Claudia Rubenstein
Eleanor of Aquitaine: ‘Black Legend’ or ‘Golden Myth’?
Claudia Rubenstein - Eleanor of Aquitaine and Her World
- Hi. Welcome everyone. Well, today is very special. We’ve got the two sisters, and Claudia is going to be talking about Eleanor of Aquitaine and her world. And I’m just thrilled to have you both with us. So thank you. Over to you.
Thank you, Wendy.
Thank you, Wendy. Good evening, or wherever you are in the world. It may not be evening, and welcome to this evening’s talk, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Black Legend or Golden Myth? A Tale of Feminism, Or Perhaps Not, in the 12th Century. I am Tanya Gold. I’m a freelance journalist based in Britain, and I’m delighted to be interviewing my sister, Claudia Rubenstein, the director of Jewish Book Week and the author of two historical biographies, “The King’s Mistress” about Melusine, the mistress, and potentially secret wife of George II. But let’s not get into that today. And also Henry II, “King of the North Wind,” your five-act study of Henry II. I’m just going to begin, if I may, by reading out something that you’ve written, Claudia, about Eleanor that was published in “The Spectator.” “Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous woman of the Middle Ages. Queen of France and England, Crusader, mother of kings, lion-hearted Richard and bad John, an ancestress of the royal dynasties of Europe. Yet more nonsense has been written about her than almost any other woman. Much of what we think we know is falsehood or half truth, and many respected historians fall foul of her myth, endlessly repeating misinformation as fact. For someone so renowned, the written record is astonishingly thin.” So my first question for you, Claud, having watched your obsession with the Angevins for a decade, is really how did you come to Eleanor? And why have you rested on the 12th century of all periods?
Well, I think my obsession with Eleanor started with Henry II and started with William Goldman’s brilliant screenplay of “The Lion in Winter,” which was made into a film in 1968 with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn. And that led me to put in a proposal for a book. And the more I researched, the more I realised that, although the facts, some of the facts in the film were incorrect, it would seem that the personalities of Henry and of Eleanor as represented in the film were pretty much accurate as far as we can possibly know from the 12th-century sources. And I wanted to know more about this incredible couple who seemed to be incredibly well matched in many ways, although it all ended very badly for Eleanor, as we’ll see. They were both incredibly smart. They were curious, they had inherited power, but, unusually, they really knew what to do with that power. And together, they managed an empire which was seen as monstrous in the eyes of many contemporaries because it was so very, very big. Nothing that big had been seen in Europe since Charlemagne.
And before Charlemagne, the Roman emperors. And Henry, with Eleanor’s help, was unusually governing lands which stretched from Scotland all the way to the Pyrenees with, you know, an untold number of different peoples and traditions and laws. And he was holding it all together. And I thought that that was extraordinary. And that led me to look more at Eleanor. I mean, as you’ve said, there have been so many myths written about her. She’s either seen as this evil seductress who wouldn’t baulk at committing incest with various family members, even her uncle, the very handsome Raymond of Antioch, seen as riding bare breasted into battle while on Crusade. I mean, she was doing outrageous things such as dressing in men’s clothing, which was seen as an abomination by the monks who wrote the histories. And then later in the 20th century, she became a feminist prototype. So her life is really shrouded in myth, whether it’s the good or the bad. And I found it fascinating to really drill down into the sources and to see who the real Eleanor was.
They both have fascinating family backgrounds. Would you be able to tell me a little bit about Henry’s background and also Eleanor’s and family?
Yes, yes. So, Henry to start with. Henry is the son of Matilda, the Empress of Germany, and Geoffrey of Anjou, and the grandson of Henry I of England, where he has a claim to the English throne. Through Geoffrey, he has a claim to Normandy.
Geoffrey his father?
Geoffrey, his father. And so, I mean, 12th-century politics is fascinating. It’s before the concept of the nation-state in Europe. So we find in France, there’s a very weak king who rules a tiny, tiny portion of what is now modern-day France. And he had these very powerful overlords who were ruling vast tracts of land. So Henry’s father had a lot. He conquered Normandy in right of his wife, Matilda, the daughter of Henry I. And he had Anjou, Maine, Touraine, so much of Central France. And later, Henry would add Brittany to all of that. Eleanor’s family ruled Aquitaine, which was the largest and the richest of all of the duchies that owed nominal allegiance to the French King. They acted as kings in their own right. They were so rich because of the trade with Bordeaux going up the river, or the spice trade, the river trade, the timber trade. So enormously wealthy. And unusually for this period, they had, the Dukes of Aquitaine, they were very open-minded. This was a period of great interaction between Muslims, Jews. I mean, remember, the Arab world is just over the Pyrenees because Spain is part of the Arab world at this time. So we find Eleanor’s grandfather, who was William IX of Aquitaine, he’s known as the first troubadour Duke of Aquitaine. The first of the troubadours, the poets of courtly love and the great romanticism of the 12th century here.
