SOURCE: “Legend” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend, Blackwell, 1993, pp. 103-61.

[In the following excerpt, Owen discusses Eleanor's chroniclers, particularly on the subject of King Henry's affair with Rosamond, and on the relationship between history and legend.]

Historical truth in the Middle Ages was a perishable commodity, apt to degenerate with time. Its recording was largely in the hands of churchmen, who were not above adapting it to their own code of values, slanting it perhaps to the advantage of their own community or to the detriment of a rival cause, and often with the intention of courting the favour of a patron. Such considerations apart, the facts of Eleanor's multifarious activities, wide-ranging in space as well as time, readily lent themselves to honest misinterpretation if not malicious distortion. Not only had she spent her long life caught in countless currents of political intrigue which the best informed of chroniclers would find it hard to chart; but she was also a woman and therefore, in clerical eyes and almost by definition, unreliable, fickle, deceitful and in some degree tainted with Eve's first sin. Her very nature made her motives, for them, open to suspicion. In any case, the chroniclers were only exceptionally witnesses to the events they set down, even when they happened in their own day and their own land. They gleaned most of their information from reliable eye-witnesses at best, but more often filtered through a series of intermediaries. They had no reference libraries to check their facts, but were often content to pillage from each other, introducing such variations into their accounts as style or purpose suggested. So they frequently relied on hearsay; and the more colourful the story the better for their own glossing or elaboration. Fictions, then, were blended with facts by a natural process; and legends grew as readily as an oak from an acorn. So it was with Eleanor; and in her case the process is well illustrated by that episode in the Holy Land to which Richard of Devizes made his guarded reference.¹

ELEANOR AT ANTIOCH

We may start with John of Salisbury who, from his post at the Papal Curia as the events unfolded, was in a good position to hear some authentic details, although he did not set them down in his Historia Pontificalis until the 1160s. He tells how Louis arrived in Antioch and was nobly entertained by Prince Raymond.

He was as it happened the queen's uncle, and owed the king loyalty, affection and respect for many reasons. But whilst they remained there to console, heal and revive the survivors from the wreck of the army, the attentions paid by the prince to the queen, and his constant, indeed almost continuous, conversation with her, aroused the king's suspicions. These were greatly strengthened when the queen wished to remain behind, although the king was preparing to leave, and the prince made every effort to keep her, if the king would give his consent. And when the king made haste to tear her away, she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related in the fourth and fifth degrees. Even before their departure a rumour to that effect had been heard in France, where the late Bartholomew bishop of Laon had calculated the degree of kinship; but it was not certain whether the reckoning was true or false. At this the king was deeply moved; and although he loved the queen almost beyond reason he consented to divorce her if his counsellors and the French nobility would allow it. There was one knight among the king's secretaries, called Terricus Gualerancius [Thierry Galeran], a eunuch whom the queen had always hated and mocked, but who was faithful and had the king's ear like his father's before him. He boldly persuaded the king not to suffer her to dally longer at Antioch, both because ‘guilt under friendship's guise could lie concealed’ [Ovid, Heroides, iv.138], and because it would be a lasting shame to the kingdom of the Franks if in addition to all the other disasters it was reported that the king had been deserted by his wife, or robbed of her. So he argued, either because he hated the queen or because he really believed it, moved perchance by widespread rumour. In consequence, she was torn away and forced to leave for Jerusalem with the king; and, their mutual anger growing greater, the wound remained, hide it as best they might.²

The chronicler, then, seems to have kept an open mind. Someone who may have shared Thierry Galeran's suspicions was the Gascon troubadour Cercamon. Little is known of his life, though he wrote a lament on the death of Eleanor's father and refers elsewhere to her marriage to Louis. It has been suggested that in one of his songs, possibly composed in the Holy Land, he alludes to her supposed adultery in Antioch when he inveighs against the woman who lies with more than one man: ‘Better for her never to have been born than to have committed the fault that will be talked about from here to Poitou.’³

William, archbishop of Tyre, who himself lived in the East until his death in 1185, had no doubts as to Eleanor's guilt. He tells of Raymond's hope of expanding his principality and says that he counted greatly ‘on the interest of the queen with the lord king’. In the face of Louis's determination to continue on to Jerusalem, he felt frustrated and openly plotted against him.

