When history changed at Beaugency

I hope you all are coping. I may not be able to post here as often as I’d like, but please don’t worry; my absence has nothing to do with the coronavirus. I’ve been dealing with an acute sinus infection and when it did not respond to antibiotics, I was supposed to see a sinus surgeon; of course, that appointment was cancelled and so for the foreseeable future, I will be having good days and bad days and on the bad days, I’ll be elsewhere. I’ll be thinking of you all, though, whether I am here or not, hoping for the best for people all over the world.
I was going to post about the battle of Towton, Edward IV’s bloody coronation, but I couldn’t bring myself to write about so much suffering and death. So, instead, I will play catch-up. Here is a post from last year about one of our favorite queens, the incomparable Eleanor of Aquitaine.
One of history’s most consequential divorces occurred on this date. On March 21, 1152, Louis Capet and Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage was annulled at Beaugency on the grounds of consanguinity. Think how history would have changed if Louis had elected to stay the course and kept Eleanor as his queen. If Eleanor had never given birth to a son, France could have had a Queen Marie, as the Salic Law was not in force then. There would have been no Philippe Capet, no St Louis, no Philippe the Fair—shedding no tears here, folks. But there would have been no Plantagenets as we know them! Yes, Henry II would still have become king—most likely. But without Eleanor’s Aquitaine, maybe not? And without Eleanor as his queen, no Devil’s Brood. Take her DNA out of the mix, and the Plantagenet dynasty would have been an entirely different breed of cat. If the Chaos Theory is applied (the argument that a butterfly’s flapping wings could give rise to a hurricane), history as we know it would have been utterly altered. For better or worse? Who knows? But my history would definitely have been changed for the worse without Richard III to write about. I’d have still been a lawyer—shudder. So I am happy to celebrate the Beaugency annulment, thanking my lucky stars that Louis set Eleanor free to hook up with Henry just two months later. As Eleanor says to her sons in The Lion in Winter, “Such, my darlings, is the role that sex plays in history.”