And he has friends with Arabs, he’s into Arab poetry, and he’s a great intellect. In the eyes of the church, the Dukes of Aquitaine very immoral. William has an affair with a woman called Dangereuse. She’s seen as so dangerous and almost a sexual deviant. And William, scandalously, marries his legitimate son to Dangereuse’s legitimate daughter, who was not William’s daughter. Yes, not William’s daughter. So they get married and these become Eleanor’s parents. So, you know, everybody is related. With both Henry and Eleanor, you’ve got this hugely dysfunctional family. They all hate each other. And this carries on into Henry and Eleanor’s relationships with their own children, particularly Henry. Eleanor actually had a pretty good relationship with all of her children. So yes, huge tracts of land. And then Henry and Eleanor get married eventually in 1151. But this is Eleanor’s second marriage, remember?
I was going to bring you back to that. So her first marriage was to the King of France.
Exactly.
So can you tell me how that came about and how it was important and were they happy?
Eleanor was never expected to rule. She was one of three children. She had a younger sister called Petronilla, and she had an older brother, but her older brother died in 1130, the same year that her mother died. And her father, Duke William X, quickly looked around for a new wife, but he couldn’t find anyone. He’d wanted to marry someone, but she was actually kidnapped on the way to her wedding with Eleanor’s father, which was quite common. Eleanor was actually, there were attempted kidnaps on Eleanor several times in her life. These heiresses were walking title deeds at the time. If you’ve got an heiress, if you forced her to marry her, you would inherit all of her lands. So anyway, Eleanor’s father decides to go on Crusade, sorry, on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, which is just over the Pyrenees in Northern Spain. And Eleanor is designated as his heir. But he expects to return, he expects to try and find another wife. So what he does is he entrusts Eleanor and her younger sister, Petronilla, to the care of his overlord, Louis VI or Louis the Fat of France. So he goes off on pilgrimage, but he dies. And so Eleanor is left with this, she’s left an heiress, where hadn’t expected to rule, of the richest duchy in France. So what the wily Louis VI does is he swiftly marries her off to his son, Louis the VII, who will become Louis VII. Louis the VI actually dies within days of their marriage. So Eleanor’s been married for weeks, several weeks, and then she suddenly becomes Queen of France. She’s crowned Queen of France. Louis hadn’t meant to be king either. He had an older brother, Philip, who sounds like a bit of a sadist. Philip was chasing a poor boy through the streets of Paris on a horse. His horse fell over a pig and he died.
And Louis is thrust out of the cloisters. He was meant for the church, and that would very much have suited his personality. And he’s king. He’s King of France. He and Eleanor did not get on at all. Eleanor was either 13 or 15 at this time. We don’t know when she was born. We don’t know if it was 1122 or 1124 because chroniclers often didn’t record the birth of girls. She seems to have been intellectually curious. We don’t know much that is solid about her education, but we can be pretty sure that her family was so educated and so learned that she would’ve been educated as well. We know later by the books that she asks for when she’s Henry’s queen that she’s incredibly knowledgeable about the new books coming out of Spain and of Sicily and the Arab world. She describes Louis as, she describes her marriage to Louis as married to more of a monk than a man. They rarely sleep together. The church imposed great restrictions on marital sex. I think you were only allowed to sleep together about 45 days of the year. Although most people didn’t seem to keep to that, Louis seemed to. And so Eleanor had problems conceiving, and she didn’t actually have a daughter until 1145. They go on Crusade together. Louis suffers a bit of a trauma, an incredibly religious man. Eleanor’s sister, Petronilla, comes to Louis’s court with Eleanor. She falls desperately in love with a much older man called Raoul de Vermandois. Raoul, he’s blind in one eye. He’s in his 40s when Petronilla is still a teenager, and she has to have him, even though he is, Raoul is married to King Stephen of England’s sister. So Louis actually goes to war over it. He burns a town, lots of people die. He feels incredibly guilty. And then he pledges to go on Crusade. And Eleanor goes with him simply because she has to conceive a son. Mediaeval queenship, the power of mediaeval queenship is all centred around having a son. And Eleanor doesn’t have this yet. So she goes on Crusade with Louis. It’s the Second Crusade and it’s an absolute disaster from start to finish.
Tell me more.
Well, they’re attacked many times. Eleanor’s baggage is stolen. It’s unwieldy. Louis and his partner, Conrad of Germany, have a fight about which way to go. I mean, it’s all an absolute disaster. Nobody knows what they’re doing. And they eventually turn up in Antioch where Eleanor’s paternal uncle is the ruler there. Raymond of Antioch is only nine years older than Eleanor, nine or seven years older than Eleanor, depending on when she was born. He’s incredibly handsome. They have a wonderful time speaking to each other. They speak together in the language of the South of France, which was known as d'oc rather than d'oui, which is from the north. Oc in the southern French tongue means yes, rather than oui in the northern French tongue. And Louis gets incredibly jealous. And so he drags Eleanor away. They have a very public row in Raymond’s palace at Antioch. Everyone can hear them screaming at each other. And Eleanor says, “I want a divorce.” And Louis said, “You’re not having a divorce.” And he drags her off to Jerusalem with him. Eleanor would apparently never forgive him. And they make their slow way back to Paris. Louis’ advisor, Abbot Suger, who is no fan of Eleanor, and he’s in charge of the kingdom. He writes to Louis and says, “Keep Eleanor quiet until she gets home. You can deal with her there.
