Power of a Woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine

'Never fear mighty men': Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Robert Fripp, author of Power of a Woman

"Never fear mighty men, child. They are dumb beasts. It's accidents make history."

So saying, Eleanor of Aquitaine tells her young secretary in Power of a Woman that the path of her eighty-two years was studded with accidents, some of which insured that, in 1137, the young duchess of Aquitaine entered Paris as the fifteen year old queen of France.

Over the next sixty-five years, Eleanor (first, as the queen of France, then England) honed her diplomatic skills, building and reinforcing alliances; advocating a pragmatic, rather than a Church-dominated, approach to statecraft; and promoting the standing and interests of women.

The defining accident of Eleanor's life was to be born female in a century when society and the all-powerful Church preferred women to be seen but not heard, and to be mild, not militant. Eleanor comments, in Power of a Woman, "It is only since I was a girl that statues of the Blessed Mary have been carved with their eyes cast down. Why shouldn't a woman hold her head erect?" She knew the answer: the Church needed men for Crusade. Husbands (literally, men bound to house and land) would not abandon their families, farms and crops if their wives talked bluntly to them. Feminine meekness served the cause of power in general, and Crusade in particular.

Power of a Woman finds Eleanor dictating her book in her eighty-first year. Author Robert Fripp lets us eavesdrop as she recalls her growing maturity: as a teenaged queen provoking a foolish war in Champagne that drew the wrath of the Church; as the wife and advisor to two kings; as a witness to diplomatic and military folly in high places; as an isolated voice arguing for a sound military policy during the Second Crusade; as Regent of England, helping to frame social and administrative policy; as a consort perfecting her statecraft, notably during the Thomas Becket affair; as a woman ruling Aquitaine and Poitou in her own right while promoting the standing of women; once more as the hard-pressed Regent of England; and, to the end of her life, as a broker of strategic marriages ? alliances.

As we read, we find Eleanor's strength of character evolving in parallel. She becomes a mistress of public relations, negotiation, bare-knuckle diplomacy, forceful administration, tax collection and, always, she is the consummate alliance-broker.

In 1152, Eleanor finally won a long-sought annulment of her marriage to Louis VII and, within weeks, married Henry of Anjou, the future king of England. Winning the English throne brought Henry and Eleanor an empire that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. Their alliance (still the French word for a wedding-ring) forged the largest political entity in western Europe since the reign of Charlemagne.

Their Angevin Empire included peoples holding scores of feudal allegiances and speaking many languages. This required that Eleanor's love of the arts take on another role, disseminating propaganda. Perhaps she first heard tales of King Arthur from Welsh bards in London, or perhaps she recalled them from childhood in her father's court. As the empress of a polyglot empire, Eleanor promoted old legends and new, explaining, in Power of a Woman: "The Arthurian tales describe a golden age in which diverse peoples live at peace with each other, inspired by a single ruler. We had urgently to show a similar benefit." As Henry and Eleanor came to represent Arthur and Guinevere, their hold on England became secure.

In 1167, after thirty years divided between two male-dominated courts revolving around very different husbands, Eleanor abandoned Henry and returned to rule Poitou and Aquitaine in her own right, administering her provinces and her Court of Ladies from Poitiers.

Historians debate the roles of Eleanor's Court of Ladies and her Code of Poitiers, but it is clear that she strove to reverse Church-mandated "meekness" and restore the feminine birthright she had known in her youth, where women were "persons equal to men, not in might, but in nature, in virtue, in soul." Eleanor's Code set guidelines by which affairs of the heart and the household might be judged and settled, by women. "Through those five years of blessed peace we built an ethos which raised women in the real world as the popes raise Mary in the Church? The feminine nature we sought to seat as our judge is not unlike that which the Church promotes for the Blessed Virgin." In effect, Eleanor tried to create a Magna Carta for noblewomen half a century before the English barons imposed that charter of Alpha-male rights on her son, King John. It may be no coincidence that, while Eleanor and her courtiers were evolving a female-centered social code, her estranged husband, Henry II, was writing his Clarendon Code of English laws across the Channel, and introducing male juries.

Thirty-seven years as the consort of kings and a duchess in her own right taught Eleanor the crafts of diplomacy. However, she failed to discipline herself at the worst possible time by unleashing her pent-up anger against her husband, Henry. The degree to which Eleanor encouraged her sons to rebel against their father is not clear: "I raised my boys to be men who esteemed their own rights, not to disesteem their father's," she says, disingenuously, in Power of a Woman. "If it chanced that I spoke harshly of Henry in their hearing, my tongue cut no deeper than the lash his public whoring earned him."

There was blame enough to go around, but Henry never doubted who was pulling the strings of his mutinous sons. In 1174 he ransacked Eleanor's court and sent her to exile in England until his death commuted her sentence fifteen years later. Not that they lost touch: Eleanor was central to the endless family feuds. In James Goldman's film The Lion in Winter, Katharine Hepburn won the Oscar but, never forget, Eleanor of Aquitaine wrote the part!

Henry's death in 1189 taxed Eleanor's diplomatic skills to the limit. She raised the finances for her son Richard the Lionheart's Crusade; prevented the English barons rising in support of her younger son, John, and his ally, King Philip of France; and then, at seventy-two, she spent two years in high level diplomacy extracting three years-worth of England's annual revenue to pay for Richard's ransom. Few of Eleanor's contemporaries could have passed that test.

In her final years Eleanor came to understand that glory is fleeting, and that empires pass, including the one she had helped to build. At the start of the year 1200 she crossed the Pyrenees in mid-winter to select one of her own grand-daughters as a bride for the heir to France. If you can't beat them, marry them! she seemed to say. Eleanor, a shrewd judge of character, chose the lively, self-assured Blanca. In time, Blanca matured into Blanche of Castile, becoming an "Eleanor" in her own century, in her own right.

Tolstoy, writing about the Napoleonic wars, famously claimed that "the war was bound to happen because it was bound to happen"; that events were the inevitable outcome of prior history, and that leaders are "labels that serve to give a name to an end."

Eleanor does not bestride her era so lightly. On the negative side, she bears responsibility for the actions of her sons whose wars destroyed their father and their Angevin inheritance. On the positive side, her years of influence managed the transition from rule by sanctity (i.e. Louis VII, the abbots Bernard and Suger), to government by trained administrators and the rise of a money economy in newly wealthy towns.

If Eleanor's struggles in Power of a Woman seem far removed from the forces driving statecraft eight centuries later, bear in mind that human nature has not changed. Personal and collective ambitions, fear, greed, stakeholders' interests, narrow nationalism, religious intolerance and naiveté still play their parts ? which means that the work of peace-making and progress has much to overcome, now as then, before it can prevail.

A queen twice over, for more than fifty years, Eleanor of Aquitaine was already an icon in her time. Her name is enough in our collective memory to command her century, her time, and her place. Power of a Woman charts a great lady's course through the thorny thickets of a long, eventful life lived in a violent time and brings her safely to her end.

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Footer: *Author Robert Fripp gives Eleanor of Aquitaine her own voice in Power of a Woman. Memoirs of a turbulent life (biographical fiction, historical fiction). (eBook edition: ISBN 0-9780621-0-8. Print edition release in 2007: ISBN 0-9780621-4-0.) Robert's URL, http://RobertFripp.ca/, posts excerpts, reviews, a timeline with nearly 300 entries, and offers Power of a Woman for sale.