He resolved also to deprive him of his wife, either by force or by secret intrigue. The queen readily assented to this design, for she was a foolish woman. Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be, as we have said, far from circumspect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.⁴

A little later Gervase of Canterbury, who mentions matters best left unspoken, and Gerald of Wales echo the presumed scandal;⁵ and we have noted Richard of Devizes' provocative discretion.

It was left to an anonymous minstrel from Reims, writing in about 1260, to throw all caution to the winds in his collection of historical anecdotes. Louis's barons, he says, agreed that he should be married; ‘and they gave him the duchess Eleanor, a very wicked woman, who held Maine, Anjou, Poitou, Limoges and Touraine: fully three times as much land as the king’. Having decided to go crusading, Louis put to sea with a great company; and after a month's voyage he arrived at Tyre.

Seeing his weakness and ignorance, Saladin challenged him to battle several times, but without the king being willing to engage. When Queen Eleanor observed how negative the king was and heard of the goodness, prowess, intelligence and generosity of Saladin, she fell madly in love with him. Then, through an interpreter of hers, she sent him greetings and the assurance that, if he could manage to abduct her, she would take him as her husband and renounce her faith. When Saladin learned this from the letter passed to him by the interpreter, he was delighted, for he was well aware that this was the noblest and richest lady in Christendom. So he had a galley equipped and set out from Ascalon, where he was, to go to Tyre with the interpreter; and they arrived at Tyre shortly before midnight.

Then the interpreter went up by a small concealed entrance into the room of the queen, who was expecting him. ‘What news?’ she asked when she saw him. ‘My lady,’ he said, ‘the galley is here all ready and waiting for you. Hurry now so we’re not spotted!’—‘Well done, by my faith!’ said the queen. Then she fetched two maidens and two chests crammed with gold and silver, which she wanted to have taken into the galley. One of the girls then realized what was happening. Leaving the room as quietly as she could, she came to the bed of the sleeping king and wakened him with the words: ‘There’s trouble brewing, sire! My lady's wanting to go to Saladin in Ascalon, and the galley's waiting for her in the harbour. Make haste, sire, in God's name!’ On hearing her, the king jumped up, dressed and got ready, then had his household arm and went to the harbour. There he found the queen with one foot already in the galley. Seizing her by the hand, he led her back to her room. And the king's company captured the galley and those in it; for they were so taken by surprise that they were unable to defend themselves.

The king asked the queen why she wanted to do that. ‘On account of your cowardice, in God's name,’ replied the queen, ‘for you’re not worth a rotten apple! And I’ve heard such good reports of Saladin that I love him better than you; so you can be quite sure that you’ll never get any satisfaction from holding on to me.’ At that the king left her and had her well guarded. Then he decided to return to France, as he was running short of money and achieving nothing but shame where he was.

So he put to sea again with the queen and returned to France. Then he took all his barons' advice on what he should do with the queen, telling them how she had behaved. ‘Truly,’ said the barons, ‘the best advice we could give you is to let her go; for she’s a devil, and if you keep her much longer we’re afraid she’ll have you murdered. Above all, you’ve had no child by her.’ The king acted like a fool and took this advice: he would have done better to have her walled up, so he would have had her great land all his life, and the disasters of which you are about to hear would not have happened.

So the king sent Queen Eleanor back to her country. The she immediately sent for King Henry of England (the man who had Saint Thomas of Canterbury killed). And he gladly came and married her, paying the king homage for the land he was acquiring, which was vast and rich. He then took the queen off to England and kept her until he had had three sons by her. The first of them was Henry Curtmantle, a worthy man and fine knight; and the second was called Richard, who was valiant, bold, generous and chivalrous; and the third was named John, who was wicked, disloyal, and did not believe in God.⁶

In Eleanor's progressive vilification regarding her relationship with her uncle, we have seen her possibly tactless behaviour the subject perhaps of general rumour followed by spiteful hints, then accepted as a guilty liaison, and finally turned into a poisonous brew of half-remembered history laced with lust and treason. Poor Eleanor! Within the lifetime of some of her erstwhile subjects, she was portrayed as a faithless harlot and an apostate to boot. Let us hope that the minstrel's tale never reached the ears of the good nuns of Fontevrault!

