Henry Plantagenet, Eleanor of Aquitane, Power, Seduction and Politics

Blanche D’Alpuget is an award winning author and essayist. In 1982, her perfectly timed biography of Bob Hawke, a year before he won power and became Australian prime minister, won D’Alpuget the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. She went on to write more political history. The Young Lion, her latest work, is her first novel in 20 years and the first in a quartet covering the lives of Henry II of England and his wife and queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. In conversation with The Sydney Institute’s deputy director Anne Henderson, Blanche D’Alpuget spoke at The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 8 October 2013 to discuss her latest novel.

HENRY PLANTAGENET, ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE, POWER, SEDUCTION AND POLITICS 

                                                                                                            BLANCHE D’ALPUGET

Anne Henderson: What’s wonderful about your book, The Young Lion – the first of a quartet – is that not only is it full of intricate details that make the reader feel part of the world you have recreated, but it’s a time and place from the distant past made accessible to a modern reader at the same time. So it’s very historical but also very accessible. So, why the Plantagenets? What took you there?

Blanche D’Alpuget: Well it’s really one Plantagenet and that is Henry II – the first of the Plantagenets. And it goes back to my twenties, when I was very interested in the twelfth century. At the time, it was extraordinarily fashionable to say – if you disagreed with anybody – “Oh, one of the great minds of the twelfth century”. I used to say it myself. One day I thought, I know nothing at all about the twelfth century. So I went out and bought a book and started to read about it. Over the years, I bought more. Wherever I was, I’d look out for little books on twelfth century costumes, on weaponry, on pharmacology, on pharmacopoeia, on beasteries and those mundane things. So I had a great deal of knowledge about ordinary life in the twelfth century. It was also the time of the building of the great Gothic cathedrals.

I was talking one day to someone who drew my attention to Henry II, as the founder of the concept of the rule of law. That was something very close to my heart, having lived in a number of countries without the rule of law. Reading the newspapers and seeing what a disaster it is that only in the democracies does the rule of law operate, I became interested in Henry II and started reading about him. I’ll just quickly go through his biography.

At the age of 14, Henry invaded England, completely unsuccessfully, and went home in disgrace. By the age of 16, he had been through the ordeal to become a royal knight. This is a sort of mystery journey. His was imposed on him by his uncle David, King of Scotland. By 18, Henry was Duke of Normandy. By 19, he had managed to marry Eleanor of Aquitane, the richest and most beautiful woman in Europe and former Queen of France. She was the divorced wife of King Louis. By the time he was 21, Henry was crowned King of England. By 25, he had established what became known thereafter as the Angevin Empire. He was actually born not in Normandy but in Anjou. His empire stretched from the North of Scotland to the Pyrenees, and from Ireland to the Mediterranean. Henry II was the most powerful King in Europe at the age of 25. This made him a considerable human being. And then he introduced the concept of The Rule of Law.

Anne Henderson: In your acknowledgements at the end, you say that the story of Henry is different as recorded by the French, or that French records have a different perspective on English history and Henry himself. Tell me about that. Did this change your view of Henry? And how are the French histories different?

Blanche D’Alpuget: It didn’t change my view of his history in England, nor did it particularly change my view of Henry’s personality. But the French fully expected that he would become King of France. And, indeed, had he not made that extremely unfortunate mistake with Thomas Becket, he probably could have become King of France. But the murder of Becket – for which I’ve no doubt Henry was responsible – ruled him out. There was such revulsion against it throughout Europe that the Pope refused to speak to any Englishmen for a whole week. But he got over it. Popes were very good politicians in those days.

Anne Henderson: Another issue in your book – very much in the lives of the characters – is the role of the church. We’ve all forgotten how much the church was a political force, as well as a moral force. And kings were quite intimidated by judgements of the church, of their moral behaviour. Even though they were always doing wicked things – murder, lust and whatever. There was a belief in the will of God and the Pope’s law was important. Can you tell us a bit more about how that involves itself with Henry?

Blanche D’Alpuget: Henry personally was not a great genuflector before the church. It’s hard to say even that he was a genuine believer, although, he used to lead his people into chapel every morning. But the church was important, as you’ve mentioned. There was another strand to it. Socially it was enormously important. We’re dealing with a feudal society, where everybody has a place. Order is all completely clear and worked out. You have duties and responsibilities to a particular person and he has duties and responsibilities to you. The one way out of a lowly birth was through the church. For intelligent boys and girls, it was the ladder from the life of a labourer or a washerwoman into a higher spot – even the upper echelons of society if you were intelligent enough. You could become an abbot, for example, going to court and dealing with the royal household. Or a bishop, or a baron.

