She Wolves (12 page)
As he lay dying, William confirmed Eleanor as his heir and entrusted her guardianship to his overlord, Louis VI of France. Louis VI immediately seized the opportunity presented by William X’s death and, on 18 June 1137, his sixteen year-old son, Louis, set out with a large escort for Aquitaine in order to marry Eleanor.
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Young Louis had been born as a second son and was raised by the Church. This made him deeply religious and somewhat unsuited to the role of heir to the French throne, which was presented to him on his brother’s death.
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Throughout her lifetime, Eleanor showed an interest in romance and it is likely that she was expecting a warrior in the same vein as her father and grandfather. Louis proved to be a constant disappointment for her. He arrived in Aquitaine in July and married Eleanor at Bordeaux on 25 July 1137. The new Duke and Duchess of Aquitaine were crowned there before moving onto the ducal capital of Poitiers.
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Eleanor was as tall as Louis and attractive, with red or auburn hair.
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Louis appears to have been overawed by his wife throughout their marriage and from the outset Eleanor was the dominant partner.
Whilst Louis and Eleanor were still becoming acquainted, word arrived at Poitiers that Louis VI of France had died, leaving his kingdom to his son, Louis VII. This must have been a shock to the young couple. For Eleanor, the news meant that she would have to leave her homeland for the first time in her life. The young king and queen immediately set out from Aquitaine for Paris in order to claim their crown. It is likely that Eleanor was as disappointed in Paris as she was in her husband and they found the city palace in a state of disrepair.
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Eleanor immediately began remodelling the palace, probably in the style of the more opulent palaces she had known in Aquitaine.
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She was crowned queen at Christmas 1137 but had little role in government, appearing only rarely in charters during Louis’ reign, something that must have been another disappointment for her.
Despite her lack of a defined political role, Eleanor had a great deal of influence over Louis. Eleanor’s grandmother had been the heiress to Toulouse, but the territory had been usurped by a kinsman. Eleanor maintained her claim to Toulouse throughout her lifetime and, in 1141, persuaded Louis to invade Toulouse on her behalf.
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It is possible that she was trying to mould her unpromising husband into a warrior but if so her encouragement failed. The campaign proved to be a disaster for Louis and it is likely that Eleanor again felt a deep disappointment in her husband.
Eleanor’s influence over Louis did not end with the Toulouse disaster and in 1143 Louis was again embroiled in a war at Eleanor’s behest. In 1142, Eleanor’s sister Petronilla fell in love with the nobleman, Raoul de Vermandois, and Louis gave his permission to the match despite the fact that Raoul already had a wife.
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Petronilla and Raoul were duly married and Raoul’s discarded wife was sent back to her uncle, the Count of Champagne. It is likely that Eleanor, who is known to have appreciated the ideals of courtly romance, was pleased that her sister had married for love and she proved a loyal supporter of the couple. However the marriage did not please everyone and the Count of Champagne immediately appealed to the Pope demanding that his niece be reinstated as Raoul’s wife. The Pope responded by declaring the marriage invalid and excommunicating Raoul and Petronilla. Eleanor and Louis reacted angrily to this sentence and in January 1143 Louis invaded Champagne and laid waste to the province, probably once again at Eleanor’s behest.
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Eleanor’s influence in Louis’ actions is plain to see and this campaign, like the invasion of Toulouse, proved to be a disaster. When Louis’ army reached the town of Vitry in Champagne, the townspeople sheltered in the church. Flames from the burning town caught the church roof and, as Louis watched in horror, the church burned to the ground with the people of Vitry inside.
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Louis’ captains found him shaking and unable to speak following the disaster at Vitry and he remained in a trance-like state for two days.
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Louis finally emerged from his trance a changed man and in later summer 1143 appears to have had a further breakdown. He ordered that his hair be shorn like that of a monk and he took to wearing monastic habits and spending hours at prayer.
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For Eleanor, this change in Louis must have been intolerable and it is possible that the real problems in their marriage date from the Vitry disaster.