THE QUEEN AND THE CHRONICLERS

In the Holy Land scandal, then, we have a clear illustration of the way in which Eleanor attracted legend to herself like a magnet: some possibly innocent activity giving rise to whispered rumours which would soon congeal into hard certainty, itself prompting fictional embellishment until any truth remained only as a distant echo. And such disfigurement of historical fact was inevitably accompanied by the misinterpretation of motives and hence by general character distortion. As a result, we cannot turn with any confidence to Eleanor's contemporaries for a reliable picture of her psychological make-up any more than for a physical portrait.

For this we should not heap too much blame on the chroniclers. We have seen some of the constraints under which they laboured in ascertaining the facts of Eleanor's activities, quite apart from the motivation behind them. It would therefore be vain to turn to them for any coherent insight into her personality. For one thing she was not at the focus of their attention to the same extent as were her husbands, or sons, or even an illustrious subject like Becket. She was not favoured with a dedicated biographer, some familiar clerk whose regular contact with her would have allowed close observation over a long period. The twelfth-century chroniclers mainly caught her only out of the corner of their eyes as they tracked down their bigger game. For them too she possessed a degree of remoteness. No stay-at-home, she would for any relatively static observer often have been ‘elsewhere’ for long periods rather than readily accessible for his scrutiny: in fact her lengthiest unbroken stay in any one country, her childhood excepted, was during her captivity in England; but then she was by necessity largely out of the public eye. An additional source of Eleanor's remoteness for contemporary chroniclers was the fact that she was a foreigner to all those who hailed from the north, whether from England or even the French or Norman domains; and along with her southern tongue, her native temperament and cultural background would not have made her character any easier for them to read. Their assessments, then, even without any ulterior motive, must be subject to caution. From men wary of giving offence we may expect conventional praise; from those with some axe to grind or with a taste for scandal uninformed blame should come as no surprise.

Richard of Devizes may be an exception to the general rule. We found him at first sight somewhat ambivalent in his attitude. His lavish praise of Eleanor's public image smacks of the conventional: her beauty, virtue, humility and unusual intelligence are the stuff of the court panegyrist, and only that cautionary footnote gave us pause for thought. As a monk at Winchester, Richard would have had some personal knowledge of Eleanor; and being a loyal supporter of her son Richard, he is likely to have held her too in some regard. This would seem to be confirmed by a sympathetic description he gives of her dealings with the people of Ely in 1192, at a time when they were suffering under an interdict imposed by their bishop:

That matron, worthy of being mentioned so many times, Queen Eleanor, was visiting some cottages that were part of her dower, in the diocese of Ely. There came before her from all the villages and hamlets, wherever she went, men with women and children, not all of the lowest orders, a people weeping and pitiful, with bare feet, unwashed clothes, and unkempt hair. They spoke by their tears, for their grief was so great that they could not speak. … Human bodies lay unburied here and there in the fields, because their bishop had deprived them of burial. When she learned the cause of such suffering, the queen took pity on the misery of the living because of their dead, for she was very merciful. Immediately dropping her own affairs and looking after the concerns of others, she went to London.

She proceeded to intervene successfully on their behalf. ‘And who,’ asks Richard, ‘would be so savage or cruel that this woman could not bend him to her wishes.’⁷

The good monk probably wrote his chronicle after Eleanor had left England; and although he could not know she would never return, we may assume that his flattering words were not framed in order to curry favour. In his work, which is largely original and covers the period from Richard's coronation to 1192, he airs certain strong prejudices including his contempt for the French, but not, it seems, in pursuit of any personal advancement. So one is inclined to accept his praise of the queen mother as sincere, and consequently to read into his allusion to unfortunate events in Antioch no malice, but a reluctant acknowledgement of certain youthful indiscretions that were common knowledge in his day.

In the 1160s the Norman poet Wace had been more conventional in his praise, not unexpectedly in view of his likely dedication to Eleanor of his translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth. He composed his Roman de Rou for her husband Henry; and in it he gives a thumb-nail biography of the queen:

Noble Eleanor is wise and of great virtue. In her youth she was queen of France, joined to Louis in a distinguished marriage. They went on a lengthy crusade to Jerusalem, both suffering much stress and tribulation. After their return, the high-born queen parted from Louis on the advice of the barons; and she came to no harm from that separation. She left for Poitiers, her native home, to which she was the sole heir in her family. King Henry made with her a rich marriage, holding the maritime lands between Spain and Scotland, from shore to shore.⁸

We notice that whatever Wace may have heard of the cause of Eleanor's rift with Louis, he keeps his own counsel on the subject.

