Louis, badgered by his adored advisor Abbot Suger, and then on Suger’s death in January 1151 by his new chief advisor, the cadaverous Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, was persuaded to pragmatism. He abandoned Eustace’s cause and reluctantly invited Henry and Geoffrey to Paris, to accept Henry’s homage for Normandy. And so, in August Henry and Geoffrey brought their prisoner Gerard Berlai to Paris, that mosquito-infested, unpaved city of mud and marsh, to meet their pious and tedious overlord, the king of France. It would be Henry’s first encounter with Louis’ queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
No one was prepared for the upheaval that was to follow.
VI
The encounter did not begin well. The great hall of Louis’ old palace, squatting at the end of the tiny Île de la Cité in the middle of the River Seine, reverberated with screams of rage. Bernard of Clairvaux, Louis, his brother and advisors, and Count Geoffrey of Anjou all competed to be heard. The noise of their frenzy echoed around the chamber.
When they saw Gerard Berlai presented to them, shackled, Louis and Bernard were furious. They demanded Gerard’s immediate release, and the return of the Vexin, a small territory midway between the Norman city of Rouen and the Capetian city of Paris. Whoever controlled this borderland of castles and rivers, whether the Norman dukes or the kings of France, held the advantage. Louis wanted it; Henry and Geoffrey were not prepared to give it up.
Bernard of Clairvaux loathed and distrusted the House of Anjou. He believed they were rogue counts, descended from the devilish fairy Melusine. He had called Geoffrey ‘that hammer of good men, and destroyer of the peace and liberty of the Church’, and in 1147 he had induced Pope Eugenius III to excommunicate Geoffrey for his besiegement of Berlai.139 Furthermore, Geoffrey had been noticeably absent from the Second Crusade, when nearly every other French nobleman had responded to Bernard’s call to take the cross.140 When Henry and Geoffrey walked into the great hall of Louis’ palace with their prisoner, tempers flared.
Louis took Geoffrey’s imprisonment of Gerard as a personal offence; he was incensed.141 He ranted that he would only accept Henry’s homage for Normandy (the ceremony where Henry would become Louis’ man and hold Normandy only by right of Louis) and arrange for the lifting of Geoffrey’s excommunication, if they released Gerard immediately. He demanded that they also cede the Vexin. Geoffrey, equally maddened, stormed out of the meeting, ‘tormented by vapours of black bile’, followed by Henry.142 They would not give up the Vexin, and they would not release Gerard. Geoffrey, in ferocious temper, cared nothing for his excommunication.
But almost immediately Henry and Geoffrey came back and ceded to both of Louis’ demands. Louis kept his word and bypassed his brother-in-law; Henry paid homage for Normandy where he was officially pronounced ‘duke’. Eustace’s claims were denied, by both Louis and the pope, who refused Stephen’s request to guarantee Eustace’s succession.143 Geoffrey, though, still smarting, refused to ask Bernard to lift his excommunication. In a fit of prophetic vengeance, Bernard pronounced that Geoffrey would be dead within two weeks.
Unperturbed by the prophecy, Henry and Geoffrey ‘joyfully’ left Paris.144 Henry went to Lisieux to meet his Norman barons, while Geoffrey travelled on to his castle of Château-du-Loir in Sarthe, near his capital, Le Mans. The late summer weather was extremely hot and Geoffrey took an evening swim in the river. He caught a fever, and by 7 September he was dead. He was thirty-eight years old.
In August, Henry had been a young man with enormous expectations, but only one dukedom in his hand. One month on, his father’s untimely death made him lord of Anjou and Maine, as well as duke of Normandy. He now controlled a vast swathe of northern France.
But in Paris in high summer, why did Henry and Geoffrey, having stormed out of the talks with Louis, return and give him everything he wanted?
The likeliest reason is that the new young duke of Normandy had made a bargain with Eleanor, Louis’ queen. Within a few months of meeting Henry, Eleanor and Louis would divorce; in May 1152, she would secretly marry Henry in her capital, Poitiers.
VII
Henry was eighteen years old when he and Eleanor met in Paris in 1151 and made their bargain. He was tall with a stocky, muscled body and a compelling face. He was charismatic, athletic, clever, educated, empathetic and ambitious. He was already known as a skilful (and lucky) commander of armies. He possessed a restlessness, an unquiet energy that kept his body in perpetual motion. Henry could not sit still.
More stories have been invented about Eleanor of Aquitaine than any other medieval woman. Her life has been imagined by chroniclers, historians, playwrights, poets, romantic novelists and film-makers for over 800 years. She has been portrayed as a vixen, a sexual predator and deviant; as the poisoner of her husband’s mistress; as a desperately unhappy woman in a desperately unhappy marriage; as Shakespeare’s ‘canker’d grandam’; as a model of erudition, beauty and queenly virtue; as the leader of an army of bare-breasted crusader women; a feisty adventuress; a feminist prototype; an intellectual powerhouse and influential patron of the arts; and as the initiator of the famous troubadour courts of love. Although Eleanor undoubtedly grew up at Poitiers among the troubadours, and was the recipient of the unrequited passion of the poet Bernart de Ventadorn – who would follow her to England and Henry’s court, proclaiming, ‘When the cold wind blows from the direction of your country, it seems to me that I felt a breeze from paradise, for love of the lady’ – almost everything that has been written about Eleanor is either a half-truth, wrong, or ultimately unknowable.145
The real Eleanor is a chimera, as illusive and fleeting as quicksilver. Such is her fame, we desire to possess her, yet we know almost nothing about her. The historian Richard Barber notes that ‘to print out all of the records and chronicle entries about Eleanor would take less than a hundred pages’.146 The written record is notably small for one of the most famous figures in European history. And that written record for the most part relates to the last fifteen years of her life – she died in her early eighties. Eleanor’s earlier life remains in the shadows.
What, then, do we know of Eleanor? She was the daughter of William X of Aquitaine and Aénor of Châtellerault, and was born in about 1122 in or near Poitiers; some rumours put her birthplace at Château de Belin, near Bordeaux.147 If we take this as the year of her birth (the records are not exact), she was twenty-nine years old when the eighteen-year-old Henry rode into Paris.
Aquitaine was the largest and the richest of the duchies that owed nominal allegiance to the French crown, although its rulers refused to pay homage to the French kings.148 To the north its border was the River Loire, and to the south the mountains of the Pyrenees. It stretched west to east from the Atlantic to the Massif Central. The territory of its dukes, consisting of several different counties, dwarfed that of the French kings. They resided in their palace at Poitiers, closer to Paris than their southern border, and their subjects treated them as kings.149 Their palace, a Merovingian fortress, sat at the top of a hill encircled by the River Clain. They certainly behaved as kings, encouraging ties of friendship between themselves and their nobility, taking clerical advice to increase their religious authority, and even acquiring relics. Relics held a cult status in the medieval world, a tangible expression of the story of Christ and his promise. Eleanor’s ancestor Duke William V, or the Great, gained the gory prize of the head of John the Baptist for the church of Saint-Jean-d’Angély.150 This duke was apparently called ‘Augustus’ by the pope in recognition of his power.
During the tenth century, the counts of Poitou had expanded their lands and became so powerful that they exercised quasi-royal authority. The relatively weak Frankish kings to the north rarely ventured south, except on their way to shrines such as St James’s at Compostela, or to Rome.151 They were obliged to grant Aquitaine’s rulers the title ‘duke’ towards the end of the tenth century. These dukes expanded their power in the eleventh century, to incorporate all the territory Eleanor brought Louis as her marriage portion. They paid lip service only to their royal overlords. They were rich, their wealth buttressed