Eleanor had troubles apart from those concerning Petronilla. Early in her marriage, Eleanor is known to have miscarried a child.
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Following this Eleanor does not seem to have conceived and by 1144 she was concerned. On 10 June Eleanor met privately with the churchman Bernard of Clairvaux and asked for his help in lifting the excommunication on Raoul and Petronilla. Bernard reproved Eleanor for interfering in politics and she burst into tears saying she only did so because she had no child. Bernard then offered her a deal: if she desisted in her interference in politics, he would ask God to send her a child.
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Eleanor accepted this and in 1145 she bore a daughter, Marie. A daughter was not Eleanor preference but this was, at least, proof that she was able to bear children.
Following Vitry, Louis grew steadily more pious and, at Easter 1146, he undertook to go on crusade.
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Eleanor, who had by then spent several uneventful years in France, must have been anxious to be included in this campaign. Insisting on taking part, Eleanor took the cross and one legend holds that she and her ladies dressed as Amazons and rode through the crowd, to encourage others to join the crusade.
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It is likely that Eleanor saw the crusade as a way of leaving behind the monotony of her life in France and her unsatisfactory marriage to Louis. Certainly she threw herself into preparing for the crusade and a number of her personal vassals took the cross. Louis and Eleanor set out for the Holy Land in 1147.
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It was not unusual for women to go on crusade in this period, although it has been suggested that Louis loved Eleanor so much that he could not bear to leave her behind.
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It is, of course, possible that he did not trust her enough to leave her behind unsupervised. There is no doubt that by 1146 any love Eleanor had felt for Louis had evaporated.
The French army followed the route towards Constantinople that Conrad of the German Empire had taken a few months earlier.
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Throughout her life Eleanor seems to have enjoyed travelling and it is likely that she was excited about visiting Constantinople. In Constantinople Eleanor and Louis were entertained lavishly by the emperor and his wife, being taken to visit shrines and other sites.
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The emperor was, however, anxious to be rid of his French guests and Eleanor and Louis soon set off again for the Holy Land. It must have been very disconcerting for them when, soon after leaving Constantinople, they heard news that the Germanic army had been decimated in the Holy Land. The French army came into contact with several Germanic survivors and was joined in November 1147 by the injured Germanic emperor, Conrad himself. Despite the worry caused by the Germanic defeat, the French had no option but to follow the same route towards Antioch.
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In order to reach Antioch the French had to cross Mount Cadmos, where the Germans had sustained their heavy defeat. Eleanor appears to have ridden in the vanguard of the army, which was led by one of her Aquitainian vassals.
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The vanguard carried little luggage and so was able to move swiftly. On the day of the crossing, the vanguard reached the proposed campsite early and decided to press on to the other side of the mountain. The rear of the army, which was much slower, reached the original campsite as night was falling and were disconcerted to find that the vanguard was not there. The Turks, seeing that the French army was split in two, attacked the rear, causing heavy losses. Louis’ royal guard were killed and Louis himself, who fought bravely, was only spared because his simple clothes meant he was not recognised.
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Louis was forced to spend the night hiding in a tree before limping back to join the vanguard in the morning with the few other survivors. The vanguard was oblivious to the fate of the rest of the army and Eleanor must have spent the night worrying about what had befallen Louis. The defeat was a disaster for the crusade but also for Eleanor’s reputation. Almost immediately, she was personally blamed for the ambush, with rumours that her enormous amount of luggage hampered the rear of the army’s progress.
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This claim seems unjustifiable since it is impossible that one woman’s luggage could have slowed down an entire army. To the churchmen who were struggling to establish what had gone wrong on the crusade, Eleanor, as a woman of already dubious reputation, was a convenient and easy target. There would have been nothing Eleanor could have done about this portrayal of her and, regardless of her true actions and the weak leadership of the French army, she will always be remembered as the cause of the French misfortunes.
The army was left with no food or water following the Mount Cadmos defeat and the remainder of the crossing must have been an ordeal. When the army finally reached Adalia, it was found that there was no food there either. Louis at first refused to abandon his army to travel to Antioch by ship, but was forced by his barons to do so.