Another Norman, William Marshal's biographer, did not spare his compliments in his verse when mentioning the lady before whom William had demonstrated his early prowess. Afterwards, of course, the marshal became a staunch servant of the English crown and eventually acted as regent on the death of her son John. When the poet reaches the year 1189, he speaks of William coming to Winchester and finding at liberty Queen Eleanor, whose name contains the elements ‘d’ali et d’or’, connoting a coin minted from gold. Two years later he depicts her giving good and wise counsel on the government of the country.⁹ His use of poetic licence in extolling her precious quality is such as might have been used by Bernard of Ventadour or many another of her troubadour admirers.

Eleanor did not, then, lack admirers during her lifetime. Legend, however, feeds more greedily on vice than on virtue, as we have seen exemplified by the Antioch affair. Regarding that, we found John of Salisbury, who was writing at about the same time as Wace, non-committal. This is in keeping with his characteristic prudence. Something of an ideologue, he was well versed in statecraft, being successively secretary to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and to Becket, whom he admired and supported, yet without entirely sacrificing his relations with Henry. He ended his life as Bishop of Chartres in 1170.

William of Tyre, who began his history at about that date, had less need to be circumspect from his distant bishopric in Palestine, where he had been born and spent much of his life. He was not a man of violent prejudices and has the reputation of a careful sifter of facts. It is possible that he had had some contact with the crusaders. But he would have been a teenager at the time; and by the time they passed south on their way to Jerusalem, Eleanor was already in strict custody and disgraced. So it is no wonder that he should have taken her guilt for granted, especially if, as is supposed, he was writing his chronicle for a French audience.

The monk Gervase of Canterbury wrote his history about 1188, four decades after the crusade. But despite his distance from the events in question, and although at that time his queen was still kept on the periphery of public life, it would hardly have been wise for him to give gratuitous offence. His main interest was in any case in inter-monastic disputes. Yet he did go so far as to say that on Louis's return from Jerusalem there arose discord between him and Eleanor concerning certain things which happened on the crusade and which are probably best passed over in silence.

Discretion was foreign to the nature of Walter Map, who was clerk to the royal household during Henry's reign and subsequently chancellor of Lincoln and archdeacon of Oxford. A Welshman from the borders, he was a friend of Gerald of Wales, to whom we shall return; and he obtained a reputation more as a witty raconteur than a sober historian. His De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers' Trifles) is largely anecdotal and full of tall stories such as we can imagine him exchanging with Gerald to their mutual relish. Neither seems to have approved of Eleanor; and Walter may have taken advantage of her fall from favour (his book was written in the 1180s) to mention another supposed scandal from her past. He speaks of the death of Stephen:

To him Henry, son of Matilda, succeeded, and upon him Eleanor, queen of the French, cast her unchaste eyes, and contrived an unrighteous annulment, and married him, though she was secretly reputed to have shared the couch of Louis with his father Geoffrey. That is why, it is presumed, their offspring, tainted at the source, came to nought.¹⁰

Some years later, Helinand of Froidmont, pious chronicler and poet at the court of Philip Augustus, used even stronger terms in his characterization of Eleanor:

The abandoned wife of Louis king of the French was carried off by Henry, count of Anjou and duke of the Normans, thereafter king of England. That brought about a war between them. It was on account of her lasciviousness that Louis gave up his wife, who behaved not like a queen but more like a harlot.¹¹

For the French in particular her reptuation was now in tatters; and time was no mender, for late in the eighteenth century a monk from the abbey of Barbeau, in the course of a sympathetic biography of Louis VII, dismissed her as a veritable man-eater, a ‘fille incontinente et corrompue’, who ‘ne pouvait vivre sans hommes’.¹²

For certain writers who took a grander view of history she was more than a simple erring woman who happened to be a queen. They saw her as playing out her shadowy role on the cosmic stage. Gerald of Wales was one of these. Son of a Norman knight from Pembrokeshire, he was a man of wide, but sometimes thwarted, ambitions as well as a full share of self-importance and reforming zeal. He was well into his seventies when he died in 1223 after a life spent in playing Church politics and seeking with varying success his own advancement. He had mixed feelings towards the Plantagenets, with admiration and criticism both finding their place in his numerous writings; but for Eleanor he found little to approve. Taking the broader view, he saw the vengeful hand of God resting on the whole family.

