“Henry was eighteen when we met, and I was queen of France. He came down from the north to Paris with a mind like Aristotle’s and a form like mortal sin. We shattered the Commandments on the spot.” – The Lion in Winter

“Marguerite and Alys [are Constance of Castile’s daughters], but you shouldn’t worry your head too much over them. They both live in England at the court of King Henry: Marguerite is married to Harry the Young King, and Alys is promised to Prince Richard.” Samson grinned. “Of course, there are very naughty rumors about old Henry and our sweet Alys, but I think the randy goat just wants to keep Alys’s dowry of the Vexin from his boy. Richard’s always been his mother’s favorite.” – The Gourd and the Stars, chapter 3

When I’m not dithering about on miscellaneous matters of a literary or historical nature, I do try to use this space to give all of you extraneous information that helps put my novels into context. Last time we looked at Baldwin IV’s life and reign in a more literary perspective, but I thought this week we’d take up a more strictly historical topic that, for reasons of space and relevance, I was forced to only lay out in the broad strokes in my book, which is the somewhat complicated and interconnected relationship between France and England in the late 12th century, and how everything got that way. Like many medieval royal houses, it’s a tale of intermarriage, competing feudal loyalties, and military conquest—but it’s an especially interesting and spicy iteration of that template, so I think it’s worth laying out in greater detail.

To start with the more directly involved monarch in my novel, we have Louis VII (1120-1180), king of the French, as he would have been addressed in his own time. Louis’s path to the throne was unexpected; he was the second son of Louis VI and Adelaide of Maurienne (an heiress of the crown vassal duchy of Burgundy and foreign allied duchy of Savoy), and for most of his childhood, Louis was educated with the intent that he would become the next archbishop of Rheims, the highest ranking ecclesiastical post in France and traditionally given to a younger prince of the ruling Capet dynasty. The throne was intended for Louis’s older brother, Philip, and indeed, as was tradition in France, Philip had been crowned as co-ruler with their father in 1129 at the age of thirteen. This had strained the relationship between the recently elevated dauphin and the king, as Philip by all accounts had started to run wild and ignore his father, but there was no intention by anyone to change the succession until the boy’s bad behavior led to disaster.

In the autumn of 1131, Philip and young noblemen of his household were hunting and generally riding riot through Paris and its environs (the boundaries between the city and its surrounding countryside would remain hazy until almost the French Revolution). As they were galloping about, supposedly a black pig leapt out in front of Philip’s horse, and the young king was thrown from the saddle, creating some of the most unintentionally funny medieval manuscript illustrations of the event.

Tragically, as shown above, Philip’s injuries were so severe that he died the following day. While Louis VI possessed enough sons that this did not create a succession crisis, it did mean that Louis, who had been being raised for a pious, celibate life in the Church, was abruptly taken out of that environment and quickly crowned his father’s new co-ruler.

Louis VI had been a strong, effective ruler—one of his epithets was Le Batailleur, the Fighter—but as his other epithet, Le Gros (the Fat) attests, he had begun to put on weight and suffer from general ill health as he aged. He worried that the powerful barons of his domain that he’d spent most of his life subduing would be too much for his young son to handle if he were to die before Louis reached adulthood. This fear was compounded by the recent marriage of one of the most powerful of those barons, Geoffrey of Anjou, marrying Dowager Empress Matilda, widow of the late Holy Roman Emperor. Worse still, Matilda was the only legitimate child of the previous king of England, Henry I, and was engaged in a protracted war of succession in England with her currently-reigning cousin, Stephen. If Matilda was successful, she and Geoffrey would become queen and king of England, while still controlling major parts of France’s domain, namely, the county of Anjou and the duchy of Normandy.

With this threat in mind, Louis VI needed a queen for young Louis that would strengthen his internal position, rather than an international alliance. By a stroke of luck for the king, William of Aquitaine, lord of the enormous (and rich) southern duchy that owed a vague fealty to the French crown, died in 1137. The duke’s only legitimate heirs were his two daughters, and Louis VI was quick to snap up the eldest, the new duchess of Aquitaine, Eleanor (1124-1204), as his son’s bride. Louis (17) and Eleanor (13) were married before the year was out, and Louis VI was dead himself barely eight days later, leaving the young couple as the sole reigning monarchs of France.