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The royal couple sailed away from Adalia leaving thousands of their men behind, most of whom starved or converted to Islam.
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It must have been a relieved Eleanor who stepped ashore at Antioch in March 1148.
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Antioch was ruled by Eleanor’s uncle, Raymond of Aquitaine who like her father and grandfather was a handsome and warlike man – a contrast to Louis, and he and Eleanor seem to have spent a great deal of time together. Such conduct led to rumours and John of Salisbury claimed that ‘the attentions paid by the prince to the queen, and his constant, indeed almost continuous, conversation with her, aroused the king’s suspicions’.
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It is not impossible that Eleanor and her uncle were lovers; there is no doubt the scandal accompanied Eleanor throughout her life. Eleanor certainly preferred the company of Raymond to that of Louis and during their stay she told Louis she wished to remain in Antioch and have their marriage annulled.
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This seems to have been the first time divorce was mentioned and Louis was deeply shocked. He consulted his counsellors and was told that he would be shamed if he left his wife behind. The French therefore left Antioch secretly at night, taking Eleanor with them as a prisoner to Jerusalem.
Eleanor must have been furious at her treatment by Louis and seems to have remained in disgrace throughout her time in Jerusalem. The king and queen finally set sail for home with the 300 men remaining in their army in April 1149, having failed to win any military victories.
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It is perhaps indicative of the state of the royal marriage that Eleanor and Louis sailed in separate ships.
On the way back to France, the couple visited the Pope at Tusculum. Their purpose may have been to discuss their marriage and the Pope took it upon himself to reconcile them, even going so far as preparing a special bed for them.
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Louis, who previously seems to have been uninterested in sexual intercourse, took this as a sign of God’s approval and, in early summer 1150, Eleanor bore a second daughter, Alix.
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The birth of another daughter was something of a blessing to Eleanor and even Louis’ council began to suggest that Louis take a new wife who could bear him a son. To the male councillors it was, of course, entirely Eleanor’s fault that Louis had no son although, in only a few years, Eleanor would be able to demonstrate that the problem was not hers.
Events began to move more quickly for Eleanor in August 1151 when Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, and his son, Henry FitzEmpress, arrived in Paris to perform homage for Normandy. Henry was over ten years younger than Eleanor and does not appear to have been handsome, being described as having a reddish, freckled complexion, large head and stocky build.
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However, to Eleanor, he must have seemed an interesting proposition. According to William of Newburgh, ‘Eleanor was extremely irritated by the habits of the king, and claimed that she had married a monk, not a king’.
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Upon meeting Henry, she apparently longed to divorce Louis and marry him.
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. It seems unlikely that Eleanor and Henry had the privacy to commit adultery in Paris but it is likely that some agreement to marry in the future was reached between them. It was claimed by Gerald of Wales that Henry ‘basely stole Queen Eleanor from his liege lord, Louis, king of the French, and then married her’, implying that an understanding had been reached between Henry and Eleanor before her divorce.
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One person who was apparently against the proposed marriage was Henry’s father, Geoffrey. Capgrave describes in his
Chronicle of England
:
Geoffrey Plantagenet warned Henry his sone that he schuld in no wise wedde Helianore the qwen of Frauns, for he told him in very treuth that whan he was steward of Frauns, and dwelled with the kyng, he had comounde with the same qwen oftetyme.
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Several other sources assert that Eleanor and Geoffrey committed adultery with each other. The evidence for this is even more tenuous than for Eleanor’s supposed liaison with Raymond of Antioch. It seems likely that rumours of an affair between Eleanor and her future father-in-law were based on her notorious reputation and the belief of contemporaries that she was capable of any sexual sin, rather than the facts. To her contemporaries, she had already proved herself an incestuous adulteress with her uncle and it was not a great stretch of the imagination for them to believe that she had had an affair with her future father-in-law. Eleanor was probably as unconcerned with these rumours as her predecessor Judith of France had been; similarly would she discover just how firmly rooted negative associations could be for a female.