Gerald devotes a whole chapter of his De Principis Instructione (On the Instruction of a Prince) to an exposition of the corrupt stock from which both Henry and Eleanor sprang and in which he saw the root of all their misfortunes.¹³ He begins by recalling Eleanor's grandfather's scandalous affair (wrongly attributed to her father) with the Viscountess of Châtellerault (‘la Maubergeonne’) and tells of a hermit's prediction that no happy progeny would come from that liaison. Eleanor's mother, of course, was the wanton lady's legitimate daughter; but Gerald makes no fine distinctions: the queen bore the taint of a profligate line, as reflected in her conduct in Palestine.

As for Henry, his race was vitiated by the bigamy of his mother, we are told. But worse than that, his father Geoffrey had had carnal relations with his present wife:

Geoffrey, count of Anjou had seduced Queen Eleanor when he was seneschal of France, concerning which, it is said, he frequently put his son Henry on his guard, warning and commanding him not on any account to touch her, both because she was the wife of his lord and because she had already been known by his father.¹⁴

How, asks Gerald in righteous horror, could one expect a happy family to stem from such a union? Now in full flow, he goes on to tell of the demon countess of Anjou, who always left church before the Mass: then, when an attempt was made to restrain her, she flew out of the church window to the amazement of the onlookers. Gerald adds that Richard, when king, would jest that his family, having come from the Devil, would surely return to him. He concludes that Henry's sons became the instruments of divine vengeance, an opinion he had earlier passed in his Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland, c. 1186).

We can see how with this loquacious Welshman history was already becoming liberally seasoned with legend. In our own day he would have made a first-rate reporter for the popular press, so avidly did he augment his facts with racy anecdotes, portents and sweeping judgements. Like so many of his contemporaries, he must have been all too ready to suspend disbelief when he read Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, perhaps even in Wace's translation as presented to Eleanor. He actually claims to have visited the newly discovered tomb at Glastonbury of King Arthur and shows no scepticism in his lengthy description. On several occasions too he refers to Merlin the seer and the fulfilment of some of his prophecies.¹⁵

In his lament for the captive Eleanor, Richard le Poitevin had drawn much of his inspiration from the prophecies of Merlin as retailed by Geoffrey of Monmouth. That is where he found his figure of the king of the North Wind, whom he equated with Henry. They are also the source of the representation, common among the chroniclers, of Eleanor as an eagle with her brood. Richard himself spoke of the insurrection of Henry's sons against him, and added: ‘Their mother, Queen Eleanor, described by Merlin Ambrosius by the figure of “the Eagle of the Broken Covenant”, had rebelled against him.’ In Geoffrey the relevent prophecy is followed by another, often taken to refer to the turbulent princes:

‘The Eagle of the Broken Covenant … will rejoice in her third nesting.

The cubs shall roar as they keep watch; they will forsake the forest groves and come hunting inside the walls of cities. They will cause great slaughter among any who oppose them, and the tongues of bulls shall they slice off. They shall load with chains the necks of the roaring ones and live again the days of their fore-fathers.’¹⁶

The chroniclers understood by the eagle's ‘third nesting’ the birth of Prince Richard, Eleanor's third and favourite son (her daughters being conveniently ignored).

Merlin also appears in the chronicle originally ascribed to Benedict of Peterborough but now more usually to Roger of Hoveden (or Howden). There is a reference to the revolt of 1173:

Prominent, moreover, among the instigators of this heinous treason were Louis the king of France and, as is said in some quarters, Eleanor queen of England herself and Raoul de Faye. The afore-mentioned queen had in her custody at that time her sons Richard duke of Aquitaine and Geoffrey count of Brittany; and she sent them to the Young King their brother in France in order to join with him against their father the king.

Then, says the chronicler, Merlin's prophecy was fulfilled; and, after quoting Geoffrey's account of the vicious cubs, he continues:

That was Merlin's prediction regarding the sons of King Henry, the empress Matilda's son; and in calling them roaring cubs, he meant that they would rise against their father and his dominion and wage war against his person.¹⁷

We have seen Eleanor being accused on the one hand of a variety of discreditable actions, for few of which (her collusion with her sons being an exception) is there a sound basis in known facts; and on the other hand her life story was woven into a tapestry of legends and seen in part as fulfilling the dire vaticinations of King Arthur's familiar sorcerer. To say she had become a legend in her own lifetime is no empty rhetoric; and for future centuries she was a ready subject for the spinners of historical fictions, sensationalizers and romantics alike. In the rest of this chapter I shall not attempt a survey of these fictions as they proliferated in Britain and on the Continent, but will confine myself to a few examples of her legend in its different aspects.