This is a huge embarrassment. You need to get back and you need to deal with various rebellions that are happening here.” So they go back to France, but on the way they stop, they stay with the Pope. And the Pope is so distressed that the King of France, who is married to the most powerful heiress in Christendom, may get divorced that he actually makes them go to bed together. And he finds the most beautiful room in the Vatican for them. He puts his nicest hangings, his nicest carpets in it, and they go to bed together. And the Pope makes them. And he apparently kind of stands outside the door to make sure that they actually have sex. And Eleanor does conceive either then or very soon after. And she conceives another girl. A little girl called Alix. She’s already given birth to Marie in 1145. Alix, another girl, she says to Louis, “This is ill-fated. We are too closely related. We have to get a divorce.” So she’s slowly pushing Louis for this divorce. And finally, in 1151, Louis agrees that the marriage is over, that it’s cursed, and he’ll never have a son with Eleanor. And they get divorced.
What impact did… Well, the real question I want to ask you is how the hell did she get away with it? That’s my first question. And my other question is, what was the impact of this on her reputation?
So the black legend of Eleanor really starts with the Crusades. This is when the accusation of incest with her uncle, Raymond, starts. Two contemporaries say that she’s not behaving herself well. One of them, he’s actually writing 30 years later, but he’s there at the time. He writes in the margins of his text, “I know things that you wouldn’t want me to talk about, so I’m not going to say this.” But he implies that Eleanor slept with Raymond, which is hugely scandalous for a queen. There are also rumours a little bit later on that she had an affair with Saladin, who was obviously the great conqueror of the Muslims who eventually ousted the Crusader kingdom. There is a Crusader kingdom here, by the way. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem is there for 200 years, which is why they’re all going on Crusade, all these kings of Western Europe are going on Crusade to save the Holy Land. So she then meets Henry, Duke of Normandy, and the rumours start to go even further. So Henry comes to Paris in 1151, August, 1151. Louis has just informally agreed to a divorce. Eleanor meets him.
Eleanor was incredibly pragmatic. She knows she has to marry someone, otherwise she’s going to be kidnapped like that poor woman who her father wanted to be married to, because Louis has agreed to give her back her lands. And if she’s kidnapped, her massive lands and her wealthy lands of Aquitaine will go to her new husband. She needs to marry someone. She meets Henry. He is only Duke of Normandy at this time. But he’s a young man with a hell of a lot of promise. He’s 18 when she meets him. She’s either 27 or 29 years old. It would seem to be a relationship that was very much based on passion at the beginning. I mean, we know that Henry was an incredibly compelling character. He was already a skillful commander. He was an astute politician. He’s been educated by the best. His parents were incredible political operators, Geoffrey of Anjou and the Empress Matilda. And they’ve kept Henry with him since he was five years old. And, well, they kept him with him always, but they started to bring him into politics at the age of five. And they have taught him incredibly well. Henry has had the best teachers of the day, and he and Eleanor seem to have made a pact that, if she can get away with her divorce, Henry will come south. She has to go back to Poitiers and he will marry her. And they’re not going to ask for Louis’ permission, which they should have done because Louis was their overlord. They’re just going to do it and see if they can get away with it. So Henry leaves Paris. Henry’s father dies very soon after this.
So Henry not only has Normandy, he has Anjou and Touraine and Maine, this huge area of Central France, and Eleanor continues to press, press, press. And then finally, in February, 1152, Louis grants her her divorce. She packs her bags. She has to leave Marie and Alix behind at the French court because they have to stay with their father. There’s no way a woman in the 12th century is going to get rights over her children. And she goes south to Poitiers. Henry meets her there, and they marry. And Louis goes absolutely nuts. And it’s typical of Louis that he did not see this coming. Louis, he was quite naive in many ways. I mean, he was the perfect nemesis, in a way, I suppose, for Henry, and was the perfect opponent because Henry was so much smarter than him and so much wilier than him. And poor Louis is just blunder after blunder after blunder in his reign. And so Eleanor and Henry find themselves married. And meanwhile, Henry has negotiated a diplomatic settlement with King Stephen, who is his cousin. And when Stephen dies the following year, Henry becomes King of England. Eleanor becomes the first woman in history to have been both Queen of France and Queen of England. And this is end of 1154.
I believe you have a slide. Then you can show us this vast empire that came into being with their marriage.
Yes, of course. This is what Henry had, the Duchy of Normandy. And then this is from his father, the County of Maine. And this is everything that Eleanor brought to him south of Anjou and Touraine. And you’ll see at the very bottom is the County of Toulouse, and Eleanor also claimed this. And I think this shows it a little more clearly. This is the territory in orange inherited by Henry II and this, in pink, is the territory that Eleanor brought to Henry. It’s a vast amount of land. And, as I’ve said, this land at the bottom is contested around Toulouse and Nimes. And it makes Henry incredibly rich and powerful.
Before we leave Louis the Pious, could you just tell us a little bit about, very briefly about what happened to him and also to their daughters?
