THE LOSS OF AQUITAINE
(March 21, 1152)
Easter came early in the year 1152, and that Lent was cold.
In the week before Palm Sunday, the middle week of March, the sodden roads of the great plains to the north and to the east of Orleans had trains upon them of men and wagons making all for Beaugency, two days below Orleans down the river—Beaugency, the little town at the opening of its shallow valley, standing upon the north bank of the Loire and facing the poor sun of this winter end.
There stood in the town of Beaugency, near the stream, a strong and simple castle, flanked with huge round towers. Many men have passed into possession of it, have rebuilt, and changed, and blazoned, and pulled down its stones in seven hundred years, but some of those towers still stand. It was, in this year 1152, Church land. It held of Amiens; and hither the Archbishop of Sens had summoned the Court and the king, Louis, and his queen, Eleanor, many lawyers and many barons, and the great prelates like himself—of Rheims, of Rouen, of Bordeaux. Their tenants for assessors, their squires and hosts of serving men and troops of horse and mules came crowding into the little place, turning for a moment this half-forgotten town into a capital; and the innkeepers were still dreaming of gold, and every house was making itself a sort of crowded hostelry; every barn was a stable.
The matter upon which this writ of the archbishop’s had gone out to his king and the Court, to the Queen Eleanor, and all their train, and to his fellow bishops, and to the barons of France and of Aquitaine, was the great divorce. For now that Louis, the king, had come back shamefully defeated from the Crusade (tortured by rumours that were more than rumours of the queen’s contempt and unfaithfulness, heavily warned that no son had been born of her to continue the Capetian line), he was for ridding himself of his burden. And this, although that burden meant the mastery of half the south, and rule direct from Paris over whatever lay between the Pyrenees and the garden of the Loire; between the mountains of Auvergne and the sea. For Eleanor had Aquitaine for her dower.
The king was a man of thirty. He was the heir to that constant effort of the monarchy to turn province by province from a proud fief into an immediate possession of the Crown. No wider sweep of that net had been thrown than when, in his boyhood, there had been brought to Rheims, as a wife for him, the girl who was heiress of all Aquitaine. He could also remember how, so many years before, that marriage had filled all his thoughts and all his heart in the new discovery of the south coming upon his cloistered mind. But life had turned sour.
The chapel of the castle, round-arched and broad, with very deep windows in its thick walls, and a faded fresco on its roof, was barely lit by the early light of the March morning. All were assembled for the great decision. Mass had been said. The ornaments of the place were veiled gloomily, as is the Lenten custom. The king’s throne was set facing the bench where the bishops and their assessors sat; but the queen, with her women and her advocates, the tonsured clerks in her cause, and her barons of Aquitaine, sat apart on the Gospel side of the nave, she also crowned and robed, she also expecting the release. Her tall figure, strong and too large in its rich draperies, suited her heavy, long face, over massive in the jaw, too steady and uncaring in the level of its high brow. Her kerchief fitted close, under the golden circle, to her now scanty hair.
The issue of this suit, which was predetermined, she strongly desired. She had said in her latest and angriest revolts: “I have married a monk and not a man!” And this, her thirtieth year, was for her also a culmination. She would bear the thing no more. For seven years she had had no child; when the children came they were daughters. She was not the mother of an heir. And the priests, by whom Louis VII. was himself so closely bound, offended her. She had hardly hidden her chance desires in the East, on the Crusade—a Greek, a noble, a Saracen slave. She had not hidden at all her contempt and her weariness. But there was more than that. She had now another choice.
Ten years, twelve years younger than herself, there was a lad into whose hands had tumbled, like ripe fruits from every side by converging inheritance, all the west: Brittany and Normandy and the Maine and Anjou from his father (for he was the Angevin), and from his mother England itself—for his claim to which crown he would fight and conquer, she knew. This lad, red-headed, passionately willed, and to be the master of such great domains, she had fixed down in her mind for a quarry. He would not fail her—for she would bring him Aquitaine. He should be lord over all the western seas from the hills of Cumberland right away to the Biscayans and Navarre. He was that young Henry of Anjou and Normandy, of Maine: and of England to be: a glorious young Lord, just past his nineteenth year. All these things the Queen Eleanor held in her heart that morning, masked behind her heavy, impassive face.
The loud, confused cries of hundreds talking in groups, of the lawyer-priests spreading their crackling parchments, and of serving men passing in and out of the doors, ceased to a sharp order from the archbishop’s serjeant and the ringing of his pike upon the stone floor of that church. There were only a few hurried whispers passing between the clerks of the queen, and these also fell when the archbishop rose and gravely put his question, whether any one present desired to come forward on the plea of the king and of the queen that their marriage, being contracted within the decrees forbidden to Christian men and women, should be made null and of no effect. But if such consanguinity were not established, then let them preserve the sacrament of their marriage in God’s name.
When he had sat him down again, those who stood ready behind the king—his relatives, and witnesses of his rolls and archives—came forward one after the other, and each stretched forward his right hand open, palm downwards, over the relics, taking the oath assigned. Such and such was the degree of consanguinity between Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII, of that name, King of the French and Duke of Aquitaine. Eleanor, upon her throne apart, heard in those proud royal formulæ titles hardly greater than her own. She had behind her generation after generation of the great dukes, her fathers, of whom she came, the sole heiress, summing up in her presence the story of the Roman south, and Poitiers on its hill, and Bordeaux and Bayonne, and the vineyards of Angoulême. She would take good care into whose hands all those hundred miles of countryside should go. She foresaw the wars.
When the long and formal business of that Court was over (the depositions inscribed, signed and sealed, the pleas of either party heard, the documents declared, the relationship established), the bishops consulted for their verdict, and gave it in corporate form, so that the great clerics outside their body—the Pope, their chief, and even great St. Bernard himself (the spiritual master in Christendom)—said nothing more. They gave their verdict upon the undoubted text of the Canon Law. They declared this marriage of fifteen years now null. And their solemn sentence was delivered, the silence broke again for a moment, and once again the serjeant of the archbishop, with the pound of his pike upon the stone floor, commanded silence. The queen took from her head the gold circle of the woman’s crown and set it down in symbol of the change. She had another crown before her eyes, and one that should be greater in Europe for fifty brilliant years than the crown of the Capetian. She was to be mistress of the Angevin, and to command in her own fashion, through so many wars, so great a government.
She was free now. She rose, not waiting to see whether the king should rise first from his throne apart. She withdrew with all her train, standing high at the head of those high lords, and moving towards the eastern doors. She went southward, and away to her own land.
These things were done before Easter, the cold and leafless Easter of that year. The spring broke, and by Pentecost this woman had married the Angevin: young Henry of Anjou, of Maine, of Normandy, of England to be. And his honour also she broke at last.