Oooh this is the type of question I just love. It brings forward all my love of history and the amazing figures that have populated it. For me, the list of people I would want to meet is endless from the obvious Elizabeth I to the probably less obvious people such as Stalin. For today, though, I am going to go with the magnificent Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was born around 1124 in Bordeaux, France, to the Duke of Aquitaine, William X. She was the eldest child and the reason there is no certainty around the date of her birth is because she was a woman. In much of history, even high-born women were seen as relatively inconsequential other than as bargaining chips for advantageous marriages, so marking their birth formally was not a priority. It would have been different had she been the first born son.
Despite that fact, Eleanor became one of the most powerful people in Western Europe of her time. A woman, one of the most powerful people. That fact alone makes her utterly amazing in my books. But what also makes her wonderful to me is that she owned that power, wore it with seeming ease. In 1137, at the age of around 13, she was married to King Louis VII of France. The same year in which she inherited the duchy of Aquitaine, in the south-west of France, one of the largest and most powerful vassal states in France at the time. The French king ruled over the relatively small Ille de France in the north-west of today’s geography of the country. It was obviously a strategic marriage made in a year when both their fathers died. When Louis assumed the French throne in 1137, he did so as the co-ruler of Aquitaine also.
Eleanor bore Louis two daughters – an unsatisfactory outcome for a king – and accompanied him on the Second Crusade. After 15 years of marriage, it was annulled on the grounds of the closeness of their familial relationship (they were fourth cousins), but the reality was it had been decided that at 26 years of age, she was too old to have the son the king and his court wanted. Around about the same time, Henry Plantagenet Duke of Normandy, arrived in the French court to pay homage to Louis. It is said that something transpired between Henry and Eleanor, who was 11 years Henry’s senior. Certainly, Eleanor did not dispute the annulment and while she had to relinquish her daughters, they remained legitimate and her lands were restored to her control. Whatever happened between them, Eleanor and Henry were married in 1152 and she became Queen of England in 1154.
From a woman unable to provide her first husband with a son, Eleanor managed to provide Henry with five sons in total, only one of which outlived her. She also provided him with three daughters who were used to cement dynastic alliances to support Henry’s on/off disputes with Louis VII over Eleanor’s lands. I imagine their marriage to be incredibly tumultuous with the coming together of two very formidable personalities. A struggle, I would imagine, of who would be alpha in their relationship. Though Henry, as a man, held the power in the eyes of their society I think Eleanor was more than a match for him and did not make life easy for him. He imprisoned her, effectively, for the last years of his life and did not allow her to have contact with her sons for fear that she was encouraging their uprisings against him.
Ultimately, she outlived him, and three of her four sons including her favourite, Richard, who would become Richard the Lionheart. Only her son King John, outlived her though he managed to lose most of her and his father’s French lands during his reign earning him the nickname of John Lackland.
In all of the tumult of her life, full as it was of political machinations and conflict, there is very little written about Eleanor herself. Many rumours and outright lies have spread about her as a result, usually very scurrilous. It is clear that a woman with power was a real threat to the men who chronicled history in those times. There are entire years in the annals that do not mention Eleanor at all. And yet she remains a key figure in English history, and possibly French also. She was a woman living in a time where female power just wasn’t tolerated (Henry II’s mother and all she endured is proof of that), and yet she wore her power I feel with an ease and assurance that was threatening to her husbands as much as to the chroniclers.
She wasn’t the most popular woman at court in both her marriages. Dominant women rarely are. People find them threatening, unsettling. Eleanor was a woman of the High Middle Ages who didn’t back down. She didn’t meekly suppress who she truly was to acquiesce to the expectations of the time. This isn’t me creating a feminist icon out of her, this is what little there is tells us. She refused Henry II’s requests for annulment – and won. She didn’t capitulate when he put her under house arrest. She stood tall and firm against him, and he did what he did because he was so threatened by her.
Why would I like to meet her? Because I would love to hear her story in her words. I would love to know her views on what happened. What made her stand so strong? What made her agree to the annulment of her marriage to Louis but refuse it to Henry? And I would just love to know what she was really like. Because there is so little written about her, I would love to know how she views that. What she thinks about being so relevant in an era that tried to make her irrelevant.
Ever since I first knew of her, I have wanted to know her. I’ve probably romanticised her life a lot, I do like to think that she and Henry enjoyed a passion and chemistry that couldn’t be denied, even when he was treating her so poorly. Maybe that didn’t exist at all, though she certainly ended up pregnant every time they were together in their early marriage! I have always felt so drawn to her, which is also a significant reason why I would love to meet Eleanor of Aquitaine.
I am an unashamed feminist, and Eleanor of Aquitaine has always been iconic to me partly for that reason.
She is the figure from history that stands out to me right now as someone I would love to meet. Because I think she is simply fabulous.
Louisa Simpson 