Yes. So Louis has two further marriages after Eleanor. He marries Constance of Castile, and he has a couple of daughters by her who will become important to the story because two of those daughters were betrothed to two children of Eleanor and Henry. And it’s only with his third wife, Adela of Blois, that he eventually has a son. And this son is called Philip, and he’s born in the 1160s. And this is the person who is really going to matter to Henry and will eventually cause so many problems for Henry. Marie and Alix marry the counts of Blois and Champagne. They’re strategic marriages, Blois and Champagne surround the Ile de la Cite, where the French kings have their power. Louis needs to shore up his power. We have no evidence that Eleanor ever saw them again, but Marie of Champagne becomes a great patron of the troubadours. She presides over the courts of love. Historians have traditionally thought that it was Eleanor who did this, but it wasn’t, it was her daughter, Marie. Alix is married to Theobald of Bois. Interestingly, Theobald is probably having an affair with a Jewish woman. Alix becomes incredibly jealous. I mean, she’s a virulent antisemite and it’s Theobald who instigates the first blood libel in Europe. So we know that Eleanor was with one of her granddaughters by Alix much later on when she retires. But other than that, we don’t know that there’s any family connection from then on.
Now this sounds like a good time to ask you what’s known about Henry and Eleanor’s attitude to their Jewish subjects.
Both Louis and, both of Eleanor’s husbands protected their Jewish subjects far more than was asked for by the church or was asked for by the times. The Norman kings were incredibly interesting. They were very pragmatic in their approach to their Jewish subjects. Their Jewish subjects had actually financed William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066. And they come to England, they flee to the haven of England after there’s a pogrom in Normandy, I think in the 1180s or the, sorry, the 1080s or the 1090s. So they settle in England. William Rufus grants them a charter of rights. Henry I extends that charter. Henry II extends it even further. And he extends it so far that some of the chroniclers believe that Henry is favouring his Jewish subjects over his Christian subjects. But under Henry’s rule, it seems the golden age of Jewry before the Jews are kicked out in 1290. Eleanor, we don’t know anything specifically about relationships with Jewish subjects. The learning, as I’ve mentioned, that was coming in was so wide and Henry was asking for it, for Jewish and for Arabic texts, Eleanor probably read them as well. We have no instance of antisemitic feeling from Eleanor. And we only have very pro feeling from Henry.
I don’t want to take us away from Eleanor too much, but there are two things I want to particularly ask you about Henry. And the first, I think we should slot in here, which is it true he threatened to convert to Islam? And what did the Pope say?
Yes, it’s true that he’d threatened to. Whether or not he meant that threat, we have absolutely no idea. This is in the middle of his row with Thomas Becket, who had been his chancellor and then became his jewel chancellor, Archbishop of Canterbury. They had a dreadful row, which I’m sure you don’t want to get bogged down in here. And when they had that row, Henry wrote to the Pope and said, “Unless you support me, I’m going to convert to Islam and I will convert all of my lands to Islam. And there’s absolutely nothing that you can do about it.” But we do know that, although it is very unlikely that Henry would’ve done this for all sorts of practical reasons, that he probably read Arabic. He was a great lover of Arabic poetry, Arabic mathematics, medical history. He was a prolific reader. I mean, one of his chroniclers said that every day at Henry’s court was like a school. And it was said that he spoke all the languages from Britain to the River Jordan, which is probably an exaggeration. But he had an incredibly open mind.
What do we know about their marriage? Because it seems to come in two sections, their marriage, the happy bit and then the war bit. So could we start with the happy bit and their children?
Yes. So one of the reasons that Eleanor probably decided to divorce Louis, because remember, she still had power. She could still have conceived a son. She was still Queen of France. It put her in a very, very good position. But Louis granted her no autonomy over her own lands. So it’s very likely that, when Henry comes along to the court in Paris and meets her, that he says, if you marry me and if you have children, I will give you autonomy and you can help me to govern because I’m going to have so much to do and I can use you. And Henry did use her. He used her. He used his mother, Matilda. He used his friends who weren’t necessarily from the nobility. Henry, more than any other English king, valued talent. And Eleanor was-
How common was that in the 12th century to let female members of your family rule in your stead, to let non-nobles rule in your stead?
It was very, very unusual. You had to be talented to have a seat at Henry’s table. Henry didn’t even give his own brothers power if they weren’t bright enough or able enough. So this is an administration. Henry was a great administrator. He brought a lot of wealth to the crown and he did it by raising, there’s a very good historian who’s called it, “By raising men from the dust.” So if he sees talent, he promotes it and promotes it. Henry doesn’t care a fig for breeding or birth or anything like that. He surrounds himself with clever people. Eleanor was clever. While Henry is off ruling his vast conglomerate of lands, he never stays in one place for more than three days for his entire reign, which lasts from 1154 to 1189. He’s always in the saddle. He’s always moving around. So he needs her. So while he’s off on the continent, she’s governing England. Matilda is governing in Normandy. He’s got trusted deputies all over his lands. But when they come together, and they usually meet at least for the Christmas court, they manage to have eight children together, seven of whom survive into adulthood. And it would seem, I mean the chroniclers certainly believed that Eleanor had as much power as Henry in the 1150s. They say, “If the king isn’t here, apply to Eleanor.” So he’s giving her full authority. This continues throughout the 1160s. Eleanor’s power begins to wane, possibly coinciding with Henry’s affair with the most famous of his mistresses, Rosamund Clifford. Some detractors of Eleanor have accused her of trying to poison Rosamond.
