Eleanor of Aquitaine by Marion Meade Read Free Book Online

at the Ombrière, William received his vassals, great and small, signed petitions, and heard the feuds and disputes that largely accounted for much of his administrative business. On these trips, and at the court in Poitiers, Eleanor learned a great deal about politics, although this certainly was not William’s intention, nor did he take any special pains to rear her for a position of authority. Rather, she absorbed politics by a process of osmosis, just as she soaked up the literature created by Cercamon. Marcabru, and other troubadours at her father’s court, and she grew up believing that affairs of state were a province not necessarily restricted to men. Scarcely a day passed that she did not hear her father inveighing against turbulent vassals who resisted his authority at the slightest opportunity. At that time, William’s grand duchy was quickly being transformed into a shaky house of cards, and even though culturally it stood as the foremost land in Europe, politically and economically it was falling behind the north. Such omens of danger did not concern Eleanor, who saw only the importance of her father’s position and, reflected, her own. Aware, of course, that her brother, William Aigret, took precedence, she still had, as the eldest child, a part to play in the day-to-day affairs of government. Her name first appeared in the records in July 1129, when she, along with her brother and parents, witnessed a charter deeding certain privileges to the Abbey of Montierneuf, her grandfather’s burial place. A quill pen was used to make crosses after each name, except that of William Aigret whose tiny baby fingers were dipped lightly in ink and the imprint pressed upon the parchment. In March of the following year, the signatures of parents and two children appeared on another charter granting the brothers of the Church of Saint-Hilaire the right to cut firewood from the forest of Mouliere.
    When Eleanor was eight, however, the quartet of signatures abruptly ceased. Tragedy swept the ducal family; within a span of a few months, both Aenor and William Aigret were dead in Talmont, leaving Eleanor the prospective heir of her father’s domains. The death of Aenor did more than remove the warmth of a mother’s affection; it also took away a stabilizing influence in Eleanor’s life. She had always been defiant and independent, a child who took direction reluctantly. Her restless temperament, her vanities and self-centeredness, her bold flirtatious manner combined with a certain tomboyishness, kept her grandmother and ladies-in-waiting in a state of apprehension. One can imagine that there were those who said she needed a good whipping and others who ascribed, but not in Dangereuse’s hearing, Eleanor’s willfulness to bad blood, but the fact remained that more and more the girl was left to her own devices. That she began to develop into a strong-minded young woman thoroughly determined to behave as she pleased is not surprising, because the women she most admired had been cast from similar molds. Innumerable times she had listened to the history of her family: the story of her paternal grandmother riding into Toulouse to mount the throne that an accident of sex had denied her; from her maternal grandmother’s lips she had repeatedly heard the now-inflated romantic tale of how Dangereuse had fled the castle of Châtellerault, riding into the forest of Mouliere with arms clasped around her lover’s waist, defying Church, lawful spouses, and public opinion to remain proudly at her lord’s side.
    And if these ladies were not sufficiently heroic, there was Radegonde, one of the patron saints of Poitiers. Since Eleanor had been a small child, she had ridden down the hill to the southernmost gate of the city where Radegonde had founded a convent almost six centuries earlier, and there in the dark crypt containing the saint’s coffin, she would place beside the tomb a tiny waxen heart and a lighted candle as she made her