Born 1122

Died 1204

Queen of France and England

“Seek, my child, those things which make for peace. Cease to stir up the king against the Church and urge him a better course of action. If you will promise to do this, I in my turn promise to entreat the merciful Lord to grant you offspring.” Bernard of Clairvaux’s advice to Eleanor

Eleanor of Aquitaine was a rare individual indeed. As wife of Louis VII, she ruled France, only to divorce her husband and marry Henry of Anjou, who would later make her queen of England. Marriage may have gotten her into positions of power, but what Eleanor did with that power was her own special gift. Both shrewd and intelligent, she was a highly cultured woman who managed to stay atop the shifting political structures of Western Europe, and at the same time cultivated learning and the arts in her lands.

The court at Aquitaine

During her long and varied life, Eleanor often found herself (or in many cases, put herself) at the center of conflicts. It was perhaps a trait she learned from her father, Duke William X of Aquitaine in France. William dared to disagree with Bernard of Clairvaux a religious leader who was perhaps the most powerful man in Western Europe—even more so than the pope, official head of the Catholic Church.

Besides the tendency to quarrel, an interest in the arts seemed to run in Eleanor’s family. Her grandfather, William IX, became distinguished as a troubadour, a type of poet in medieval France. Eleanor herself grew up surrounded by music and literature at her father’s court, a French center of culture.

A powerful fifteen-year-old

In 1137, however, fifteen-year-old Eleanor was suddenly jolted from what might have been a quiet, easy life when her father died without a male heir. As his oldest child, Eleanor became not only duchess of Aquitaine, but countess of Poitou. Any man who married her would control even more of France than the king did, and this put Eleanor in danger of kidnapping and forced marriage.

It so happened that before his death, William had asked the king to become Eleanor’s guardian. Now King Louis VI took her under his wing in a way that also served his own interests, by arranging her marriage to his son, the future King Louis VII (c. 1120–1180; ruled 1137–1180). Shortly after the wedding, Louis VI died, making Eleanor—not yet sixteen years old—queen of France.

Queen of France

Louis VII seemed more suited to a career as a monk or priest than as king of France, and in fact he had been raised for a life in the church, and would never have become king if his older brother had not died in a riding accident. Thus Louis was not inclined to make trouble for the pope and other Catholic leaders, whereas Eleanor had a mind of her own. Eleanor’s younger sister Petronille was having an affair with Count Ralph of Vermandois, and she wanted to make an honest woman of herself by marrying him. The problem was that Ralph already had a wife, and divorce was not possible under church laws. The only way around this was to have a marriage annulled, or declared illegal, so Eleanor arranged this for her sister.

As it turned out, however, Ralph’s former wife had powerful friends, not least of whom was the pope, who lashed out at France with all the power he had. This put Louis VII, a reluctant participant in the conflict, in a difficult position. Finally Bernard of Clairvaux stepped in and helped settle the dispute. He also advised Eleanor that if she would quit making trouble with the church, God would give her the thing for which she had long been hoping: a child.

The Second Crusade

Eleanor did stop quarreling with the church, and in 1145 she did give birth to a daughter, Marie. Shortly afterward, Bernard organized the Second Crusade (1147–49), an effort to win control of the Holy Land for Christian forces, and Louis took part as a means of winning back the favor of the church.

Eleanor went with him, and in the Syrian city of Antioch, an important crusader stronghold, she met her uncle, Raymond of Toulouse. Raymond was only twelve years older than she, and they instantly became close. The nature of their relationship has long been disputed by historians; regardless of whether they became lovers, however, they were certainly close friends.

During their long hours talking, Raymond became the first person to learn of Eleanor’s misgivings regarding her marriage. “I thought I had married a king,” she told him, “but I find I have married a monk.” Raymond suggested that she could obtain an annulment on the basis of consanguinity—blood relationship, or the fact that she and Louis were too closely related.

In fact medieval monarchs and nobles often married close relatives, but it made for a good excuse, and Eleanor announced to Louis that due to consanguinity and a desire to remain in Antioch with Raymond, she was not returning to France. Louis, however, forced her to return.

