Eleanor of Aquitaine

• 1. Introduction

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  Eleanor of Aquitaine married two kings and bore two more. She was duchess of Aquitaine for decades, and she ruled that land jointly with her husbands and with two of her sons, Richard I and John of England. Even so, nobody wrote her life while she lived. There are no contemporary biographies, and modern ones are built from scattered annals and chronicles.

  In French court records she is barely mentioned, and she appears to have been actively erased from memory. Yet she was one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages. How does a woman of that rank leave so thin a trace? And who filled the silence she left behind, and with what stories?

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• 2. The Silent Archive

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  Roger of Howden, Walter Map, Ralph de Diceto, Gerald of Wales and Ralph Niger are the main secular voices from England and Wales. They did not all treat her alike. Niger aimed most of his criticism at her second husband, Henry II, rather than at her. Map and Gerald, by contrast, wrote largely satirical attacks.

  Gervase of Canterbury, Ralph of Coggeshall, Richard of Devizes, William of Newburgh and Ranulf Higden wrote as churchmen. Their views were mostly shaped by revulsion at the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Richard of Devizes did admire the perseverance she showed in supporting her son Richard. Still, every one of these writers distrusted women who held power, and they hinted at darker faults.

  Those hints eventually hardened into what scholars call the Black Legend. In the twentieth century, Amy Kelly and Marion Meade swung the other way and painted a feminist heroine. That picture is known as the Golden Myth. Régine Pernoud gave French literature a similar treatment. More recent scholarship has tried to correct both portraits.

  Where reliable accounts run out, legend fills the gap. One line sums up the problem: "rarely in the course of historical endeavor has so much been written, over so many centuries, about one woman of whom we know so little". Even the year she was born is still argued over.

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• 3. Heiress of Aquitaine

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  A document from July 1129 holds the earliest certain mention of Eleanor. Her birth was once placed in 1122, but 1124 is now generally accepted. The best evidence is a late 13th-century family genealogy that lists her as 13 years old when her father died in the spring of 1137. Some chronicles instead mention an oath of fidelity from the lords of Aquitaine on her fourteenth birthday in 1136. Because of this doubt, her age at death is given as either 80 or 82.

  Tradition places her birth at the castle of Belin, near Bordeaux, during a visit by her parents. Other writers suggest Poitiers, Ombrière Palace in Bordeaux, or Nieul-sur-l'Autise. She was baptised Aliénor, from the Latin alia Ænor, meaning the other Aénor, after her mother. The name became Eleanor in English, and its spelling never settled in her lifetime.

  Duke William X of Aquitaine and Aénor de Châtellerault had three children, and Eleanor was the eldest. Her mother was the daughter of Dangereuse de l'Isle Bouchard, who was also the longtime mistress of William X's father, Duke William IX. Dangereuse and William IX arranged the marriage of their children to each other. Eleanor's younger siblings were Aélith and Aigret. In 1130 both her brother Aigret and her mother died, which made Eleanor heir presumptive to her father's domains.

  Bertran de Born, a troubadour, gives the only contemporary word on her schooling. He says she read the poetry of her native tongue. The language of Bordeaux and Poitiers was Poitevin, a northern French dialect, but at the ducal court she soon met Occitan, the southern language of poets and courtiers.

  Her father's ancestors had been dukes of Aquitaine since the 10th century. In the twelfth century their duchy was among the wealthiest and most powerful vassal states in France. The French kings, meanwhile, ruled only a small area around the Île-de-France. The rulers of the surrounding duchies and counties gave the crown little more than nominal loyalty.

  In 1137 William X left Poitiers for Bordeaux and took his daughters with him. He lodged them at l'Ombrière Castle in the care of his loyal vassal Geoffrey of Louroux, the local archbishop. Then he set out for the Shrine of Saint James of Compostela with other pilgrims. He died on Good Friday, the 9th of April, and Eleanor, aged 13, became duchess of Aquitaine.

