sanction of the Pope, and Eugenius would not have failed to be advised in this matter by Abbé Bernard, who had first pointed out the flaw in the royal marriage. The abbé's apologists have sought to relieve him in the matter of responsibility for the step to which Louis now consented. But this is to belittle the abbé. For Bernard the political interests of France did not transcend the sanctity of the moral order. His was no Hellenic mind seeking to harmonize reason and the will of God. In fact, the abbé had little regard for the pure works of intellect, so prone, as he had seen in his century, to lead the noblest minds to heresy and schisin. It was the singleness of Bernard's inward eye that was the instrument of his power; it saved him from confusions with secular concerns. With this eye he could see no ultimate good springing from the Poitevin root. He knew the queen's stock: Guillaume the troubadour, living his irreverent life under anathema, corrupting his bishops to gain his will, supporting monsters of ungodliness in Rome; Guillaume the Toulousain, dragged from his persistent heresies only by a miracle from heaven. He knew them root and branch; ungodly, stiff-necked, puffed up with pride and arrogance, broilsome, self-willed, garnering the worthless treasure of this world, and always impenitent. As for the conversion of the queen herself at Saint Denis, he could not count it one of the triumphs of his predication. Her past accused her. She had provoked Louis's wars with Thibault of Champagne to procure her sister's infamous marriage. Her levity overseas had cost the Franks incalculable losses. And there was the certainty of consanguinity. His mandate was clear. "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out." It would have been lax of the abbé to tolerate the queen.

On the Friday before Palm Sunday (March 21, 1152), the Archbishop of Sens, who had presided at the condemnation of Abelard, convened a synod for the sanction of the separation in the king's castle of Beaugency near Orléans, whence the queen might, upon her liberation, proceed without hindrance to her own domain. The conclave was august. Present were the Archbishops of Reims, of Bordeaux, and of Rouen, with certain of their suffragans, and a large gathering of barons and of nobles. The details were prearranged. If Louis had reason to discredit the queen, he forbore to injure her. On the other hand, his own sovereign dignity was preserved. It was the king's party that bore witness to the consanguinity of the royal spouses. The Princesses of France were declared legitimate and awarded to the king. The Archbishop of Bordeaux, as cautioner for the queen, made no protest against the charges, but received assurance of the restoration of her domains as she possessed them before her marriage, and the assurance that either party might marry again without hindrance, so long as the duchess preserved her vassal's allegiance to the king. Thereupon the decree of separation was announced.

For an event of such consequence, the termination of the royal marriage passed with significantly meager comment in the chronicles. The French historians, overlooking John of Salisbury's account of Eleanor's initiative in the affair, relate the event as Louis's, "repudiation," of his consanguineous queen. It is Bouchet in his seventeenth-century narrative who invents the circumstantial account of the proceeding.
²²
According to his engaging chronicle, the King of the Franks cast off his brokenhearted queen. Eleanor in fearful trepidation awaited the decree of the bishops outside the assembly. The two prelates and the two barons assigned to break the decision to her went softly, fearing their tidings might unhinge her mind. Bouchet represents her as so overcome with anguish and desperation at the verdict that she fell in a swoon from her chair, and so remained above two hours with her teeth firmly locked, beyond the relief of speech or tears, too far gone for restoratives. At last, when she had recovered her senses, she bent her clear green eyes upon her accusers and exhausted the rhetoric of helpless innocence and despair in defense of her honor and her crown. The plain facts do not, however, accord with this sensitive account. The Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Poitou, restored now to her own titles, was able, in spite of her ordeal, to mount her palfrey and make a hasty departure from Beaugency. With an escort of her own vassals, she took at once the familiar road by way of Blois for Tours.

The rumor of her release flew before her. Not far from Blois her tram fell into the ambush of Geoffrey of Anjou (aged sixteen), the enterprising younger brother of Henry, Duke of Normandy, who, without leave from his overlord or invitation from the duchess, plotted brigand-wise to possess himself of her person and her fiefs. Protected by her escort from this rude sally, she hastened toward the crossing of the Loire near Tours, which would bring her almost at once into her own estates. But then, as the chronicle of Tours relates, "her good angel," warned her that Thibault of Blois, second son of Louis's vassal, the Count of Champagne, lay in wait to capture her at the crossing of the river. Though lacking for the moment an elect champion, Eleanor was not yet reduced to younger brothers. Avoiding the usual ford, she outmaneuvered him, and so passed quickly, "by another way," to her own high place in Poitiers, where her Poitevin garrisons made her safe for the time from brigandly young counts.