But this has been proven to be absolute nonsense. And whether or not Eleanor cared by this time, we really don’t know. But in 1167, after the birth of her final child, John, who’s the baby of the family, Eleanor goes off to Aquitaine and she doesn’t come back for the next few years. She only comes back later when things will go horribly wrong for her. And in Aquitaine, she expects to govern with full autonomy. But Henry doesn’t let her. And this is very unusual for Henry and it’s very interesting, but he keeps interfering. I mean, Eleanor is obviously a very capable woman. Her duchy of Aquitaine is notoriously the most difficult of all of Henry’s lands to govern. Their nobles are constantly in rebellion, but Eleanor knows how to keep them under control. But Henry doesn’t let her do this. So, for some reason, he starts nay saying her, he starts to put deputies in, and Eleanor gets really pissed off. And then in 1170, another big thing happens, which is that Thomas Becket is murdered. Even though Henry probably didn’t order his death, many contemporaries blamed Henry for it and he was seen as a monster by the church, which is a continuation-
Not everyone here is going to be familiar with the Becket murder, which, I presume you agree with me, is the thing that destroyed his reputation. If it hadn’t been for that, he would be remembered as one of the greatest of our kings. And if you don’t agree, please say so. But could you just tell us a little bit about what happened with Thomas Becket and the impact that it had on Henry II?
Yeah, sure. So Thomas Becket had started as a very able clerk in the employ of the old Archbishop of Canterbury. He had been one of the administrators who’d negotiated for Henry’s peaceful succession to the English throne. Henry, when he met him, recognised his ability, and as soon as he became king, he promoted him to a position of power. Thomas eventually became Chancellor of England. They were apparently great friends. They were very well matched intellectually. They played chess, they went out riding together. Henry, once old Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury died, Henry wanted a yes man in that position. Henry very much believed… This is a time when you’ve got two courts in England. You’ve got the king’s courts and you’ve got the church courts. And Henry believed, and I think he was absolutely right, that you could not have two centres of power in an effectively-ruled realm. So he wants a yes man as Archbishop of Canterbury who will let Henry bring all of the courts under his jurisdiction. Thomas begs Henry not to let him do this. Henry’s mother, Matilda, begs Henry not to do this because they know what Thomas’s personality is like. Thomas knows himself very well. He said that it will be an absolute disaster because, whenever I take a position, particularly a position such as this as Archbishop of Canterbury, I will embody that position and I will let you down. Henry doesn’t believe. Henry says, no, no, no, no, no, this will suit me. You are becoming archbishop. So Thomas reluctantly agrees. And as soon as he agrees, he and Henry start to clash. And they start to clash over this issue of people in minor orders who would come under the jurisdiction of the church if they’ve committed a crime, they start to clash over this. And it’s clash after-
Henry wants them tried in his courts.
I’m sorry? Yes, Henry wanted them tried in his courts because church courts were much more lenient. I mean, you had churchmen committing dreadful crimes such as rape and murder, and all they would have to do is something like a trial by bread. And a trial by bread is you’d eat a piece of bread and if you didn’t choke and die, you weren’t guilty. So Henry thought this was utterly ridiculous. I mean, this is the king who introduced trial by jury. So he’s a smart man and he wants all criminals to come under the jurisdiction of his court. So he and Becket have row after row. Becket eventually engineers a ridiculous fight with Henry. He tells Louis of France that Henry is trying to murder him. And so he takes a boat and he flees to the French court where Louis protects him and everyone thinks he is the biggest pain in the ass. And he stays there until 1170. Henry needs him back because Henry wants to crown his oldest son, also called Henry, in his lifetime. This is a very common practise to ensure the succession. It’s common in Europe, anyway. Thomas won’t come back, but he eventually comes back in 1170 and he starts creating all sorts of problems. He had said to Henry that he’s going to forgive everyone who went against him. And as soon as he comes back, I mean, he seems to be pretty vindictive. He starts excommunicating everyone, left, right, and centre, who he’s ever had a a grudge against. And Henry’s had enough. He’s at Normandy and he explodes. And four knights who are very loyal to Henry cross the Channel, believing that Henry has given the order to murder Becket. And they go to Canterbury Cathedral in December, 1170 and they kill Becket in the most brutal way. His skull is smashed open. His brains are all over the floor of Canterbury Cathedral. And it’s very, very bad news for Henry because at least four of the greatest historians of the day happen to be right there on the spot. And they witness it and they write down their contemporary accounts, and it’s a bit of a PR disaster.
You think?
Yeah. But, Henry being Henry, recovers very quickly. He’s quite extraordinary. He goes into seclusion for 40 days. He won’t eat. He says how upset he is and people start to believe him. The Pope says, “You’ve got to go on Crusade to do penance.” Henry says, “I’m far too busy.” He takes himself off to Ireland until things have calmed down, ostensibly to quell a rebellion there. And then he eventually comes back in 1173 and he is forgiven by the Pope. The Pope says, “Don’t worry, I know you’re busy. Don’t go on Crusade, but build a few abbeys.” So he does. He builds three abbeys and he starts to harness the Becket miracle industry into the service of the Plantagenet Dynasty because he is a political and PR genius. And that’s what Henry does. But in terms of Eleanor, it would seem that Becket was another nail in the coffin and Henry’s treatment of Becket was another nail in the coffin of how she felt about Henry. So in 1173, Eleanor leads, well, she participates with hers and Henry’s son’s in a rebellion against their father.
And what was the purpose of this rebellion? What did they hope to achieve?