  An unmarried heiress could be kidnapped to seize her title and lands, and William knew it. As he lay dying, he named King Louis VI of France as her guardian. He asked the king to protect Eleanor and her lands and to find her a suitable husband. Until a husband appeared, the king held legal rights over her territory. William also insisted that his companions keep his death secret until Louis was told. They were to hurry back across the Pyrenees to Archbishop Geoffrey, then on to Paris.

  Louis VI was in poor health, and he saw a chance to fulfil an old ambition of enlarging his realm. His son Louis had once been meant for the monastery. The boy became heir after his older brother Philip died in 1131, thrown from a horse. The king sent young Louis to Bordeaux at once, with some 500 knights, Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, and Bishop Geoffrey II of Chartres. Counts Theobald II of Champagne and Raoul I of Vermandois rode along too, and both would soon be tangled in a war that began over Eleanor's own sister.

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• 4. Queen of France

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  On the 25th of July 1137, Archbishop Geoffrey of Bordeaux presided over Eleanor's wedding to Louis in the Cathedral of Saint-André. Right afterward the couple were enthroned as duke and duchess of Aquitaine. It was agreed that the duchy would stay separate from France until Eleanor's eldest son became both king of France and duke of Aquitaine. Her wedding present to Louis was a rock crystal vase.

  The couple reached Poitiers on the 1st of August and spent a week in festivities. On the 8th they were invested as count and countess of Poitou. On the road to Paris, a messenger brought news that Louis VI had died. His son and Eleanor were now king and queen of France. She was crowned at Bourges on Christmas Day 1137.

  Abbot Suger and Louis's mother, Adelaide of Maurienne, did not warm to Eleanor. Adelaide left court soon afterward and remarried. Some courtiers recalled Constance of Arles, third wife of Robert II of France and an ancestor of both Louis and Eleanor, who had a reputation for indiscreet dress and speech. Church elders, above all Bernard of Clairvaux and Suger, repeatedly called Eleanor's conduct indecorous. The austere Cité Palace in Paris was altered for her sake, and her sister Aélith joined her there under the name Petronilla.

  Toulouse reached Eleanor through her grandmother Philippa, the only child of Count William IV. After his death in 1093, Philippa's uncle Raymond IV claimed the title, and the quarrel between the two lines lasted nearly thirty years. Louis marched on the city and reached its walls on the 21st of June 1141. He laid siege but could not take it, and he withdrew after accepting homage from Count Alfonso. Eleanor kept pressing the claim, with further expeditions in 1159 and throughout her life.

  In 1140 Louis clashed with Pope Innocent II over the bishopric of Poitiers. A new bishop, Grimoald, had been elected and consecrated without the king's consent, and Louis tried to keep him out of the city. The dispute ended only because Grimoald died. A worse quarrel followed in 1141 over the archbishopric of Bourges. Louis backed his chancellor, Cadurc, and vetoed Pierre de la Chatre, a monk whom the canons elected and Innocent consecrated in Rome. Louis bolted the gates of Bourges against him.

  The pope may have suspected Eleanor's influence, since her father had once tried to replace Innocent's supporters in Poitou. Even so, he called Louis only "a foolish schoolboy". Louis swore on relics that Pierre would never enter Bourges while he lived, and an interdict fell on the royal household and lands. Theobald of Champagne gave Pierre refuge, which angered the king further.

  Raoul I of Vermandois had married Theobald's sister, also named Eleanor, in 1125. Then he began a liaison with Petronilla, the queen's sister. Louis found three bishops willing to declare Raoul's marriage invalid on grounds of consanguinity, and in 1142 he officiated at the wedding of Raoul and Petronilla. Theobald and Bernard of Clairvaux protested to the pope. A council voided both the annulment and the new marriage, excommunicated one bishop and suspended the other two. When Raoul refused to return to his first wife, he and Petronilla were excommunicated as well.