While Eleanor was drawing her first draughts of freedom in her own ancestral city, assembling her household, and settling her effects in the long unused tower of Maubergeonne, the Duke of Normandy kept discreetly in his own estates observing the penitential rites of Lent. He must have heard with sardonic humor of the abortive plots of King Stephen's nephew Thibault and his own younger brother Geoffrey to capture the whilom queen. Not without challenge, he observed, did the richest dower in Europe pass over the highways of that troubled border region. On April 6 Henry took council with his barons in Normandy. He had need of their advice, for he had it in mind to affront his overlord, the King of France.

Near the middle of May, whether in pursuance of his own plans or on summons of the duchess, Henry came to Poitiers, Eleanor had never seen Louis until he came to Bordeaux to marry her. But she had already had a view of this bridegroom and was prepared for the bold, stocky, deep chested, high hearted, rufous young duke who came riding his stallion over the bridge of Moutierneuf to her high place, his falcon on his wrist and a sprig of plantagenesta in his bonnet On the 18th of May, scarcely eight weeks after the decree of Beaugency, the erstwhile queen became Duchess of Normandy.
²⁴
Some canonists must have been required to enable the spouses to avoid the sin of consanguinity about which the queen had been so scrupulous in Antioch and Tusculum. But this was somehow managed. The marriage was concluded without fanfare but not without responsible witnesses, lest some impediment should be discovered in the contract. The Duchess of Aquitaine was thus in a single hour swept into the orbit and encompassed by the destiny of her former lord's hereditary enemy Because of this, says the chronicler, a mighty feud arose between the two kings.

TIDINGS OF THE EVENT IN POITIERS broke like a mighty thunderclap in the Ile. Even if the court of Paris had suspected the queen of seeking the security of a new alliance, there was, from the Capetian point of view, no disconcerting potentate at large to whom she might attach herself. Certainly the wise men of the king's council, buttressed by the law and the canons, would not have regarded Henry Plantagenet with suspicious eye. Had not Abbé Bernard forbidden as consanguineous a marriage between this very Henry and the queen's daughter, the Princess Marie of France? Had not the queen harried the king and the court all the way from Antioch to Tusculum and from Tusculum to Beaugency with her scruples about consanguinity? Had she not, on this issue, been more precise than Rome itself? Was not Eleanor, as Countess of Poitou, the ward and vassal of the king, and did she not therefore require his sanction to marry anyone whomsoever? Had not the Duke of Normandy lately paid his vassal's vow of fealty to his overlord and received from him the kiss of peace?

It was merely the practical advantages of the alliance to the high contracting parties that the cautious Franks somehow overlooked. The late queen's marriage with the Duke of Normandy, incredible from a legalistic view, was precisely the only one that could raise Eleanor to a status from which she could survey her former role without humiliation and regret; and the capture of her provinces without the cost of an Angevin mark or a single man-at-arms was the one stroke that could certainly make Henry Plantagenet the more than peer of his overlord on the Continent, and in England the invincible rival of the reigning house of Blois.

In his palace Louis took counsel of the new advisers that surrounded him after the deaths of his nearest mentors, Abbé Suger, Thibault of Champagne, and Raoul of Vermandois. In the face of the fact accomplished in the west, the new council was perplexed as to whether to employ ecclesiastical or secular weapons in dealing with it. Too speedily the fears of Abbé Suger had been realized, but the ghostly weapons of AbbéBernard offered little prospect of reaching the recreant Duke and Duchess of Normandy, safely ensconced within their own frontiers. The air was sultry, but no bolt of anathema from Clairvaux or Rome touched the consanguineous spouses in Poitou. The council, which considered some notion of revoking the conditions of the royal separation,cited Henry to the French court to answer for his double treason; but this summons produced no sound or movement in the west.

When at last the king's advisers realized that it would be necessary to shift from the plane of concepts to the plane of action in dealing with the troth-breachers, it required a month to organize the French allies and to launch them on the borders of Anjou and Normandy: Louis's brother, the Count of Dreux, the friends of King Stephen and his nephew Eustace, Henry of Champagne, and Thibault of Blois, and Geoffrey Plantagenet, the two latter the recent suitors for the hand of Eleanor, all uniting against the Duke and Duchess of Normandy, who suddenly through perfidy had become their universal foes. Torigny says these five had formed an alliance to recover Poitou and Aquitaine and divide it among themselves.
²
Louis himself charged into Normandy. At this invasion Henry appeared like a whirlwind out of the west, leaving foundered horses and exhausted followers in his wake. Louis, who sensed heaven's displeasure in all his calamities, gave way at Henry's onset. All his experience as a warrior had taught him to distrust battle as a means of ending confusions. The military valor that had distinguished his early days ebbed away. He fell sick of a fever, retired to his own borders, and quickly succumbed to the church's cry for truce.