Henry’s fatal flaw as a ruler was promising the world to his children and not delivering. So Henry constantly had concerns about who would rule his lands after his death. He didn’t believe that any one of his children had the ability to do it. So what he envisaged, the most likely thing that he envisaged, was a loose federation with his sons acting together. So the eldest surviving son is Henry the Young King. Henry is meant to get his father, Henry’s, patrimony. So he’s meant to get to the heartland of Anjou and Maine and the crown of England. That’s fine. Richard, the next son, is meant to get Aquitaine, Eleanor’s lands. That’s fine. Their son, Geoffrey, gets Brittany. Geoffrey is married off to Constance of Brittany. Henry effectively steals Conan of Brittany’s lands and he marries Geoffrey off to Constance, but it’s Henry who still rules. Now, he gives his sons money, but he doesn’t give them any power. And by this time they’re teenagers. John is still a baby. So John’s out of the picture at this time. They want the power. Henry doesn’t give it to them, and they believe this rebellion is going to get it for them. You have to remember that these families are so interrelated. They’re all cousins. They’re in-laws, they’re brothers, they’re sisters. They’re all fighting for power against one another. So Henry the Young King is married to Margaret of France, who is Louis’ daughter by his second marriage. She’s actually been brought up in Eleanor’s care. She comes to Eleanor when she’s a six-month-old baby, and they are married.
And so Louis is very much on the Young King’s side and he flees to Paris. Eleanor is all ready to go to Paris soon. And because of the feelings about Becket and because Henry is so loathed, his entire empire erupts against him, including Eleanor. But Eleanor is captured almost at the very beginning of the rebellion. One of the black myth stories about Eleanor is that she escapes through a forest from Poitiers, her capital, dressed as a man. And this is seen as an abomination. She’s wearing trousers so she can ride a horse, but she’s captured by Henry’s men and now follows a period of captivity for Eleanor, which will last until Henry’s death in 1189. So Eleanor is now locked up for 15 years. The rebellion fails. Henry, because he’s got such trusted deputies, such able deputies, is able to defeat everyone even though it’s an empire-wide rebellion. And they reach a settlement in 1174. Eleanor’s in prison, all of his sons are forgiven. They’re given a little bit more money, a little bit more nominal power, but nothing really. And Henry still has everything under his control.
Do we know much about Eleanor’s life in this 16-year-long captivity?
It would seem that she was incredibly bored. It was comfortable captivity. She wasn’t in a cell. She was in a nice house. She was probably in Old Sarum around Winchester for quite a lot of it. Her captivity loosened over the years. I mean, when her daughter Matilda, who’d been married off to Henry the Lion of Saxony, when she comes back in exile for a few years, Eleanor sees her. She sees the children. She starts to be able to communicate with the children, and they even have a Christmas court together, all of them together in 1181, because Henry still needs Eleanor’s help with Aquitaine, with the French king. So things get better, but she certainly has no power in her own right at this time.
And you wrote brilliantly in “The King of the North Wind” about the death of Henry II in 1189. Could you tell us a little bit about that and then what life was like for Eleanor when her son, Richard, ascended the throne?
So Henry’s last days were absolutely dreadful. Henry the Young King is dead by this time. So is Geoffrey. They’ve all made alliances with first, Louis VII, and when Louis VII dies, with his son, Philip, who will become known as Philip Augustus, who really shows himself to be Henry’s nemesis. Philip is a brilliant politician. He hates Henry. He hates the Angevin kings because he sees them as stealing the glory of France. And so he slowly plays off brother against brother and son against father. And he gets to all of them eventually. So Henry the Young King is out of the picture with his death in the 1180s. Geoffrey then becomes Philip’s bosom companion, and he actually dies in Paris in a joust. And Philip was apparently so distraught he threw himself into Geoffrey’s grave, which is quite interesting. And then he becomes very close to Richard. Richard actually believes that his betrothed, Alice, who is Philip’s half sister, has been having an affair with Henry. Whether or not that’s true, Richard certainly believes it. And he and Philip become very close and they turn on Henry together and they start fighting Henry. Henry by this time is old. He’s unwell. He’s in his 50s, which is a great age in the mediaeval period. And he dies with all of his living sons, well, with Richard and John rebelling against him. And it’s John’s name on the list of the traitors that absolutely breaks his heart. And he dies at Chinon in 1189. Eleanor, at this stage, has been described as a cork out of a bottle. She erupts onto the scene, and all politics from this point has Eleanor’s stamp all over it.
Richard is seen as one of England’s greatest kings, but he’s hardly ever in England. He rules for 10 years and he’s in England for less than six months of that period. He’s a Crusader king. He’s on Crusade for a lot of the time. He gets himself captured by Leopold of Austria, and Eleanor is forced to raise an enormous ransom for him, which, you know, millions, tens of millions of pounds, in today’s currency. And it’s Eleanor, who is now in her 70s, who traipses across Europe to give the money to the emperor. Meanwhile, John, Richard’s brother, and Philip of France are conspiring with everybody that they can for the emperor to keep Richard so John can take over England. But Richard comes back. He’s at war with the King of France, but they’re losing. They’re losing territory after territory. And Richard eventually is shot by friendly fire in 1199 at Chalus in France. He’s killed by a crossbow and he dies. Eleanor, who has been acting as his regent, she transfers her allegiance to John. She chooses John over her grandson, Arthur of Brittany, who had been her son Geoffrey’s son, because Arthur has been living at the French court for years and is Philip’s protege. So that can’t be. And John is possibly the most unpleasant person to have ruled England in the history of the kings and queens of England. He’s a nasty man, gratuitously violent and cruel. And Eleanor writes to the Pope that she knows what this son of hers is, but, I mean, he drains England and he’s terrible to the Jews. And he probably murdered his nephew Arthur. He had him in captivity from the beginning of the 13th century, and Arthur mysteriously disappears in 1283, never to be heard from again. But Eleanor, she supports John because he’s her child. And from this point, from the point of Henry’s death, everything for Eleanor is about being in the service of the Plantagenet Dynasty and the legacy of the Plantagenet Dynasty. I mean, she’s extraordinary.