By all accounts, Louis and Eleanor’s marriage was initially a happy one. Although we must always remember the biases and embroideries of contemporary sources that we discussed in the last entry, Eleanor was reported to be beautiful beyond the rote conventionalities of chroniclers, and Louis was said to be instantly smitten by his beautiful, clever wife raised in the erudite and witty Aquitaine court. But, even if they were puppy-eyed teenagers, ruling France was a serious business for both of them, and within a few years, strains began to appear in their relationship. Some of these practical—the barony resented Eleanor’s alleged control over Louis, who was said to often defer to her opinions. Additionally, if she wanted to deflect from that criticism, despite the early age at which she was married, Eleanor needed to produce at least one son in quick order to secure both hers and her husband’s position, and after nearly a decade of marriage, she only had one daughter, Marie, to show for her efforts.

But as the years passed, Eleanor supposedly began to insinuate that this failing in her duties was not her fault. As she was infamously quoted as saying, “she had thought to marry a king, only to find she had married a monk,” implying that the more reserved Louis had never entirely shook off the hold of his early monastic life. Indeed, Louis and Eleanor’s marriage would be pushed to full-blown crisis while the couple were on what would become the disastrous Second Crusade (1147-50), where Louis would suffer embarrassing military defeats while his vivacious young wife was accused of having affairs with half of medieval Palestine, including (improbably, he was eleven) Salah al-Din and (more concretely) her handsome uncle, Raymond, the prince of Antioch. The situation was so bad that no one in France could rejoice when the bedraggled royal party returned to France with a finally pregnant again Eleanor, because half of Christendom didn’t believe the baby was Louis’s.

If the baby had turned out to be a boy, Louis would have likely swallowed his pride and accepted the new dauphin without qualms. But when Eleanor gave birth to another princess, Alix, it was the last straw for her marriage. Even though it would result in the loss of direct royal control of rich Aquitaine’s revenue, Louis and his barons began looking for a way for him to put the marriage aside. Technically, divorce didn’t exist in the medieval period, but both monarchs and the Church were adept at finding loopholes for the nobility to have marriages annulled in a variety of ways. The most common was consanguinity—the parties being too closely related according church marriage guidelines—and since that applied to virtually everybody in the European nobility, it was more the rule than exception. This was the official reason given for the pope granting Louis and Eleanor an annulment in March 1152, but today we’d call this “irreconcilable differences.” The dispensation specifically preserved Marie and Alix’s legitimacy, but otherwise the annulment made it so it was as if the marriage had never occurred. It also gave the princesses’ custody solely to Louis; there is some circumstantial evidence that she may have at least met Marie again as an adult, but it is possible Eleanor never saw her eldest daughters again.

Eleanor did what Louis expected, which was immediately depart the Paris court she’d never really liked for her duchy’s largest and best court at Poitiers. What he didn’t anticipate was her getting there and reaching out to recently deceased Geoffrey of Anjou’s son, Henry II (1133-1189), and offering herself in marriage to him—an offer Henry accepted immediately. Henry and his mother Matilda had failed to win the war for the English succession, but they had ended up winning the long game, as the treaty they made with the childless Stephen made Henry his cousin’s crown prince. Regardless of Eleanor’s personal attractions, which as we’ve said were by all accounts substantial, marrying her would make Henry the largest landowner in France before he even became king of England. They were married less than two months after Eleanor’s annulment, and Louis could only grind his teeth as they became the premier power couple in Christendom and Eleanor almost immediately began cranking out sons almost as quickly as physically possible.

But disappointments and personality aside, Louis was still in desperate need of a male heir, so he, too, embarked again on matrimony. It would take almost two years for him and the barons to survey their options, but they decided on Constance of Castile, no doubt to make a Spanish alliance capable of flanking Aquitaine’s southern border. Unlike the suddenly extremely fertile Eleanor, Louis’s succession woes would continue with Constance, who in six years would produce two more daughters, Margaret and Alys, the latter she would die giving birth to in 1160. We don’t know much about the marriage between Louis and Constance, but regardless of sentiment, Constance’s death was a catastrophe for Louis and his rule. He was forty years old and had only four daughters to show for almost a quarter century of married life. He and France couldn’t afford to spend two years shopping around this time, and so barely five weeks after Constance’s death, Louis married Adèle of Champagne, the younger sister of his two most powerful non-Henry barons, Henry of Champagne and Theobald of Blois.

