King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts. Claudia Gold
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Richard of Devizes, although he called Eleanor ‘a woman without compare’, went on to say in the margin that ‘Many know what I would that none of us knew. This same queen, during the time of her first husband, was at Jerusalem [sic, Antioch]. Let no one say any more about it. I too know it well. Keep silent.’196
We will never know if Eleanor slept with her handsome, clever and charismatic uncle. We do know, however, that they enjoyed one another’s company immensely, and that their close relationship in Antioch maddened Louis.
The most compelling evidence of marital discord and Eleanor’s ‘bad behaviour’ comes from the unimpeachable Abbot Suger. Suger had obviously heard of problems between Eleanor and Louis, for he wrote from France to Louis in 1149: ‘Concerning the queen your wife, 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.’197
Louis, meanwhile, urged on by his advisor and Eleanor’s adversary Thierry Galeran, refused Eleanor a divorce.
Louis may have been ready to agree to it, but Galeran persuaded him that to return to France with a failed crusade and no wife would injure his reputation. And so he slipped away from Raymond’s court in the middle of the night, dragging Eleanor away from Antioch and on to Jerusalem. William of Tyre recorded that Louis’ ‘coming had been attended with glory … and his departure was ignominious’.198
Whether or not Louis believed that Eleanor had committed adultery, there were evidently some in his entourage ready to accuse the queen. It is probable that she and Raymond spoke together in the language of the southern Aquitaine, the langue d’oc (oc meaning ‘yes’) or Provençal. It probably sounded similar to modern Italian, and was unfathomable to most northerners, who spoke the completely different dialect of langue d’oȉl. Although Eleanor spoke the langue d’oȉl fluently, by choosing to converse with her uncle in the Aquitaine tongue, it may have increased suspicion of her. On their way back to France, on 9 October, the royal couple arrived at the papal court at Tusculum, where they had been invited to stay by Pope Eugenius III. Here, they discussed their marital problems with Eugenius.
John of Salisbury wrote an account of the pope’s intercession; evidently neither Eleanor nor Louis was calm. Eleanor had been kidnapped on the way to Italy. Although she was rescued almost immediately, this, added to her violent arguments with Louis, his refusal to divorce her and his ignoring of her military advice, must have made her agitated. She also learned at Tusculum of Raymond’s brutal death in battle, at the end of June 1149. Nur ad-Din defeated Raymond and his allies at the battle of Inab. To celebrate, he decapitated Raymond and sent his head and right arm to the caliph of Baghdad.199 Raymond had apparently fought valiantly, ‘like the high-spirited and courageous warrior he was’.200 We have no evidence, but Eleanor may have blamed Louis for refusing to help Raymond militarily, and for his bloody death.
It was in this atmosphere that Eleanor and Louis put their cases to Eugenius, who, acting the role of marriage counsellor and friend, sought to heal their relationship.
John recorded that:
He reconciled the king and queen after hearing severally the accounts each gave of the estrangement begun at Antioch, and forbade any future mention of their consanguinity: confirming their marriage, both orally and in writing, he commanded under pain of anathema that no word should be spoken against it and that it should not be dissolved under any pretext whatever. This ruling plainly delighted the king, for he loved the queen passionately, in an almost childish way. The pope made them sleep in the same bed, which he had had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by friendly converse to restore love between them.201
They departed the following day. The pope cried as they left: ‘though he was a stern man, he could not hold back his tears’.202 But he had succeeded. There would be no divorce for the king and queen of France. Eugenius’ intervention worked – or at least for the time being.
Eleanor and Louis arrived back in Paris in November 1149, over two years after they had left on their crusade. The experience had been bruising for them both: Eleanor appears to have lost all respect for Louis, and Louis in turn allowed her no power once they returned to France. Yet Eleanor was pregnant again – she may have conceived at Tusculum in the pope’s beautiful bed – and Louis was once more full of hope for a son. She gave birth to another daughter, Alix, in 1150.
Alix’s birth finally persuaded Louis that the marriage was incestuous in the eyes of God, and to grant Eleanor a divorce. Ever pious, Louis now believed God would never give them a son. The pair disliked one another, and the prevailing view of the church – following the teachings of Hippocrates – was that a woman who did not enjoy sex would not produce a ‘seed’, and would therefore not conceive.203 The marriage was by this point so dreadful that it was difficult to imagine, even for Louis, that she would become pregnant again. The death of Abbot Suger – who had been a strong advocate of the marriage – in January 1151 allowed other voices to be heard, particularly Bernard of Clairvaux’s.
Why did Eleanor push so hard for a divorce? She is rumoured to have said that Louis was ‘more monk than man’, a statement which implies incompatibility, whether sexual or otherwise.204 But leaving aside any marital discord or a lack of power in her ancestral lands, Eleanor was an aristocratic woman who had lived all her life at a court, whether her father’s or her husband’s. Although we have very little evidence of her personality for this period in her life, we have a great deal for her last fifteen years. The older Eleanor was intelligent, brave, determined, a capable and respected politician.
Looking at her character in her twenties through the prism of what we know of the woman in her seventies and early eighties, we may make an intelligent guess that the younger Eleanor was pragmatic enough to realise that she had to be married to someone. If Louis granted her a divorce, as duchess of Aquitaine she would become his vassal; he would have the power to marry her to whomever he pleased, probably a court acolyte – anything to hold on to Aquitaine until Marie was old enough to inherit. Eleanor would not be allowed to rule alone.
We can deduce that Eleanor, although queen of France, rich, and with access to her young daughters, was extremely and irrevocably unhappy, and this is why she manoeuvred for Louis to divorce her. She had no guarantees that she would be any happier in a second marriage than in her first, but Eleanor needed to leave Louis.
By August 1151, the matter was not quite decided – Louis may well still have been deliberating. When Henry arrived in Paris in late summer, he must have appeared to Eleanor as a gift. He erupted into her life, and his energy, self-belief and optimism would have been luminous to her.
Everything we know of their characters suggests that Henry was able to persuade Eleanor to marry him by offering her a match of equals and mutual advantage. For Henry, marriage to Eleanor would provide him with wealth, land and heirs enough to gain and secure an empire. For Eleanor, if she took the gamble, this young duke would be her best chance for autonomy. Louis had denied her power in Aquitaine, and she likely envisaged the rest of her life married to him, the mother of daughters, gradually losing every shred of influence. From our knowledge of Eleanor, we may imagine this would have been intolerable to her. Henry appeared at the right moment, promising her heart’s desire: real power, rather than its trappings – the rightful duchess of Aquitaine, in deed as well as name. Theirs would be far more of a partnership than Louis had ever offered her. It was the best she could hope for from a marriage.
As far as we know, there were no witnesses to any formal agreement between Henry and Eleanor, nor are there any surviving documents that attest to it. Meanwhile,