In her 80s, John manages to conclude a peace with Philip of France, and Philip wants one of Eleanor and Henry’s granddaughters to marry his son, the future Louis VIII of France. So it’s Eleanor who goes across the Pyrenees to meet her four Castilian granddaughters. And she chooses Blanca, who is not the oldest one, but the one she thinks is most suitable to rule. And she takes her across the Pyrenees, which is an arduous journey for anybody in the mediaeval period, let alone for an 80-something-year-old woman. And she takes her back to the French court. So Eleanor is at the centre of everything. And I think we know so much about Eleanor’s life in this period. We know how capable she was. We know what an astute politician she was. We know how sensible she was and how kindly she dealt with pleas and with the poor, with anyone who needed charity, that I think we can, therefore, deduce that the younger Eleanor was of a similar personality. I mean, obviously we all change as we mature, but I don’t think you can see the younger Eleanor as a frivolous woman who did nothing but shop, which some of her detractors have accused her of, considering that we know what a smart and capable politician she was towards the end of her life.
You have compiled a selection of clips from “The Lion in Winter,” and I was just wondering, as we get quite close to the end, maybe we should start looking at them and then we can discuss Eleanor’s legacy.
This is Eleanor arriving at Chinon. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know why that keeps doing that. For Henry’s Christmas court, which the playwright William Goldman has in 1183. And let’s just.
How was your crossing? Did the Channel part for you?
It went flat when I told it to. I didn’t think to ask for more. How dear of you to let me out of jail.
It’s only for the holidays.
Like school, you keep me young.
Will we ever know whether they had that kind of affectionate relationship? I think you always used to call it a bargain.
We can’t ever know. We certainly can’t ever know. We don’t have letters between them that would’ve been so personal. We know that Henry had absolute trust in her up until she went back to Aquitaine in the 1160s. But we can’t know if there was that affection. All we can know is that there was a chronicler called Gerald of Wales who absolutely hated Henry. But “The Lion in Winter” is based mostly on Gerald’s writings. And even though Gerald hated Henry, he also portrayed him with a lot of affection. I mean, we do know a lot about Henry’s personality. We know that he was warm. We know that if he liked you, he really, really liked you. We know he had a ferocious temper. We know that he was an incredibly curious person. If you interested him, he wanted to know everything about you. So we have no reason to believe that their relationship couldn’t have been like that. We know that they were an equal match intellectually, so it could very well have been as warm as that. I very much hope so.
So what happened to their empire after Henry’s death and why?
Well, it was complete disintegration. Henry had always been concerned that it was only him who could hold it together. Henry, remember, had always been up against a weak, for most of his reign, had been up against a weak adversary, Louis the VII. You get Philip Augustus, who is just as astute as Henry is. And you get Philip, who is young, just as Henry is coming into his dotage. He’s old, he’s tired, he’s bow-legged by having spent the most of his reign in the saddle. I mean, remember this extraordinary fact. He was only ever three days in any one place. He was constantly on the move, moving a whole court with him. He had an ingrown toenail. His foot was in pain. He suffered a leg injury. So he’s old, he’s elderly. I mean he’s only in his 50s, but for the mediaeval period, he’s old and Philip is young and Philip is astute, and Philip has managed to get Henry’s sons onto his side. Now, even though Henry didn’t bring his sons along with him, he loved them. He was an incredibly fond father. Even the chroniclers who hated Henry said he loved his children. And I think he was devastated by their betrayal. But after he died, it all fell apart. I mean, Eleanor helped to keep it together. But once she dies in 1204, it’s pretty much gone. John manages to lose everything except for a tiny rump that remained in Gascony, which the English clung onto. But it didn’t outlast his parents.
Do you think if Henry had given his children real power, they might have been a little bit better at it?
I don’t think so, actually. I don’t know. I think they were a pretty unsavoury bunch. They weren’t particularly, they were pretty selfish. But it was Henry’s flaw. It was up to Henry to bring them along and to manage the succession. And I think that was Henry’s fatal flaw, not managing the succession properly. I mean, we can only imagine what it would’ve been if they hadn’t all fought against him, seeing as, you know, seeing as three of them died fighting. But then, you know, one of them caught dysentery. Henry the Young King caught dysentery while fighting his father. He might have lived, Geoffrey died while he was at the French court. If he hadn’t been sucking up to Philip, he might not have been at the French court. Now, Richard might not have been fighting a rebellion in the South of France if he’d been with his father. But they weren’t. They wanted power, they wanted lands. Henry didn’t understand what they were going on about and he failed entirely in not bringing them with him. But crucially, I think, in not bringing Eleanor with him, because Eleanor as the mother was the key. Eleanor was as close to her children as she possibly could be. She travelled a lot as well for Henry as his regent. She was going all over the place. But she kept her children with her when she could. I mean, whenever she crossed to France, she always took at least one child, if not two. So it’s not like she was having these children and then just handing them over to wet nurses. I mean, they both loved their children and did what they could while managing this enormous empire.
