texas aquitainesaw massacre
Or, eight decades of audacity with Bad Bitch in Charge Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Hello friends!
Welcome back to another old-timey story of petty plots, schemes, and shenanigans! The inspiration for this week’s issue was me rewatching The Lion in Winter over the weekend, which is a prime example of one of my favorite genres: rich people being little shits to each other at a festive occasion. Also if you want to see Timothy Dalton leaning villainously on a pillar while wearing a truly stunning Betrayal Bathrobe, this is the movie for you.
But this is not a Timothy Dalton newsletter. This is a newsletter about one of the OG Lady Dirtbags of European History:
Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Queen of France, England, Schemes, Plots, and Being Cooler Than Your Husbands
Eleanor of Aquitaine was born in—guess where—Aquitaine, in about the year 1122. (Aquitaine, by the way, is now the southwest bit of France.) She was the eldest daughter of William X, the Duke of Aquitaine, and his wife Aénor de Châtellerault.
This is all well and good. However, what I really need you to know is that Eleanor’s maternal grandmother was named, and I shit you not, Dangereuse de l’Isle Bouchard. I took French for nine years, so I feel confident in translating this name as “The Dangerous Bitch of Big-Mouth Island.” I know nothing else about this woman and already she’s in the running for the best part of this story.
I Am Not a Jack-O-Lantern. My Name Is ~*Louis*~
Eleanor was smart and well-educated and outgoing and didn’t give a fuck about anything except power and having a good time, so when her dad died shortly after her 15th birthday, she was ideally positioned to become the heir to Aquitaine herself.
However, because rich teenage girls were constantly getting kidnapped so men could steal their countries, William X wrote in his will that both Eleanor and Aquitaine would be protected by the King of France, Louis VI. He’s usually referred to as Louis the Fat, which seems rude and like none of history’s business.
This is a nice gesture by Dad of Aquitaine, and I respect him for trying. However, anyone with a brain can guess what happened next. Louis VI was like “hmmm this teenager under my protection sure does have a nice dukedom. How can I take it?” The easiest way was to marry Eleanor to his son, named…
Guess. Literally please guess what the Dauphin of France is named in this story.
Yes obviously it was Louis. What the fuck else did you expect.
Eleanor and Lil Louis got married in 1137. Exactly one week later, Louis VI pulled an Oregon Trail and died of dysentery, and Louis VII and Eleanor became king and queen of France.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Eleanor of Aquitaine
As Queen of France, Eleanor seems to have been cool as shit. She was way smarter and more personable than her husband, and basically she swanned around French court wearing low-cut dresses and having a kick-ass time. She fully bossed around her husband and did whatever she wanted.
The church leaders were all scandalized by Eleanor, which is how I know she rocked. Saint Bernard (the guy, not the dog) in particular thought she was a disreputable whore distracting the king from spiritual matters. This seems a little rich coming from a guy famously depicted as drinking breastmilk from the Virgin Mary’s tit like it’s water from a Super Soaker, but what do I know.
If Eleanor was trying to distract Louis from God with her sexy ways, she was doing a profoundly bad job of it, because eight years went by and still they had no children. This was very upsetting to France, as the sole job of a queen back then was “have a baby,” and Eleanor had gotten distracted by the side quest of “pissing off Saint Bernard.” I can only assume she really hated her husband, who had grown up preparing for the priesthood and was by no means prepared to keep up with a bad bitch like Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Finally, Louis and Eleanor had their first child in 1145, a daughter named Marie. It seems that we burned through all our naming creativity with Dangereuse and are now doomed to several generations of Louises and Maries.
After Marie was born, Louis and Eleanor decided to do what most married couples do when they want to celebrate their daughter: they launched the Second Crusade.
Crusader? I Hardly Know Her!
Was Eleanor really into the idea of “Genocidal Religiously Motivated Murder to Celebrate the Birth of My Kid”? Who knows. Maybe she was as much of a shitbag as her husband. Maybe she was tired of listening to Louis whining and thought riding on a camel would distract him. Historians think it was at least partly because her hot uncle Raymond of Antioch asked her to join them, and Eleanor famously would do anything for Hot Uncle Raymond.
I don’t know if Eleanor and her Hot Uncle Raymond actually had an affair during the Second Crusade. I am assuming not, because gross. But that doesn’t really matter, because the important thing is Louis definitely thought Eleanor had a thing for Hot Uncle Raymond. She was actively campaigning to annul her marriage to Louis by this point, and of course Louis went straight to the “she’s in love with her hot uncle” explanation, rather than what I would consider the more direct “she’s just not that into you, bro.”
The Crusade was a shitshow for other reasons, too. One of my favorite anecdotes suggests that Louis lost all his battles because Eleanor brought so much luggage with them.
