Hi Friends! This is Stephanie, your trusty page administrator and the trustee of Sharon’s social media. Continuing in the vein of Sharon’s routine support of other authors, I’ve got a special treat to share.

I’ve asked author and historian Matthew Lewis to be a guest today. While his main focus is the Wars of the Roses and Richard III, he’s a historian of the middle ages in general. As such, I asked him to stop by and talk about his newest book, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Founding an Empire.

Over to you, Matt!

I know what you might be thinking. What’s a Ricardian doing at the wrong end of the Plantagenet dynasty? It’s a fair question. My answer would be that understanding the end of a story (or at least the closing of a chapter) often requires knowledge of its beginning. I wrote a book on The Anarchy – the 11^th century civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda. I found that period fascinating (and given my interest in the Wars of the Roses I was worried that civil wars fascinated me so much). A biography of Henry II seemed like a natural sequel, and when Henry bursts onto the scene, it is impossible to ignore the woman at his side. Eleanor of Aquitaine is every bit the match for Henry, and so I decided to write a joint biography of them.

Although Henry and Eleanor were, in many ways, the original European power couple, telling their story presents unique problems. Eleanor had lived an incredibly full medieval life before she even met Henry. The death of her father left her an unmarried teenager and one of the greatest heiresses in Europe. Louis VI soon married her to his son and heir, and within weeks the king died so that Louis VII came to the throne with Eleanor as his queen. She seems to have exerted a great deal of influence over Louis, something his councillors and courtiers resented. That made Eleanor a target, and I think it is through this lens that we need to view later criticisms of her, not to mention sordid stories that began to do the rounds. It’s incredible how they’ve stuck despite a lack of real evidence for them, and plenty of political motivations for seeking to undermine her.

Eleanor had been Queen of France, a mother to two daughters, and had been on the Second Crusade to the Holy Land, spending Easter in Jerusalem, before she encountered Henry in Paris. Her marriage to Louis was annulled amid rumours that she had indulged in an affair with her uncle, Raymond, Prince of Antioch whilst in the Holy Land. The basis for this claim seems to be the fact that Raymond advised a course of action that Louis refused to accept. Eleanor agreed with her uncle, perhaps believing that he had far more knowledge of the region and its politics than they did, but Louis refused to be swayed.

From this were birthed not only tales of an affair with Raymond as the only possible explanation for Eleanor dissenting from her husband’s decision, but also later stories of Eleanor planning to run away and marry Saladin, who was around twelve or thirteen at the time. For good measure, accusations were added that she had engaged in an affair with Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, Henry’s father, and that her lust for Henry ruined her marriage to Louis. For Eleanor to be convicted of these scandals in the court of public opinion for over 800 years based on such flimsy evidence is ludicrous.

I encountered the young Henry in depth when writing about The Anarchy. He arrives near the end in earnest but has a couple of fascinating cameos earlier on. I particularly liked the story of him bringing a small mercenary force to England when he was fourteen to chance his arm. When it went horribly wrong, he asked his mom, Empress Matilda, for money to pay his men, but she refused. He then went to his uncle Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who also declined to help him out of the fix he was in. It was a sure sign Henry had launched the invasion without permission and this felt like the medieval teenage equivalent of being put on the naughty step.

What happened next tells us a great deal about Henry, and about King Stephen, and probably helped bring about the end of The Anarchy. Henry made the apparently absurd move of asking King Stephen, his mother’s cousin, but his rival for the throne of England, to bail him out. To astonishment that has echoed through the centuries, Stephen handed over the money Henry requested. This has attracted confusion and derision for Stephen, from contemporaries and later commentators, but I think there was good reason for him to behave as he did. It allowed him to meet the chivalric imperative of helping another, and a family member too, to help prevent him suffering dishonour. It also got Henry and his men out of England quickly and without trouble. Beyond that, I think it created a relationship between Stephen and Henry that prevented all-out slaughter in 1153 when Henry returned in earnest as the twenty-year-old Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou and Maine, to claim the crown of England. There was an odd series of standoffs, and a refusal to fight that is usually put down to nobles tired of the ongoing wars. The two leaders seemed just as happy to dodge a showdown and met at least once to discuss things as their armies hovered behind them. I can’t help wondering whether Stephen’s behaviour towards Henry, the notion that one could be civil to an enemy, that the cause between them didn’t mean they had to personally despise each other, left a mark. It feels like something we could do with more of today. If it had created a well of goodwill, it was to help settle the disputed succession in Henry’s favour. Stephen’s oldest son died, his other son expressed no desire to become king, and Stephen adopted Henry as his son and appointed him heir to England.

In December 1154, Henry and Eleanor arrived in England for their joint coronation. They now oversaw territories that sprawled from Hadrian’s Wall to the south of France. The problem was that this made them a threat to many, most notably the King of France. Louis VII had set Eleanor aside, and there had been efforts to blame her for their lack of a son and heir. On her way back to Aquitaine, Eleanor had been the subject to two kidnap attempts that aimed to force her into marriage. The second had been made by Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey. It seems likely that she sent word to Henry that she would be willing to marry him, and Henry, who was busily preparing an invasion of England when the offer arrived, dropped everything, and darted south. Louis was outraged that his former wife, and vassal, had remarried without his permission. He was terrified at what looked like an empire the match created on his doorstep. For Eleanor, the appeal of Henry was probably less some passionate obsession with a younger man than a realistic assessment of who was single and in a position to protect her and Aquitaine. Henry was the obvious candidate.