Anne Henderson: The bishops, of course, were like another part of the aristocracy. To what extent did illegitimate children of royal households find their way up through the church. Henry’s first son, who was illegitimate – Geoffrey – became Bishop of Lincoln.

Blanche D’Alpuget: In fact it was illegal, officially illegal, for a bastard to become a bishop. In Geoffrey’s case, it was very interesting. Richard Coeur de Lyon (he would have never have called himself “the Lion Heart” because he never learnt to speak English) was a terrible man.It’s my view that Richard was very anxious lest Geoffrey, who was older than he and illegitimate and beloved of his father, would seize the throne. It was Richard who forced Geoffrey into the church.

Anne Henderson: Well, let’s look at the women. You have created a wonderful young woman, Xena (meaning “foreigner”). Would you to tell us a little about her. She’s brought to France by Eleanor after her journey on the second Crusades. Eleanor has bought her from slavery. She’s also of Jewish background. Henry’s eldest child Geoffrey was born to a mother who is not recorded in history but is vaguely listed as a foreign woman with a name that might be Middle Eastern whatever, I could find a name that was obviously Middle Eastern, certainly exotic. She is even sometimes called a “prostitute” – a generic for women of immoral repute. So where did your Xena come from?

Blanche D’Alpuge: Well, Geoffrey had a mother. He didn’t come out of an egg. Such details are neglected with a great deal of history. I think it’s changing now but certainly details about trivial people are omitted in the histories written up until recently. The greatest book on Henry was written in the 1970s. Traditional academic historians would often just give you a name and no flesh on the bones whatsoever because there was nothing in the record to substantiate their existence, to turn them into a human being. As a novelist, I had to turn all of these names into humans and to give them believable characteristics. So that’s where Xena comes from.

Anne Henderson: So, the lovely story, the romance, is all in Blanche’s imagination.

Blanche D’Alpuget: Well he had a romance with somebody, because he absolutely adored that son, who was with him, holding his hand, when Henry died.

Anne Henderson: And now Queen Eleanor – an amazing match to say the least. Tell us about that.

Blanche D’Alpuget: Henry had a very powerful mother, Matilda. She was the Empress of Germany and the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I, in line to be ruler of England. On three occasions Henry I had his nobles swear that they would accept her as King of England. Breaking an oath in those days was a very serious matter – it wasn’t just bad form, it was considered criminal. So three times they swore they would have Matilda. But when the moment came, a cousin slipped in, went to the Archbishop and said a woman cannot possibly rule – it’s against the laws of God and man and completely unnatural. The Archbishop agreed and anointed that cousin who became King Stephen. I find it very interesting that ever since – and that’s over 900 years – there’s never been another King Stephen, although Stephen has remained in use as a name until now. But the Royals don’t forget a usurper. There has never been another Eustace, the name of Stephen’s crown prince.

Henry’s mother was extraordinarily powerful and very disgruntled. She’d been wronged, overthrown. She brought Henry up from birth to know that he must avenge this injustice and take the Kingdom. She trained him to be the King. And very successfully. But he had a problem with money.

Eleanor, on the other hand, was born the Duke of Aquitane because she was the elder child of the Duke – there were only two – Eleanor and her sister. Eleanor was brought up, more or less, as a man to rule Aquitane, which was a rebellious province. At the age of 14, she was forced into marriage with Louis, the son of the King of France. Louis was 17 and didn’t want to be King. He wanted to be a monk. Louis had no interest in sex. Eleanor was 14; Louis was 17 and a virgin. It was a complete disaster, a very unhappy marriage. They managed to have only two children, both daughters, but it was considered a queen’s duty to provide an heir to the throne.

Eleanor really wanted to get rid of Louis and did everything she could. She petitioned the Pope for a divorce on the grounds of consanguinity. The church in those days forbade the marriage of people who were related within seven degrees of cousinhood. Of course, this was more honoured in the breach than in the fact. Elenaor was denied a divorce for many years but finally her adulteries helped her win papal approval. Feminists feel this is terrible thing to mention—her adulteries—because she was such a wonderful woman. She was. And she was just doing what any other King would do. Although Queen Victoria and Prince Albert deliberately adopted outwardly at least the norms of the people, it’s woolly-headed to try to force 21^st century middle class morality onto the behaviour of the aristocracy. So, finally, Eleanor did get the divorce. She was a wonderful politician. Divorced, she managed to keep all her money. This took a deal of diplomatic skill. Louis showed what a poor judge of his ex-wife he was and how naive he still by not realising what Eleanor might do next, which was to marry the young Duke of Normandy. Once Henry had married Eleanor, he had the brawn and the brass, and England was next.