*

Louis's demonstrations had the effect, however, of delaying Henry's projected visit to England to vindicate his claim to the crown, and the duchess persuaded him instead to make an autumn progress through her southern provinces. Together they passed the vintage in Poitou and the Limousin, reviewing the strongholds from which Louis had recently removed his garrisons, and surveying Eleanor's rich dower — fiefs gathering their harvests of olives and wine, the salt marshes covered with grazing sheep. The best horses throve in Landes and the Saintonge. The ducal pleasure grounds in the Talmont were well stocked with game, and the best falcons in the world were bred in the region. While Eleanor took the sunshine of old towns, old friends, old vintages, and her native Provencal, Henry took stock of Gascon ships and men for the coming struggle beyond the Channel. In January 1153, leaving his duchess behind, he set forth with twenty-six vessels he had recruited in various harbors to try his conclusions with destiny.

From some castle in the confines of her lord's estates, the Duchess of Normandy and Poitou, the Countess of Anjou, kept her eye during Henry's absence on the marches of their new domain. Doubtless she was sometimes in Poitiers; but it has been surmised that Eleanor took up her chief residence in Angers, and this is probable.
⁴
Angers was a fitting residence for the feudal chatelaine whose most significant title for the moment was Countess of Anjou. The place was safe in the heart of Henry's undisputed inheritance, and it was far removed from the machinations of the Franks.

The citadel which Henry's grandfather Foulques, when he went to be King of Jerusalem, had abandoned to Geoffrey the Fair, was no obscure retreat;
⁵
it stood full in the currents of the day and cast its beam of enlightenment along the valleys of the Loire and the Mayenne, and the roads that there converged from Brittany, Poitou, and Normandy. No city, says the chronicler, could boast a more venerable religious tradition than this foyer of the Angevins, more churches, more monastic orders, more schools. Geoffrey the Fair had made his court the resort of scholars for his own solace and for the education of his sons. It was here that Henry first went to school to Pierre of Samtes and Matthew of Loudun.
⁶
They of Ronceray across the river had nurtured its Héloise in the Abess Tetburge, and still offered a solid discipline for women, not unmingled with secular delights. The high place had produced its bishops and its philosophers, but dialectic was set in Angers to sweet pastoral airs, the lusty flow of the Mayenne amidst its green isles, and the drone of country bees. "The city," said one of her sons, "puts a man out of the way of knowing himself."? Persons of consequence withdrew to river villas at Quincé and Chalonnes for a Virgihan recollection of themselves. The white wine, the country fare, were excellent. In the spaciousness of the valley, out of the reach of Rome and Clairvaux, there was something left of man's singularity. But Geoffrey the Fair had not sought in Angers, nor in any of his cities, to rival the babel and the bedlam of a royal court.

Now that Geoffrey had, "passed from his generation" and Henry was away and Matilda Empress kept her own establishments in Rouen, it devolved upon the Duchess Eleanor to set up centers of civility in the West befitting the new Angevin dynasty whose prospects at this time rose so fair as to cast a shadow over the Ile itself. General conditions in 1153 favored her necessity. The world was unsettled by the late crusade, the calamities of the Franks, and that recurrence of famine and distress that haunts the trail of military enterprise. Poets, artists, annalists, and other foot loose professionals who require a measure of bread and tranquility for the flowering of their gifts, found hardly a patron in the western world. In Paris, after the queen's withdrawal, Louis scourged to exile the remnant of wastrels and gallants that had demoralized his court and settled down to a monastic quiet in which the trivium and the quadrivium resumed their proper ascendancy over romance and gasconnade.
⁸
Henry Beauclerc and Thibault of Champagne, those rich and bountiful scions of the Conqueror, had ended their days. Stephen in England was harried with war. The times were hard.

Harbingers of the dawning era of the Angevins beat their way over the rivers and the roads to the drawbridge of the castle where the Countess of Anjou presided, young, rich, liberal, eager to be sung as the lodestar of the dynasty rising in the West. At this juncture Eleanor enjoyed a large new freedom from surveillance and restraint in which to create her own milieu and infuse it with all she had learned of
savoir-faire
, not only in the palaces of the Capets but in the brilliant cities of the East. No woman of her day was so fitted by talent or experience to diffuse the benefits of the enlightenment she had absorbed in the highest citadels of Christendom. To her bounty flocked not only her own Poitevins, vassals and relatives, upon whom she bestowed her largess with a free hand, but a generation of poets and chroniclers eager to merit her praise and her reward.