Divorce and remarriage.

Despite the birth of a second daughter, not to mention help from the pope in sorting out their marital problems, Eleanor’s marriage to Louis was doomed. In 1152, she left him, and soon afterward arranged to have her marriage annulled. As a woman possessing huge lands, however, she could not afford to remain unmarried for long; therefore just two months after the end of her first marriage, she married a man eleven years her junior, Henry, count of Anjou (1133–1189).

Henry’s mother Matilda was a grandchild of William the Conqueror, as was the reigning English king, Stephen. Stephen had usurped, or seized, the throne from Matilda, and Henry fought with him for control. The outcome was an agreement, the Treaty of Winchester (1153), which stated that when Stephen died, Henry would take the throne. Stephen died in 1154, and thus within two years, Eleanor went from being queen of France to queen of England.

Henry’s accession to the English throne established the ruling House of Plantagenet, destined to rule for nearly 250 years; and during much of that time, England and France would find themselves at war. The roots of the problem went back to the marriage of Henry and Eleanor, which combined the French duchies of Aquitaine and Anjou, and (following Henry’s accession to the English throne) placed both of those territories under the rule of England. Thus the English royal house controlled more of France than the French crown did. Perhaps Eleanor could have eased things by asking the king’s permission before marrying Henry—but since the king happened to be her ex-husband, she knew he would never give his consent.

Conflict between father and sons

Eleanor bore Henry numerous children over the years from 1153 to 1166, including four sons. During much of this time, Henry was away, overseeing his lands in France, and Eleanor ruled England as regent. Then in 1168, Henry returned full control of Aquitaine—the ruler of which he had become at the time of their marriage—to Eleanor, and she moved there.

The marriage with Henry had not turned out to be much happier than the one with Louis, though for opposite reasons. Certainly Eleanor could not accuse Henry of being monk-like: he was a lusty, battle-hardened warrior, an unfaithful husband and a selfish father.

In 1170, Eleanor persuaded Henry to follow a French custom and crown his eldest son Henry while he continued to reign. The father agreed to do so, but did not permit the son—who never lived to reign, and is known to history as Henry the Young King—to hold any power.

Eleanor became increasingly displeased with Henry’s unwillingness to pass on the throne to one of their children. Therefore over the course of the 1170s and the early 1180s, she joined forces with Louis VII, who apparently let bygones be bygones, especially because he and Eleanor now had a mutual enemy. Together with her sons, they periodically waged war against Henry. But the king held on to power, and in 1186 he had Eleanor imprisoned in Salisbury Castle.

Richard and John

Eleanor spent three years in prison, gaining release upon Henry’s death in 1189. For such a well-traveled and cultured person, those years of confinement were especially difficult—not to mention the fact that by now she was almost seventy years old. But Eleanor still had many good years left, and she devoted them to her sons—or rather to her eldest surviving son, Richard I (the Lion-Hearted).

Richard took the throne upon the death of his father, and Eleanor became his trusted (and very powerful) counselor. She oversaw Richard’s affairs, arranging a beneficial marriage for him and in 1192 putting down a revolt led by another son, John. When Richard was kidnapped following the Third Crusade, she ran the country, and it was she who delivered his ransom to Germany in the dead of winter, 1194. Therefore she was all the more devastated when Richard, having returned to England, died from an infected arrow wound in 1199.

This left John, who was as greedy and cruel as Richard was noble, on the throne. Though John was not Eleanor’s first choice for king, he was all that she had left, and she supported him when Arthur of Anjou, one of her grandsons, tried to claim the throne. Despite her help, John proved a failure as a king, and lost most of the family’s French possessions.

At least Aquitaine remained in Eleanor’s control, and as her life drew to a close, she possessed little more than she had when it began. Still suffering from the loss of Richard, she went to live with the nuns at the abbey of Fontevrault, where her favorite son, Richard, and her second husband were buried. She died in the spring of 1204, at the age of eighty-two.