Anne Henderson: Henry II was an extraordinary King on any count. What does he tell us about the expectations of a king at the time – from his peers, his subjects, his rivals? Are there any implications/lessons from that time for those who lead now?

Blanche D’Alpuget: First, the king had to be able to lead his army into battle. Henry was physically strong, the greatest horseman of his century and a very good and successful warlord. He was also a cautious one. He knew the contingencies of war, and he knew not to rush into battle. He had a natural leadership qualities, he was every inch an “Alpha male”. He was good humoured and jovial but he had a terrifying temper. This got worse as he got older, and as he came under increasing strain in his family relationships. Of course, in those days marriage among the aristocracy was more like mergers and acquisitions – as it still is today for some. They say anybody who marries for money earns every penny. Eleanor and Henry developed a horribly dysfunctional family and, in due course, it ripped his empire apart.

Eleanor herself was a woman of considerable learning. She was a formidable character. She was very beautiful, very rich, very self confident, and she had an artistic nature. She was a great patron of the arts. She was a fashionista. She invented a number of fashions, including a lovely little thing called a barbette, a cute headdress. She invented the mode of slashing sleeves so that the silk of a different colour on the inside would show. She was famous for her banquets, and for the amusements she organised at banquets. The nursery rhyme “Four and Twenty Blackbirds baked in a pie” came from Eleanor’s pie. One of her chefs invented it. She had that kind of sophistication, she was tres soignée.

Anne Henderson: Your book is regarded as historical romance. And you have fictionalised action and dialogue between characters, even incidents – that’s what makes it such a spellbinding read. But for any writer who captures vividly a world long gone, in such detail, you must have done a heap of research on the minutia of daily living. There is so much in your book that takes the reader into the realities of being alive in the twelfth century. That’s history not romance. So, is romance a fair description?

Blanche D’Alpuget: Well I’m someone who never reads reviews. Good, bad or indifferent – I don’t care. So, how this novel is categorised I don’t know. It’s not my problem. I write with my heart’s blood, reviewers write for money.

Anne Henderson: I’m thinking of the ones that don’t write for money. Anyway, it’s a fantastic story, a fantastic study and a fantastic experience and I guess Gerard is going to take over now and get you to ask Blanche some questions.

From the floor …

Question: How do you then approach the psyche of your characters, if as you say the history is flat, and put the flesh on the bones?  Is there a responsibility to do those characters justice?

Blanche: That’s a question about how do you write. What I do is I go into my ivory tower, which is a small, ugly flat in Cammeray with no hot water, no telephone and one tiny window. And the characters come and talk to me. One way or another, I think that’s the experience all writers have writing fiction. You turn up and the Muse will turn up for you.

Anne Henderson: But you would have to read a lot and absorb a lot.

Blanche D’Alpuget: Oh, you don’t start that process until you’ve done all the research. Though, there are some occasions where you suddenly think I really have to look that up, I don’t know that. In which case, you have to pull back for a moment and do more research so you can go on. That is the process of informing the imagination.

Question: How much planning went into working out the quartet?

Blanche D’Alpuget: You have to know the entire life. At first, I thought I knew where I was going to make my breaks. But when I started adding and enriching it with other characters, I realised that the breaks had to fall elsewhere. So the first book starts with Eleanor coming back from the Crusades and her relationship with Henry’s father, and ends with Henry being crowned King. The next book backtracks a bit and starts with the coronation and the first years with Thomas Becket and the relationship with Becket and what’s going wrong with it. The third book is the first rift between church and state, which Henry loses. It was a tragedy that he lost. There would have been no need for the dissolution of the monasteries and the terrible destruction of churches if he had won. It happened because of a small number of legalisms over which he was stupidly dogmatic. Had the reforms he wanted been brought in, you wouldn’t have had the horrors inflicted by Henry XIII. The last book is the rebellion by his family.

Question: Do you feel that medieval men and women think as we would think today?