*

And he [the poet Ventadour] went away and came to the Duchess of Normandy, who was young and of great worth, and she had understanding in matters of valor and honor, and cared for a song of praise, and the songs of Bernard pleased her; she received and welcomed him cordially He was a long time in her court and he fell in love with her and she with him. He made many good songs. And while he was with her the King Henry of England married her and took her from Normandy and led her away.

Raynouard,
Choix des poésies originales des troubadours
, V,

It was perhaps during the
chevauchée
of Henry and Eleanor through the Limousin, when the ducal household was taking shape, that the troubadour Bernard,
¹⁰
exiled at the moment from his native Fief of Ventadour, joined the duchess'
mesnie
, followed her to her residence, and began those relations with her, Platonic or otherwise, which he celebrates in some of the most exquisite lyrics surviving from the century. Bernard, though humble in origin, had been trained from his youth in the troubadour's art of poetry and courtesy
(trobar)
. He was of about the countess' age, her vassal, a young man goodly in aspect, ardent, poor, touched especially by the lamentable transiency of things He had been banished from his native fief for employing his amorous skills too successfully in praise of the Countess of Ventadour. The nature of the relationship of Bernard and Eleanor and the duration of it are not clear from the chroniclers; but the poems remain as evidence of some reality, and from these we gather glimpses of the Countess of Anjou and the court she developed for her own milieu in that first heyday of freedom when she consulted only her own desire.

Bernard praises his lady in the framework of the
gat savoir
, that ritual of the troubadour that had its roots in the Limousin. It is impossible to unriddle from songs fashioned under the exacting rhetoric of that poetry the secrets of personal feeling, but there are accents in his verse more genuine than those of fashion or servility. The poet responds as a lyre should to the touch of his mistress. All is
de règle
. The lover, who is marked for favor not by birth or status, but only by his art of
trobar
, looks up humbly to the eyes of his chosen lady, who is, by the rule, the wife of some great lord. Secrecy is of the essence of the liaison. With the utmost caution, lest she betray herself to the world, the lady whets the lover's ardor first with enticing advances, then with cruel retreats. At one moment she encourages him with gifts; at the next she puts him off with frowns and dearth of favors. Her caprice disturbs his wakeful hours and agitates his dreams. Now she is intimate, now mysteriously aloof. The lover lives in an alternation of hope and despair, a sweet torment not to be exchanged, however, for the state of any "king, duke, or admiral." With a dawnlike freshness, as if he were the first lyrical poet of all time, Bernard opens his heart and weaves the story of his adoration in harmonies that can be brought from the
langue d'oc
into no other tongue.

No chronicler gives us so many glimpses of the duchess as she appeared to her own day as does her vassal poet: "noble and sweet." "faithful and loyal." "one meet to crown the state of any king." "gracious, lovely, the embodiment of charm." When she bent upon him her eyes, full of fire and eloquence, he felt the joy of a Christmas fete. She was the most beautiful of women. For her gifts he would not give the rich city of Pisa in exchange. He rejoiced that she could read and interpret his secret messages for herself. He addresses her as, "my Comfort." Tristram, he swore, never suffered such woes for Ysolt the Fair as he suffered for his lady. In her presence he trembled like an aspen, was witless as a child.

Perhaps Henry, who was said to have ears everywhere, thought it best, in view of the episode in Ventadour, not to let these matters proceed in Angers. At any rate, he cut off in its glory this lyrical affair between his duchess and the poet, and summoned Bernard to bring his lyre to England for service to more martial themes. There in the midst of fog and chill, the troubadour warmed himself with the embers of his passion. The snow by the Thames appeared to bloom with April flowers, crimson, yellow, white. In exile from his mistress, he begged to return from Henry's heavy service to her court, where, "ladies and chevaliers, fair and courteous," moved in a world composed.

When the sweet breeze

Blows hither from your dwelling

Methinks I feel

A breath of paradise.

Somehow he found his way back to the duchess' castle and sought, on some pretext of incompetence, to elude a second summons from his lady's side. But this time it was Eleanor who moved, leaving Bernard to pine in desolation with the remnant of her temporary court. The duchess, swept off in Henry's wake to new scenes and new activities, seems to have found no further place in her life for dalliance with her humble vassal of the Limousin. Two years later, as Bernard scuffs the autumn leaves in the, "deserted flat country," far from her presence, he comforts himself with the rumor that she still hears his songs. But he fears the, "fair disdain," and offers himself as her bedside slave to draw off her boots when she retires. And so he passes from the scene. However, the outpourings of the poet in this interlude, such as it was, might have gone far to assuage the jealousy of any woman of the century for the famous love songs (now lost) of Abélard for Héloise.