By this point, Louis and Eleanor were so fed up with each other that they gave up in 1149 and took separate ships home to France. I love this so much. Eleanor literally looked at her husband and said “If you don’t stop being a fuckwit I will turn this crusade around.” On the way back, Eleanor’s ship was beset by pirates and then sent off course by a storm, and it took her two extra months to get home. Which I’m sure was a total accident and not just her delaying getting home to her shitty husband.
Enter: Somehow an Even Worse Husband
Once she finally made it back to land, Eleanor’s next move was to petition the pope for that annulment. It took her three years, but she finally got it, and in 1152, Eleanor and Louis VII were formally divorced.
Eight weeks later, Eleanor married Henry II, Duke of Normandy, who would soon become King Henry II of England. One has to assume her romance with Henry started well before the annulment. I imagine her sitting at her window glaring generally Pope-wards muttering “please let me divorce this wet blanket of a Frenchman, there is a hot duke who loves murdering people just outside my window and I would like to jump his bones please and thank you.”
Between 1153 and 1165, Eleanor had eight kids with Henry: five sons and three daughters. So a happy marriage, all in all? Well. Not exactly. Henry II might have been hot and dashing and sexy and more interesting than Louis VII, but unfortunately, he was a bag of dicks.
Henry had more mistresses than I can count, one of which Eleanor might have poisoned for revenge purposes. They fought all the time, and one imagines lots of shouting and slashing tapestries with daggers to prove a point. This reference will date me, but I imagine them as Teresa and Joe Giudice from the original Real Housewives of New Jersey. Were they good for each other? Absolutely not. But man, it made for good TV.
Fortunately for Eleanor, she didn’t have to spend too much time with Henry, other than the not-inconsiderable time required to have eight children. She basically set herself up as the ruler of Aquitaine while Henry took care of England, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, &c. She had her own court where she did more or less whatever she wanted, whether that was pass judgment on people’s marital disputes or decide what the people of Poitiers were going to pay in taxes.
Coup-De-Lally
Meanwhile! Just out of shot! Rebellion!!
Eleanor’s oldest son, confusingly also named Henry, was fed up that King Henry II had not yet died and given him the kingdom. So to hurry things along, he went to France in 1173 and met up with his mom’s ex, King Louis VII, who agreed to help him get an army together.
Eleanor may have been 51 years old at this point, but she still loved mess as much as she ever did. And what’s more fun than one of your sons leading a rebellion against your shitty husband? Three of your sons leading a rebellion against your shitty husband! So she got right to work and enlisted two more of her sons, Richard and John, to join in the plot to kill their dad and make one of the kids king. You may know Richard and John as the two cartoon lions from Disney’s Robin Hood.
That’s right, it’s time for a good ol’ family coup! You know what they say: the family that overthrows the crown together, stays together.
Unfortunately, Henry II did not love this plan. So he declared war on his sons and locked Eleanor in Winchester Castle, where she would remain in prison for the next 16 years.
*Spongebob Narrator Voice* 16 Years Later…
The next decade and a half seems to have been very boring for Eleanor, as she mostly stayed inside and came up with private schemes and watched Henry II forgive all the kids who tried to overthrow him. Yeah, that’s right: Henry II named Richard his heir, but left Eleanor under house arrest for the rest of his life. You tell me how that makes sense.
Henry II finally died in 1189, and good riddance. When Richard became king, his first order of business was to let his mom out of jail, for which he earns one (1) point in my book. Eleanor was 67 years old and ready to thrive now that her shitty second husband was dead. She basically held England together while Richard went on yet another crusade, keeping up the family tradition of committing religiously motivated war crimes.
Richard died of gangrene from a crossbow wound in 1199, and Eleanor’s next son John became king—presumably to her general disappointment, as one does not get immortalized in pop culture as a villainous lion in an ill-fitting crown by being a good king.
Eleanor of Aquitaine died in 1204 at the age of 82. I am so fucking proud of this bitch for outliving every problematic man in her life, powered by nothing but spite alone. She was buried in Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou next to Henry II, where I hope her ghost never gave him a moment’s goddamn peace.
Anyway, that’s all for this week, friends. Thanks as always for joining me for this nonsense. Until next time, be well, and now that the SAG-AFTRA strike is over please someone in Hollywood make sure a studio is optioning a 12-part miniseries called “Dangerous Bitch of Big-Mouth Island,”
-Allison
"I'd hang you from the nipples, but you'd shock the children." Somehow that line seems even more plausible after reading this.
Went to see Madrid a couple of weeks ago and saw a similar painting (by Alonso Cano) in the Museo Nacional del Prado of the Virgin shooting her warm lactation into a man's mouth, targetting the kneeling guy from quite a distance ➜ https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/saint-bernard-and-the-virgin/25b83887-3b11-4a99-a9b1-3b3050733d6a
Also, as can be seen with respect to Catherine of Aragorn, Anne Boleyn and some other wifes of Henry VIII, in a man's world a queen's job is mostly to get a boy, better quite a few.