Henry and Theobald additionally took advantage of their new relationship and necessity to the crown by also getting themselves married to Marie and Alix, respectively. This gave them incredible leverage in Louis’s affairs, but it also ensured that Louis had loyal bannermen ruling both his largest border with Henry and Eleanor’s domains (Blois) and his most important border with the Holy Roman Empire (Champagne). This symbiotic relationship would blossom into its final form when the princesses were finally old enough to actually marry their bridegrooms in a double wedding in 1164, and when Adèle finally managed to do what her predecessors hadn’t accomplished and gave birth to Louis’s long-awaited son, Philip in 1165. She would add one more daughter, Agnes, in 1171.

With Louis’s position at last relatively stable, his relationship with his ex-wife and her husband enters a detante period, aside from the occasional jockeying for territorial weaknesses typical of the times. In an attempt to secure both borders and loyalties, within a decade of participating in Christendom’s most scandalous divorce, Louis and Eleanor were back at the matrimonial bargaining table—not with each other, but on behalf of the children they didn’t share together. While still a toddler, Louis’s daughter Margaret was betrothed to Eleanor’s equally young son, Henry. As was the custom, Margaret was sent to England to be raised in the court she would one day be expected to rule as queen. Nine years later, they would repeat the process with Margaret’s younger sister, Alys, who would be betrothed to young Henry’s brother, Richard, and dispatched to England to join them.

These two childhood betrothals and their outcomes would sow much of the ongoing Anglo-French discord they had been contracted to assuage. Louis would nearly start a war with Henry when the latter used the pretext of Thomas Becket’s exile to not crown Margaret as junior queen when he (in the French tradition) made his son Henry his co-ruler in 1170, and Henry was forced to redo the ceremony with Margaret in 1172. Unfortunately for the king of England, crowning Henry (who became known as Henry the Young King) seems to have had the same results as Louis’s father’s elevation of his brother Philip. The Young King would spend the rest of his short life (he died at 28) in almost constant rebellion against his father’s authority, aided and abetted by not only his younger brothers and Eleanor (whom the older Henry would eventually put under house arrest for her meddling), but his father-in-law Louis as well. Margaret, as a result of her husband’s choices, would spend a fair amount of her adulthood in France while Henry threw up his father’s continental lands against his authority, but these preoccupations also meant she didn’t have many opportunities to get pregnant, either. After the Young King’s death, she would briefly return to the court of her half-brother Philip, now king of France, before he married her off to Béla III of Hungary.

As for Alys, Henry put off the marriage between her and Richard so long that the pope threatened to excommunicate him over it, but still the old king stalled. The rumor for the delay at the time was that Alys had long been Henry’s own mistress, but it may have simply been that Henry didn’t want to give his equally rebellious son Richard control of Alys’s dowry county of the Vexin in France. The marriage never did go forward, and when Richard ascended the throne at his father’s death in 1189, he broke off the betrothal despite the fact that it was an insult to her half-brother Philip, and the two of them were in the midst of traveling east on the Third Crusade—one of many disagreements that made their partnership so volatile during that venture. Philip tried to talk Richard into giving Alys to his youngest brother John, but perhaps deciding it was time to stop trying to make nice with France, Eleanor intervened and prevented the match. In spite of being engaged since the age of eight, it took until she was thirty-five for Alys to finally walk down the aisle—to William of Ponthieu, a vassal of her brother’s.

So that’s the story of how a French count became the king of England, and how the French king’s lost queen in turn became his queen. I could go on for another long bit with more tales of their collective fourteen children (how Joan of England almost married Salah al-Din’s brother; how John lost everything before he even signed the Magna Carta; how Agnes of France became empress of Constantinople and then the mistress of multiple brigand lords on the run, and still might have been the last kid standing… just to name a few…), but this is a good grounding in the complexion that the always complicated relationship between medieval France and England took during this half-century or so. Eleanor would be the longest-lived leg of her courtly love triangle, but one could argue that Louis had the last laugh, as more of his children than her own would still be alive at her death in 1204, and of their respective remaining sons, Philip would prove to be a much more competent ruler than hapless John. But as Eleanor had always been the greater gambler, I’m sure she’d say that all the risks she’d taken had been worth it, whatever the outcome.