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Eleanor of Aquitaine in the Early Reign of Louis VII

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Eleanor of Aquitaine in the Early Reign of Louis VII Chapter 6 The Missing Queen? Eleanor of Aquitaine in the Early Reign of Louis VII Michael R. Evans The popular image of Eleanor of Aquitaine is shaped mainly by her career as queen of England. For many people, Eleanor is the mature matriarch so mem- orably represented by Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter. Her life with Henry II, and the subsequent troubled relations between Henry and his family make for great drama, not to say soap opera. Before her marriage to Henry, how- ever, she was Queen of France and the wife of Louis VII of France, a marriage that, while troubled, lasted for nearly a decade and a half, produced two daugh- ters, and saw the royal couple embark on crusade. Yet this period in Eleanor’s life remains somewhat shadowy. Many historians have speculated about Eleanor’s influence on the policies of Louis VII; writing with hindsight knowledge of her later career as a powerful queen and queen- mother of England, and finding it hard to imagine that such a woman did not exert a strong political influence on Louis during the first decade of his reign, they have created an image of Eleanor as an éminence grise manipulating the French king. The relatively small amount of attention paid to Eleanor’s period as queen of France, and the tendency to sensationalism when the period is addressed, stem from the same source—the paucity of evidence for French history in this period compared to the relative wealth of sources for England in the second half of the twelfth century. This era has been dubbed a “golden age of English historiogra- phy,” the age of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Walter Map, John of Salisbury, William of Newburgh, Gervase of Canterbury, and Richard of Devizes. There is no such wealth of narrative sources for France during the reign of Louis VII; Suger’s narrative of Louis VII’s reign covers only the very early years,1 while Geoffrey of Vigeois’s chronicle is a good source for events in Eleanor’s duchy of Aquitaine, but is not a contemporary source for her period as queen of France.2 If the chronicle evidence is scanty, there is likewise an imbalance of char- ter sources between Henry II’s England and Louis VII’s France. One hundred 1 Suger, De glorioso rege Ludovico, Ludovici filio. in Oeuvres, ed. and trans. Françoise Gasparri, 2 vols. (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1996), 1: 156– 177. 2 Geoffrey of Vigeois, Chronica in RHF XII, 421– 50 and 18:211– 23. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004368002_008 106 Evans twenty acts per year survive from the reign of Henry, against only twenty per year for his contemporary Louis.3 Might those charters that we do possess throw some light on Eleanor’s role? In fact, so far as they do, they suggest that Eleanor was marginalized in the government of France and even of her own Duchy of Aquitaine. Marie Hivergneaux’s study shows that only three of Eleanor’s twenty charters from the time of her marriage to Louis were issued in her capacity as Queen of France, with the remaining seventeen relating to her role as Duchess of Aquitaine. Even here, she played a secondary role to Louis, who took the title Dux Aquitanorum and appointed his own officials to the government of the duchy. Of Eleanor’s seventeen Aquitanian charters, only four appear to have been initiated by the duchess herself. In Hivergneaux’s words, “she is therefore far from acting alone even in this duchy to which she is the heiress.”4 After her divorce from Louis, on occasion she reissued deeds from her time as Queen of France, as if her authority in the duchy had been compromised, having been subsumed into that of her royal husband.5 According to Marion Facinger: A dispassionate examination of the documentation for the first ten years of Eleanor’s career as queen of France … reveals almost no information about either her activities or her influence. Her presence in the royal curia is unnoted, her name rarely appears on Louis’s charters, and no sources support the historical view of Eleanor as bold, precocious, and responsible for Louis VII’s behavior.6 Ralph Turner concurs that: Eleanor would never enjoy the active participation in royal government that her mother- in- law [Adelaide of Maurienne] had relished. Official documents tell almost nothing about either Eleanor’s activities or her influence on Louis VII, rarely associating her name with his.7 3 Martin Aurell, The Plantagenet Empire, 1154– 1224, trans. David Crouch (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 12. 4 Marie Hivergneaux, “Autour d’Aliénor d’Aquitaine: entourage et pouvoir au prisme des chartes (1137– 1189),” in Plantagenêts et Capétiens: confrontations et heritages, ed. Martin Aurell and Noël- Yves Tonnere (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 62. English translations are my own unless stated. 5 Ibid., 64. 6 Marion F. Facinger, “A Study of Medieval Queenship: Capetian France (987–1237),” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 5, ed. William M. Bowsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 7– 8. 7 Ralph V. Turner, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 54..
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