  Eleanor's assumed part in these affairs produced the first hint of her Black Legend. Women, even queens, were not supposed to meddle in such matters, so people whispered that she served darker powers. Rumours linked her to mythical figures such as Melusine. A salacious tale then claimed she was having an affair with Count Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou.

  Louis rejected the papal legate's ruling and invaded Champagne, in a war that lasted from 1142 to 1144. In 1143 he took personal charge of the siege of Vitry. More than a thousand people sheltered in the town's cathedral, and it caught fire, burning alive everyone inside. Horrified, Louis returned to Paris to seek peace. Innocent II died in September 1143, and his successor, Celestine II, lifted the interdiction at Bernard's suggestion.

  Suger hosted a meeting at his newly built church at Saint-Denis on the 22nd of April 1144. There Bernard persuaded Eleanor that her efforts for her sister were hopeless, and peace returned. The couple stayed excommunicated until 1148, when Raoul's first marriage was invalidated again and his second was validated. Bernard also raised Eleanor's apparent infertility, which included one miscarriage in 1138, and hinted she might be rewarded for her concessions with a child. On the 11th of June 1144, Louis donated her crystal vase to Saint-Denis at the church's dedication. In April 1145, Eleanor gave birth to a daughter, Marie.

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• 5. Crusade to Antioch

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  On the 24th of December 1144, Zengi and the Seljuk Turks captured Edessa, capital of one of the four crusader states in the Holy Land. That left the neighbouring Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem exposed. Antioch was the most vulnerable, and its prince was Raymond of Poitiers, Eleanor's uncle. Pope Eugene III issued a bull asking Louis and all faithful French Christians to mount a rescue. Louis and Eleanor were at Bourges when it arrived, and on Christmas Day he promised to lead a crusade.

  Few French nobles shared his enthusiasm, so he put off further action until Easter 1146. The final planning took place at Saint-Denis that Easter, with Pope Eugene present. Louis handed the administration of his kingdom to Eugene, who named Abbot Suger and Raoul of Vermandois as co-regents. Eleanor took the cross during a sermon by Bernard, which meant leaving her baby daughter behind. She recruited women of the Aquitainian nobility and about 300 other women who volunteered.

  Louis had reasons to bring her. As regent for an absent king, Eleanor might have made trouble for Suger, and Louis needed the backing of the Aquitainian nobility. The campaign was also meant to aid her uncle. Clerics objected to women on crusade, though William of Newburgh wrote well after the event and may have been coloured by hindsight. Her detractors seized the chance to build her legend, claiming she and her ladies rode out as Amazonian warriors.

  On the 11th of June 1147, between 25,000 and 50,000 crusaders and pilgrims gathered at Saint-Denis and began to march. They went to Metz, crossed the Rhine at Worms, and pressed on to Regensburg and the Danube. Envoys of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Komnenos met them there. They followed the river through Hungary, reached the Eastern Empire by mid-August, and arrived at Constantinople on the 4th of October 1147. Louis and Eleanor stayed in the Philopation palace, just outside the city walls.

  The French crossed into Asia on the 15th of October and made Nicaea their first stop. Along the way they learned that the Germans had been badly beaten by the Turks at Dorylaeum. The French and the German remnants kept to the safer coastal road and reached Ephesus on the 20th of December. In January 1148 Louis chose to cut inland toward Laodicea in Phrygia, hoping to reach Antalya and Antioch faster. They arrived at Laodicea on the 6th of January and then climbed into the mountains.

  On the day they crossed Mount Cadmus, Louis took charge of the rear, where the unarmed pilgrims and the baggage trains travelled. Geoffrey de Rancon, an Aquitainian, led the vanguard and was told to camp on the plateau. Instead he went on through the pass with Louis's uncle, Amadeus III of Savoy. The main column, cut off from both ends, was ambushed by Turkish forces. Louis barely escaped.