Blanche D’Alpuget: There are certain things in human nature that don’t change. At the moment, I’m reading the Analects of Confucius, which is 2,500 years old. There are similarities within the thoughts there about politics and correct behaviour. Of course, the twelfth century was a feudal society and we live in a democratic society. That in itself gives a very different consciousness. But look at the difference between us and the Americans, for example, how differently we think on many issues. There are some things that change but other things that don’t. Ambition remains with us. Lucifer remains among us too. One great difference was a lesser sense of privacy in the 12^th century. Sharing beds and opening one’s bowels together was quite common. They were less stitched up than we are.

Question: Could you tell us more about your research methods. Did you actually go back to twelfth century materials and, by any chance, find a black bird recipe book?

Blanche D’Alpuget: I’m afraid I didn’t find that book. I did all my research in English, initially. Then I worked with a couple of French historians. I can read in French, but slowly. I didn’t go to any of the Latin, which is what everything was originally written in. But I did go back to what is left of the palaces and convents and cathedrals. I went back to those places when I was traveling in both France and England. I also always tried to stay as far as possible away from cities and in the simplest accommodation in the countryside, to get an idea of what it was like to be without electricity at night.

Have I got time to tell a story? We were in Wales and we drove from where we were staying to dinner in a pub. Then we had to drive back to our b&b and there wasn’t a light anywhere, or a road name. There were enormously high vegetation walls everywhere, and we got hopelessly lost. After about an hour of driving around in the dark, we found we were back where we started. We went in and they all laughed, “Oh, you’re back again.” They’d been drinking for several hours and were filled with hilarity at our predicament. I said, “It’s terribly dark out there.” A Welshman replied, “Yes, here in Wales we’ve got something called NIGHT.”

Question: What were the main landmarks you visited, what are the surviving buildings and places?

Blanche D’Alpuget: Well Chinon, in France, where Henry died, of course. That’s a huge and important castle. Also Fontevraud Abbey where Henry, Eleanor and Richard were buried. During the French Revolution royal graves were dug up and their bones flung about. It was vandalism on a grand scale. The images of all three were reconstructed in the nineteenth century.

Question: And in England and Britain?

Blanche D’Alpuget: In Britain, Henry II built Dover Castle, which withstood WW II – not a bad effort. In Wales, the castle of Striguil. I’ve forgotten the English name. I went to lots of cathedrals in both countries. Canterbury, of course. I can’t remember the names of all of the palaces, but I’ve toured Windsor. There’ nothing left of Henry’s hunting lodge at Woodstock. In Anjou I saw the tower of the Black Falcon, Henry’s ancestor, and first of the Counts of Anjou. Also the ruins of Clifford Castle—but that comes into Book II. Westminster Palace, that Henry re-built, was burned down in the eighteenth century: the one we enjoy now is of recent origin.

Question: We’re so far away here in Australia and take inspiration from those geographical places. What was the most inspirational place that you went to around Eleanor?

Blanche D’Alpuget: Undoubtedly Poitiers for its palace and cathedral, where she and Henry married. Poitiers is a lovely palace where Eleanor used to hold court. It’s a place where you get a real sense of this woman. She was an early democrat in a way. She allowed a commune to be formed – quite something in the twelfth century. Another fact about Eleanor is worth noting. Everybody thinks people from the twelfth century were the size of hobbits and died at 40. This is a myth. Richard Coeur de Leon was 6 foot 5, blond and gay. Eleanor had ten, actually 11, children and lived to the age of 81. Pope Pius III lived until 93. So they weren’t all tiny little people. But, of course, the men died from battle, from wounds and infections. And women would die in childbirth. However if you were a churchman, you had a good chance of longevity.

Because there’s plenty of sex in the book people have asked me, “Weren’t they frightened of catching venereal diseases?” There were no venereal diseases. Syphilis had existed some hundreds of years earlier but had completely died out. It didn’t exist in the West until brought back from the New World by Christopher Columbus’s merry men. There was no gonorrhea. It was another 150 years until that came to Europe thanks to Crusaders. There was leprosy, also brought to Europe by Crusaders, and leprosy could be sexually transmitted. But there weren’t a lot of people lining up to cohabit with lepers. Sex was not fearful, as it has been in more recent centuries. It was fun and recreational. There was nothing much else to do after dark. Another reason for good health was that rich or poor, there was no sugar in the diet. And there was a great deal of exercise. The rich rode horses, which takes agility and strength. The poor walked. And everyone ate organic food.

Anne Henderson: Blanche, it’s been a delight. The book is a wonderful read. I’m just waiting for the next one. I can’t recommended The Young Lion too highly. And, tonight, you’ve taken us behind the scenes and made it even more interesting. Blanche, I wish you well with the next volume, and the two after that. And please come back when you do. Thank you.