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, the chroniclers – mostly churchmen – were too consumed with Eleanor’s supposed sexual voraciousness to pay it much attention. Walter Map and Gerald of Wales later accused her of sleeping with Henry’s father Geoffrey. Walter claimed she ‘married Henry despite rumours circulating to the effect that she had already shared Louis’ bed with Geoffrey, Henry’s father’. Walter went on to speculate that ‘this … is why their progeny, sullied as their origins were, finally came to naught’.205 If true, it would have made their marriage incestuous in the eyes of the church. The chronicler William of Newburgh believed it was Eleanor who ‘longed to be wed to the duke of Normandy as one more congenial to her character’, and Gervase of Canterbury wrote that ‘people said that it was she who had cleverly brought about that contrived repudiation’, as she had grown tired of Louis’ ‘decrepit Gallic embraces’. Helinand de Froidmont, writing at the beginning of the thirteenth century, went even further, ascribing Eleanor’s desire to divorce entirely to her desire for Henry: ‘It was on account of her lasciviousness that Louis gave up his wife, who behaved not like a queen but more like a [whore].’206
And as late as the early twentieth century, one historian of the counts of Poitou explained Eleanor’s pursuit of marriage to Henry thus: she had grown bored of Louis’ ‘almost effeminate grace’, and rather she ‘wished to be dominated, and as the vulgar crudely put it, she was among those women who enjoy being beaten’.207
Eleanor was far more likely to have been seduced by promises of autonomy rather than Henry’s personal charms alone. Henry was a risk-taker and an optimist. His parents and his tutors had imbued him with self-belief since babyhood. Henry – young, arrogant and talented – likely believed that the crown of England was his; despite Eustace’s formidable claim, he had only to wait. England, Normandy, Maine and Anjou, together with the cornucopia of Aquitaine offered by marriage to Eleanor, would all eventually be theirs if she chose him as her new husband.
No wonder Henry left Paris ‘full of joy’; he had secured a promise of marriage from the wealthiest heiress in the western world. Now he planned to travel to England immediately, to fight Stephen and Eustace.
The historian Kate Norgate, quoting the chronicler Peter Langtoft, says that Matilda was also in Paris with Henry and Geoffrey, and if so it is likely that both parents were party to his plans.208 But if Matilda was there to help to smooth the negotiations with Louis, she left before Henry and Geoffrey. The worldly Geoffrey, under Bernard’s ‘curse’, could not have imagined he would have so little time to live. On their way to Lisieux