  William of Tyre, writing decades later, blamed the size of the baggage train, much of it reputedly Eleanor's, and the presence of non-combatants. Official blame fell on Rancon. Because he was Eleanor's vassal, many believed she was behind his decision, and her reputation in Christendom suffered. She was also blamed because her Aquitainian soldiers had marched at the front and missed the fighting.

  The survivors reached Antalya on the 20th of January. Ships were scarce and expensive. The royal party sailed with a small following and reached Antioch on the 19th of March, well behind schedule. Those left behind struggled on, and only about half completed the journey.

  Raymond wanted to attack Aleppo and win back Edessa, but Louis insisted on Jerusalem, in part for a personal pilgrimage. Eleanor sided with her uncle, which set her against her husband. On the 28th of March the French, now only a tenth of their original strength, left Antioch abruptly despite her protests. John of Salisbury says it was Eleanor who raised the question of consanguinity again.

  The crusaders entered Jerusalem in May by the Jaffa Gate, where Queen Melisende and King Baldwin III greeted them. A conference at Acre on the 24th of June led to the siege of Damascus, which began on the 24th of July. After only four days the crusaders withdrew, and the crusade was effectively over. Chroniclers such as John of Salisbury and William of Tyre hinted at an adulterous and incestuous affair between Eleanor and Raymond. Contemporary accounts suggest the real stain on her character, in their eyes, was her attention to politics.

  Louis and Eleanor sailed from Acre in separate ships on the 3rd of April 1149. Hostile warships and storms scattered them, and Eleanor's vessel was driven as far south as the Barbary Coast. For a while no one knew where either was. Louis landed in Calabria on the 29th of July. Eleanor had reached Palermo in Sicily, where agents of King Roger II sheltered her. She learned there that her uncle Raymond had been beheaded by Nureddin's forces at the Battle of Inab on the 29th of June.

  The couple headed toward Rome and stopped at the Abbey of Monte Cassino on the 4th of October, after Eleanor fell ill. Pope Eugene hosted them at Tusculum from the 9th of October. Suger had told him that the couple were no longer sleeping together. Eugene refused an annulment, declared the marriage legitimate under canon law, and urged reconciliation. They reached Paris around the 11th of November 1149, after two and a half years away.

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• 6. A Marriage Undone

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  In the summer of 1150, Eleanor gave birth to a second daughter, Alix. She was twenty-six and had been married for thirteen years. No Capetian line had ever lacked a male heir for so long, and the absence was read as an omen. Suger had been the marriage's strongest advocate, and he died on the 13th of January 1151. Bernard of Clairvaux, who objected to the marriage on grounds of consanguinity, now had more sway, and a number of nobles urged the king to dissolve it.

  Later in 1151, Count Henry of Anjou came to Paris to pay homage to Louis as the new duke of Normandy. Gerald of Wales, William of Newburgh and Walter Map later implied that his visit helped end Eleanor's marriage. By then her reputation was badly damaged, and her influence at court was fading. Separating Aquitainian and Capetian lands and rights would need careful work. In the autumn the couple toured the duchy, and much of the French presence, such as garrisons, was replaced with Eleanor's people.

  On the 11th of March 1152, Hugues de Toucy, archbishop of Sens, opened a synod at the royal castle of Beaugency, on the Loire near Orléans. Both spouses attended. Samson, archbishop of Reims, spoke for Eleanor, and she did not contest the action. On the 21st of March, four archbishops granted the annulment with Pope Eugene's approval. The ground was kinship within the fourth degree. Eleanor was Louis's third cousin once removed, and both descended from Robert II of France and Constance of Arles.

  Their two daughters were declared legitimate, and custody went to Louis, as custom and law required. Louis promised Archbishop Samson that Eleanor's lands would be returned. Eleanor herself gave the reason as "for reasons of kinship with my Lord, Louis". The stories of a distraught, discarded wife have no evidence behind them.