Well, my final question is, one of the best things I imagine about being a mediaeval queen is that you get to design yourself some gorgeous tomb and possibly an abbey around them. So I would just hoping that you’d end the talk by telling us a little bit about the arrangements that Eleanor made for herself.
Yes, so as I’ve said, once Henry died, Eleanor did everything she could to further the interests of the Plantagenet Dynasty. And one of the things she did was giving an enormous amount of money to Fontevraud Abbey. Henry’s family had also given to Fontevraud. It’s an extraordinary order, religious order, that was run by women, which is very interesting for this period. If you haven’t been to Fontevraud, it’s in the Loire. It’s absolutely beautiful and peaceful and it’s really glorious. And this is where Eleanor designs herself and Henry and Richard beautiful tombs. And then later, John’s second wife, Isabella of Angouleme, joined her. Eleanor designs herself a tomb where she’s actually lying down reading a book. It’s a beautiful, beautiful work of art. And this is where she wanted the Angevin kings to be buried. But then obviously from 1204, they’re in French hands. And so Richard was the last English king to be buried at Fontevraud. And from that point, they were mostly buried at Westminster. But, I mean, it was a glorious testament to Angevin power while it lasted. But I actually believe that Eleanor’s real legacy is in her granddaughter, Blanca, who took the name Blanche when she married the dauphin, the future Louis VIII. Blanca learnt from her father-in-law, Philip Augustus, Henry’s nemesis. She learnt statecraft from him. Her husband died young. She was the mother of Louis IX, Saint Louis, who was so dreadful to the Jews and burnt the Talmud in Paris in, I think it was 1242. But she is the real unifier of France, carrying on Philip’s tradition. I mean, it’s interesting that Eleanor chose her of four granddaughters to marry the King of France. And then, obviously, I mean, it wasn’t a conscious legacy, but you see the wars that send Europe into such strife until the end of the Hundred Years’ War. Really Eleanor’s legacy as the kings of England try to hang on to the portion that was brought to them by Eleanor, that big portion of France in the very left hand corner of France. So that’s really her legacy. But she was, you know, even though we don’t know much about her until her later years, I mean she was an undoubtedly extraordinary. Extraordinary woman, extraordinary ruler.
That’s amazing, Claudia. And I do hope that everyone will go back and read your article about Eleanor of Aquitaine in “The Spectator” and the passages on her in your book, “The King of the North Wind.”
The names of the books. “King of the North Wind” is about Henry. “How do we know about the rows between Eleanor and Louis?” Shelly says. Well, Shelly, it’s all documented. Louis was a copious letter writer. The great thing about the 12th century for the historian is it’s known as the golden age of historical writing. We have got, some of the greatest historians and chroniclers of the age were writing about it. So you can see it. A lot of it has been translated if you go to the library. But we’ve got Louis’ letters back home to his mentor, Abbot Suger, his letters to Bernard of Clairvaux, their letters back to him. So there’s a lot that we have in writing. We’ve got a lot from the Pope admonishing Eleanor, telling her to behave better. So we have a lot of contemporary sources. “What are the inaccurate things in the film ‘The Lion in Winter’ in your opinion?” says Jerry. Well, Jerry, from start to finish, it’s inaccurate. It’s set in the wrong year. Philip never came to, Philip of France never came to Henry’s Christmas court. But I think what it really does do brilliantly is embody the personalities. So if you can forgive the minor lapses of date and place, I think the personalities are a very, very good way to get a feel for the period.
I mean, they might not have been accurate, but they feel so plausible.
Yes, yes. I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, it works. Jeremy says, “How was Eleanor allowed by Louis to retain her property once divorced?” Well, Jeremy, Louis was incredibly naive. It’s something that Henry would never have done and Philip would never have done. But Louis trusted her and he was absolutely horrified. It was a massive mistake. Stewart says, “Was John the John who signed the Magna Carta?” Yes, he was. Yes, because he had lost so much power by this time. Jerry says, “Why did the Austrian king kidnap Richard? And why was there antagonism between Austria and the Angevins?” I think actually on Crusade, Richard had been really rude to the Archduke of Austria. I think it was personal and I think it was a way to get some easy money, because you’ve got somebody’s king, you can charge them an enormous ransom. Shelly says, “Is it true that Richard’s ransom was primarily paid for by the Jews of Britain?” Yes. The general population had to pay a tithe of 10%. I believe that the Jews had to pay 25% of their wealth. “Was Richard the second son and Eleanor’s favourite?” He was the third surviving son after William, their first child, Henry and Eleanor’s first child. William died at the age of three. And then Henry the Young King. Richard was the third son, probably Eleanor’s favourite, but she stuck by John as much as she stuck by Richard. And I think that’s probably all we’ve got time for. Thank you very much.