Henry is, for me, a complex character. He shunned all majesty, preferring to send his Chancellor Thomas Becket to Paris to make a splendid, showy entrance to the city because, well, it just wasn’t Henry’s style. Politics during this period demanded a degree of flexibility that I think Henry struggled to find. Borders and rights were often left deliberately in fuzzy, grey areas to avoid endless disputes, but Henry craved definition and certainty. His goal throughout his reign was to recover and restore all of the rights held by his grandfather Henry I, and he would pursue these ferociously and doggedly. Blurry borders and ill-defined authority were no good to Henry. Some of the times he got himself into the deepest trouble, such as the Toulouse Campaign in 1159 and the Becket Affair that ended so tragically in 1170, it was because he wanted his rights clearly defined from these grey areas.

Eleanor was, I think, always preoccupied with Aquitaine. I suspect she felt her duty to protect the duchy even more keenly because she was a woman in a world increasingly wary, if not downright fearful, of female rule. If there was an assumption that she wasn’t up to the task, that only drove her harder to prove that she was. Her interest in their second son, Richard, was probably less to do with selecting a favourite child than with his having been conceived in Aquitaine and positioned to be its next duke. He was the future of the place that meant the most to her. It is for this reason that I didn’t see Eleanor’s move to Aquitaine in 1168 as the split in their relationship it is often portrayed as. Eleanor was in her mid-forties, and the couple had seven children, including four sons (no doubt to Louis VII’s irritation!). I position this move not as a mark of a cooling in their relationship, which had never required constant physical proximity, but as a reward. Eleanor was allowed to return to the place she loved above all others as its duchess, to train Richard in the tricky art of ruling Aquitaine.

Telling the stories of Henry and Eleanor together was, as I mentioned earlier, tricky. In part, that is because Henry imprisons his wife for fifteen years. The shocking move came in the aftermath of uprising of the couple’s sons. Eleanor was suspected of instigating, or at least encouraging and facilitating, the revolt. Although their sons and other rebels were swiftly forgiven and rehabilitated. Eleanor was not. Like so many other facets of their story, I don’t think the traditional story paints the full picture. I wonder whether Eleanor took a hit for the team, tacitly accepting punishment as a ringleader because that allowed their sons to be reconciled to their father quickly: it wasn’t their fault, it was their mother’s influence.

Louis and later his son Philip II consistently tried to drive a wedge between Henry and his sons to disrupt the vast territories they saw as a challenge to Capetian authority. Any prolonged dispute between Henry and his sons played into the French king’s hands and was a dynastic risk to all that Henry and Eleanor had built. There is no real evidence to position Eleanor as some kind of mastermind in a bid to tear her family and their lands apart. There was simply no benefit in it either. Eleanor would remain in England for most of the rest of Henry’s life in what is usually characterised as comfortable house arrest. In the cost Henry incurred on her care, and her placement at one of her favourite castles at Old Sarum, there is little trace of the vindictive, wronged husband. In her attendance at celebrations where their sons were present, there seems little fear on Henry’s part that she might try again to incite an uprising.

The moments that are perhaps most telling are those of grief. Henry allows Eleanor to travel to Normandy to visit the grave of their son Henry the Young King. When their third son Geoffrey also dies, Henry seems to want to spend time with Eleanor. As he is forced to reconstruct the shattered settlement of his domains, it is to her that he turns for help. Perhaps time and sorrow softened any sense of betrayal, but perhaps there had never been one. It was part of the show of power, and Eleanor played her role perfectly. She was able to retire comfortably as Queen of England, with Aquitaine in the capable hands of Richard, and in doing so, take the sting out of the conflict between her husband and their sons. If that was the case, it was a poor return for her efforts when their sons continued to betray their father, even to his death in 1189.

After that, Eleanor goes on to live what, for anyone else, might constitute the third glitteringly impressive medieval life she was gifted. As the mother to Richard the Lionheart, she helped him sure up his succession, find him a wife, manage his lands while he was on campaign, and spring into action at the age of 68 to raise and personally deliver his ransom when he was taken prisoner on the way home from the Holy Land. When Richard died without an heir, it was Eleanor who was the pivotal figure in securing John’s succession. She preferred him to her grandson Arthur, Duke of Brittany because the latter had been raised under French wings, out of her control. It was, at 75, perhaps her first real mistake.

When Eleanor died in 1204 at the age of 80, she elected to be buried where she had spent her final years, at Fontevraud Abbey. She had her tomb placed beside that she had commissioned for her husband, Henry, suggesting again a fondness that undermines the view of their relationship as fractious and difficult. Henry lies still, his eyes closed, holding his regalia, as he probably never was in life. Eleanor has her eyes open, watchful still. A book rests on her chest, though in typically enigmatic style, we are left to guess what she may be reading. If she is reading at all, and not still observing and listening. Their second son, Richard, lies at their feet, another restless Plantagenet brought to stillness by the greatest leveller of them all.

Henry and Eleanor were an extraordinary couple, who lived extraordinary lives – in Eleanor’s case about three of them. I hope I have done them justice in my biography and tried to view them more as people than political caricatures. There is, I think, so much more to their story than we usually allow.

Matt Lewis is an author and historian of the middle ages. His main focus is the Wars of the Roses and Richard III, but he has also written on The Anarchy, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Henry III. A book on rebellions in the medieval era is due soon, and Matt’s current project is a biography of Warwick the Kingmaker, in a return the fifteenth century.

Website: Matt Lewis – Home (mattlewisauthor.com)
Blog: Matt’s History Blog – Hopefully interesting snippets and thoughts (wordpress.com)
Twitter: @MattLewisAuthor

Purchase Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Founding of an Empire at bookshop.org or bookdepository.com.