  An unmarried heiress was an easy target for abduction, a practice even her own family had used. On the night of the 21st of March, Count Theobald V of Blois tried to seize her as she passed through Blois. She escaped by boat down the Loire to Tours. Geoffrey of Anjou lay in wait at Port-de-Piles, but she was warned at Tours, changed her route, and reached Poitiers by boat. Theobald later married her daughter Alix, and his brother Count Henry I of Champagne married Alix's older sister, Marie.

  Just before Easter, Eleanor sent envoys to Geoffrey's older brother, Duke Henry of Normandy, asking him to come at once and marry her. Many writers think this fulfilled an arrangement made during his visit to Paris. The message found Henry at Lisieux on the 6th of April. He arrived in Poitiers in mid-May, and on the 18th of May 1152, Whit Sunday, they married in a quiet private ceremony at Poitiers Cathedral. The wedding was described as lacking the pomp that suited their rank, and they kept it secret because Louis would have tried to stop it.

  Eleanor was even more closely related to Henry than she had been to Louis, since they were cousins to the third degree. Louis was furious. He also refused to give up the title of duke of Aquitaine, because Eleanor might still bear a son and disinherit his daughters. His invasion of Normandy opened an Angevin-Capetian conflict that would last more than fifty years. Henry repelled the invasion within six weeks and signed a truce. Meanwhile Eleanor struck new seals as duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitou, adding the titles duchess of the Normans and countess of the Angevins. To mark the marriage, the couple installed a stained glass window in Poitiers Cathedral that shows them kneeling as donors.

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• 7. Angevin Queen

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  In January 1153, Henry sailed to England to challenge his cousin Stephen of Blois, who held the throne. The Treaty of Winchester in November 1153 made Henry Stephen's heir. Eleanor stayed behind with Henry's mother, Matilda, and his youngest brother, William, and their first child, also named William, was born on the 17th of August 1153. King Stephen died on the 25th of October 1154. Henry and Eleanor crossed from Barfleur and landed near Southampton on the 8th of December.

  On the 19th of December 1154, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury crowned Henry II at Westminster Abbey, with Eleanor beside him. Whether she was crowned or anointed too is unclear, since she had been crowned queen of France in 1137. The ceremony began the House of Plantagenet, which ruled England until the end of the fifteenth century.

  Henry gave Eleanor generous dowerlands and regular payments of money. These made her one of the richest people in the kingdom, and she was called "riche dame de riche rei". She signed her charters Alienor Dei Gracia Regine Anglorum. She never learned English. Chroniclers rarely mentioned her except to note when she was with the king, so biographers have rebuilt her life from itineraries and surviving official documents.

  Henry's lands ran from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, and he was absent from England far more than any earlier king. During many of those absences, Eleanor acted as regent or co-regent with the justiciar. She also travelled widely through her domains, alone or with her children. Claims that she was a major patron of the arts look greatly exaggerated. Still, writers dedicated works to her, among them Robert Wace's Roman de Brut, written around 1155, and William of Blois. Marie de France and the author of Roman de Thebes are thought to have drawn inspiration from her. Some speculative legends even link her to Guinevere.

  Her children arrived while Henry was often elsewhere. Henry was born on the 28th of February 1155 during the king's absence. Prince William died in the spring of 1156 and was buried at Reading Abbey beside his great-grandfather Henry I. Matilda was born that June, and Richard was born at Beaumont Palace on the 8th of September 1157. Geoffrey followed on the 23rd of September 1158. Eleanor, Joanna and finally John, born on Christmas Eve 1166, completed the family of five sons and three daughters.

  Henry hoped to win the French throne through marriage. Louis VII now had a daughter, Marguerite, but no son, so Henry II planned to marry young Henry to her. He obtained a special dispensation, and the children were wed on the 2nd of November 1160, without Louis knowing. In 1168 Eleanor brought eleven-year-old Matilda to the continent for her marriage to the much older Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony. The wedding took place on the 1st of February 1168.

