A royal divorce that changed history

I should have posted this yesterday, but I needed to verify the date first. On March 21st, 1152, a royal marriage ended, and the history of Christendom was forever changed. At Beaugency, France, Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine were declared to have been related within the prohibited degree, and their marriage was therefore annulled on grounds of consanguinity. Within two months, Eleanor would horrify Louis by wedding the young Duke of Normandy, Henry Fitz Empress, and to add insult to injury, she and Henry were related to the same degree as she and Louis were. Below is a scene from When Christ and his Saints Slept, beginning on p 613, between Eleanor and her nemesis, Bernard, the Abbot of Clairvaux, who would later be canonized by the Catholic Church and who famously proclaimed that the Angevins were from the Devil and to the Devil they’d go. Henry and Eleanor’s sons seemed to have felt that gave them bragging rights. Anyway, I give you the queen and the cleric.

* * *
Abbot Bernard greeted her with frigid formality. He so resembled one of the patriarchs of old—pale and haggard, burning dark eyes and flowing long hair—that Eleanor wondered cynically if he’d deliberately cultivated the image. “I understand,” she said, “that you convinced Louis not to bring my daughters to Beaugency to bid me farewell. He told me that he would have done so—if not for you, my lord abbot.”
He was quite untroubled by the accusation. “That is true,” he said calmly. “I thought it was for the best. Such a meeting was bound to be painful.”
“Am I to believe, then, that you were acting out of Christian kindness?”
“I care for all of God’s lost lambs, Madame, even the foolish ones who keep straying into the hills where wolves prowl and dangers lurk. The Lord forgives much, provided that there is true repentance. It is always possible to come back into the fold, into grace.”
“With you as my guide? I’d rather take my chances with the wolves.”
“Take care, Madame, lest you imperil your immortal soul. You do but prove I have good reason to keep your daughters away from your baneful influence.” As wrathful as he was, the abbot still remembered to keep his voice down, for this was not a conversation for others to hear. “Your lack of gratitude should not surprise me, though, given your lamentable lack of decorum and discretion—“
“Gratitude? My apologies, my lord abbot. It seems I’ve been maligning you unfairly, for you do have a sense of humor, after all!”
“It is foolhardy to court danger, Madame, but it is lunacy to court damnation. You do indeed owe me a debt of gratitude. If not for my forbearance, you might have been cast aside for adultery rather than consanguinity.”
“It is also foolhardy, my lord abbot, to hold your foes too cheaply. Your convictions to the contrary, most women are not idiots. I could not have been accused of adultery, for you have no proof, and well you know it. And even if you’d found men willing to swear falsely that it was so, a verdict of adultery would have prohibited Louis from marrying again…as you well know, too.”
“I see no point in continuing this conversation. If you would spit upon salvation, so be it, then. I leave your sins to God. Fortunately for the king and for France, he is now free of your unholy spell, free to choose a wife devout and docile and virtuous, a wife who will give him the heir you could not.”
Eleanor’s eyes shone with a greenish glitter. “What a pity,” she said, that the Blessed Virgin Mary is not available, for she would have suited his needs admirably.”
Bernard drew in his breath with a sibilant hiss. “You are an evil woman, wanton and truly wicked, and you will indeed suffer for—“
“No—no, she is not!” Neither Eleanor nor the abbot had heard Louis’s approach, and they both spun around at the sudden sound of his voice. “You are wrong, Abbot Bernard,” he said, with a firmness Eleanor had seen him show all too rarely. “I know her far better than you, and there is no evil in her soul, only a misguided sense of…of levity.”
(omission)
There’d been times when she’d yearned for words sharp enough to draw blood, to leave ugly scars. She’d blamed Louis for much that had gone wrong in their marriage, for not being bolder or able to laugh at life’s perversities, for not being more like the swaggering, spirited, roguish men of her House, for no longer heeding her advice as he’d done in their first years together, for loving God far more than he could ever love her, and for the reluctant desire and sense of shame that he’d brought to their marriage bed.
But she’d not hated him for those failings—anger and frustration and occasional contempt, but not hatred. That had come only after Antioch, after Louis had accused her of harboring an incestuous passion for her uncle and threatened to have her bound and gagged and dragged away by force if need be. Ever a realist, she’d yielded, far too proud to fight a war she could not hope to win; she was learning that women must pick their battles with care, that strategy mattered more than strength. Eventually Louis had apologized and swore upon the True Cross that he knew her to be innocent. But by then it was too late. By then her uncle had been slain by the Turks, his impaled head rotting above the caliph’s palace in the hot Baghdad sun, and Eleanor could not look upon her husband without Raymond’s doomed and bloodied spectre coming between them.
But now that she’d regained her freedom, she found herself remembering how it had been at first for them, a fifteen year old bride and her sixteen year old bridegroom, shyly appealing, awed by her beauty and eager to please her. Before he’d begun to yearn for the peace of the cloister, before those poor souls had died in the flames of a Vitry church, before the miscarriage and daughters instead of sons, before his hair shirt and her disgrace, before the crusade and Antioch and Raymond’s needless death, before Abbot Bernard. For a poignant moment, she could see that long-lost youth reflected in the depths of translucent blue eyes. And then the memory faded and she was looking at a man decent and ineffectual and despairing, a man she could pity but not respect and never love.
* * *
Of course we now know that Eleanor was actually born in 1124, not the traditional date of 1122, so she was an even younger bride than we’d realized—only thirteen. It is interesting to speculate how different their history might have been had she given him even one of the sons she’d give Henry. We also know that it was the husband who determines the sex of the child, an ironic twist that Eleanor might have appreciated. But I suspect that she’d rather have had the glorious chaos of life with Henry, even with its bittersweet ending, than whatever Louis could have offered her. As I have her think in one of my novels, she was not made for safe harbors.