  Long separations bred rumours about Henry. The most notorious concerned Rosamund Clifford, whose affair was known by late 1166 and acknowledged by 1174. Henry fathered illegitimate children throughout the marriage. Eleanor seems to have taken an ambivalent view. She raised Geoffrey of York, an acknowledged illegitimate son of Henry, at Westminster. In 1165, meanwhile, Louis's wife Adela bore a son, Philip Augustus, which ended Henry's hopes of the French crown through marriage.

  The feud between Henry II and Thomas Becket began in 1163. Becket had been Henry's friend and chancellor before becoming archbishop of Canterbury. Eleanor's role has been guessed at, but very little evidence exists. During Becket's exile in France from 1164, he sought her help without success. What evidence there is suggests she urged a reconciliation.

  In December 1167, Eleanor gathered her movable possessions in England and shipped them to Argentan. After Christmas there, she left for Poitiers. Henry went with her and attacked a castle of the rebellious Lusignan family. He then left, naming Patrick, Earl of Salisbury, as her protective custodian. Patrick was killed in a skirmish with the Lusignans, and Eleanor ransomed his captured nephew, the young William Marshal. She was left in control of her lands and would stay there until 1173. She restored order in a restless duchy and dropped "the king's" from the form of address in her letters, writing simply "to her faithful followers".

  The years in Poitiers between 1168 and 1173 have been called her most influential period, yet very little is known about them. A late 12th-century treatise by Andreas Capellanus, the Tractatus de amore et de amoris remedio, later known as The Art of Courtly Love, describes a Court of Love. In it Eleanor, her daughter Marie, Ermengarde of Narbonne, Isabelle of Vermandois and other ladies judge the quarrels of lovers. Capellanus records some twenty-one cases. The most famous asks whether true love can exist in marriage, and the ladies rule that it hardly could.

  The treatise is largely satirical, and it appeared long after her time in Poitiers. There is no evidence for any of its claims, although popular biographies still treat it as a kind of parlor game. The phrase "courtly love" did not appear until the late nineteenth century. The ideas behind fin'amor had begun in the south in the early twelfth century, before Eleanor's Poitiers years. Troubadours such as Bernart de Ventadorn and Arnaut Guilhem de Marsan did attend her court, as they did other Occitan courts. The rest is conjecture, and it forms a central strand of the Golden Myth.

  At Montmirail in Maine on the 6th of January 1169, Henry II met Louis VII and divided his domains among his sons. He also betrothed Richard to Louis's daughter Alys. On the 14th of June 1170, despite opposition from the Church, he had his heir crowned, and the prince became known as Henry the Young King. The sons were eager to rule now rather than wait. In November 1172, Louis invited his daughter Marguerite and her husband, Young Henry, to Paris, where he encouraged the young man's ambitions.

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• 8. Prisoner and Regent

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  From the 21st to the 28th of February 1173, Henry and Eleanor were together at Montferrat for the betrothal of Prince John to Alice of Maurienne, who died soon afterward. Open conflict between the two Henrys over the delegation of powers marred the occasion. On the 5th of March, at Chinon, Henry II woke to find that his son had escaped custody and gone to Paris. Louis VII then declared that he backed the son as the new reigning monarch. The Revolt of 1173-1174 had begun.

  Later chroniclers laid much of the blame on Eleanor, though they carefully added "so it was said". William of Newburgh claims Young Henry went secretly into Aquitaine, where Richard and Geoffrey were living with their mother, and incited them with her connivance. Roger of Howden says Eleanor herself sent the younger sons to France to join their older brother against their father. Other evidence points at Louis VII, Young Henry's father-in-law. In April Eleanor set out for Paris to join her sons, but she was seized on the road to Chartres and brought to Henry II at Rouen.

  The king did not announce the arrest, and for the next year her whereabouts were unknown. Of Henry's sons, only seven-year-old John stayed with him. On either the 7th or the 8th of July 1174, Henry sailed from Barfleur to Southampton with Eleanor, John, Joanna and other ladies. From there Eleanor was taken to an unknown place of confinement.

  Henry II won the war and made some concessions to his sons at the Treaty of Montlouis on the 30th of September 1174. Eleanor stayed confined to varying degrees for the rest of his life. Pipe rolls mention Ludgershall Castle in Wiltshire, a place in Buckinghamshire, and houses in Berkshire and Nottinghamshire. According to Gerald of Wales, Henry considered annulling the marriage in 1175 on grounds of consanguinity and met Cardinal Pietro Pierleoni at Winchester on the 1st of November. The cardinal talked him out of it.

  In early 1176 Henry tried again, persuading Eleanor to become a nun at Fontevrault. She asked the archbishop of Rouen to intervene, and he backed her refusal. Henry again sought papal approval and was denied. She was not strictly a prisoner but lived under a form of house arrest, stripped of her revenues. She gained more freedom from 1177, and still more after 1184. Henry kept using their children to build alliances. Joanna was sent to Sicily to marry William II in February 1177, and Princess Eleanor married King Alfonso VIII of Castile at Burgos that September.

  Eleanor grew distant from her sons, since Henry could not risk her plotting with them. Richard, her heir in Aquitaine, had always been her favourite. Rosamund Clifford died in 1176 or 1177 at Godstow, Oxfordshire, and Henry built a tomb for her at the abbey. Myths later claimed Eleanor had a hand in the death. They grew more elaborate over the centuries, were long accepted as fact, and fed the Black Legend, with virtually no contemporary evidence. Some chroniclers also say Henry began an affair with the sixteen-year-old Alys of France, who was betrothed to Richard.

  Louis VII died in 1180 and his son Philip II succeeded him, even more determined to take back the French lands. On the 11th of June 1183, Eleanor's son Henry died of dysentery at Martel, aged twenty-eight. His dying wishes included a plea that his mother be freed. Thomas Agnellus, archdeacon of Wells, carried the news to her at Sarum, and she told him she had foreseen it in a dream. In 1193 she told Pope Celestine III how much her memories of that son tortured her.

  His death made Richard the heir. It also set Henry II against Philip II over lands that Philip claimed for Marguerite, Philip's half-sister and Young Henry's widow. Henry argued that those lands had once been Eleanor's and would revert to her. So he summoned her to Normandy in late summer 1183, and her restrictions began to ease. Roger of Howden says the king ordered her freed to tour her dowerlands, and her income improved. Eleanor returned to England in early 1184, where her daughter Matilda and son-in-law Henry, now in exile, stayed with her at Winchester and Berkhamsted.

  Even so, her freedom stayed narrow. In Aquitainian business she stated that her acts were made "with the assent and at the will of her lord Henry, King of England, and of Richard, Geoffrey and John, her sons". Geoffrey died in Paris on the 18th or the 19th of August 1186. After that, Richard and John fought their father over the inheritance, and Richard made another attempt to add Toulouse to Aquitaine. Richard and Philip combined their forces against the ailing Henry, and John eventually joined them. Henry II died at Chinon on the 6th of July 1189, aged fifty-six.

  Richard's first act as king was to send William Marshal to England with orders to free the sixty-five-year-old Eleanor. Her custodians had already released her. She took up the regency Richard gave her, rode to Westminster and received oaths of loyalty from lords and prelates on his behalf. She now signed herself "Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England" and reversed many of Henry II's acts. Richard landed at Portsmouth on the 13th of August 1189 and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the 3rd of September, with Eleanor and John present. John had married his cousin Isabella on the 29th of August.

  Richard left for the Third Crusade on the 12th of December 1189, naming Hugh de Puiset and William de Longchamp as justiciars. Eleanor held no formal post, yet they deferred to her authority. She acted as regent during Richard's long absences from England and France. When Richard died in 1199, she campaigned successfully for his younger brother John to succeed him. Turmoil between the French and English kings went on, and the lands she and Henry II had once ruled were lost one after another. Eleanor died in 1204 and was buried at Fontevraud Abbey in France, the abbey where Henry had once tried to make her a nun.

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