FAIR ROSAMOND

The infidelities of Henry, eleven years younger than his wife, made public gossip in his day. The most notorious was his affair with Rosamond Clifford.¹⁸ Born perhaps before 1140, she was the daughter of Walter de Clifford, a Norman knight whose castle on the Welsh borders Henry may have visited in the course of his campaign of 1165. Nine years later a document speaks of a manor given to her father by Henry ‘for the love of Rosamond, his daughter’. Under the year 1174, Gerald of Wales inveighs against the king's lapse into vice and the manner in which, having imprisoned Eleanor, he brought his adulterous ways into the open by publicly taking advantage not of a rose of the world (mundi rosa) but of a false or impure rose (immundi rosa): a bad example indeed for a king to set.¹⁹ We have no reason to doubt the bare facts as given by Gerald or his claim that they were public knowledge. If so, it is unthinkable that Eleanor remained ignorant of the situation; but whether this knowledge perturbed her unduly is another matter. The early chroniclers pass no opinion on that.

Benedict of Peterborough (if it is not Hoveden) tells of a visit by Bishop, later Saint, Hugh of Lincoln to the nunnery at Godstow near Oxford, where Rosamond had been buried after her early death in 1176 or 1177. He went into the church.

There, as he prayed at length before the high altar, he saw in front of the altar a particular tomb draped with a silk cloth and surrounded by the illumination from burning candles, for it was held in great reverence by the aforementioned nuns. Then he asked those standing about him who lay in that tomb which they revered so highly. They told him it was the tomb of Rosamond, whom Henry king of England had so favoured that for love of her he had enriched that house, which had earlier been poor and indigent, with many handsome gifts. And he had embellished it with noble buildings and had also made large payments to the church for the provision of permanent illumination round the tomb.

To them the bishop replied: ‘Remove her from here, for she was a harlot, and that love between her and the king was unlawful and adulterous! And bury her with the other dead outside the church, lest the Christian faith come into disrepute, and for that to be an example for other women outside to guard against illicit and adulterous intercourse.’ Then they did as the bishop told them and took her for burial outside the church.²⁰

It seems, then, that in Eleanor's lifetime the conduct of both Henry and Rosamond was seen as open to censure, whereas Eleanor's only association with the affair was as the wronged wife and presumably distant observer. That was the view of Ranulf Higden, the monk of Chester, when early in the fourteenth century he composed his Polychronicon, a universal history which was only as reliable as its sources, Gerald of Wales among them. The work was translated in 1387 by John Trevisa, who deals with the now expanded account of Henry's adultery in this fashion:

He that hadde prisoned his wif Eleanore the queene, and was priveliche a spouse brekere, leveth now openliche in spousebreche, and in nought aschamed to mysuse the wenche Rosamond. To this faire wenche the kyng made at Wodestoke a chambre of wonder craft, wonderliche i-made by Dedalus werke, lest the queene schulde fynde and take Rosamounde: but the wenche deide sone, and is i-buried in the chapitre hous at Godestowe besides Oxenforde with sich a writynge on her tombe:

‘Hic jacet in tumba rosa mundi, non rosa munda,
Non redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet.’

That is, Here lieth in tombe the rose of the world, nought a clene rose; it smelleth nought swete, but it stinketh, that was wont to smelle ful swete. This wenche hadde a litel cofre scarsliche of two foot long, i-made by a wonder craft, that is yit i-seyn there. Therynne it semeth that geantes fighten, bestes stertelleth, foules fleeth and fisches meoven with oute manis hond meovynge.²¹

Here we have our earliest mention of Henry's construction of the ‘maze’ at Woodstock, later to become a central feature of the Rosamond legend. His palace there was for him a favourite retreat and hunting-lodge and was quite often frequented by Eleanor before her captivity; but the maze is pure myth, clearly patterned on the Cretan labyrinth of the Theseus story. Its introduction here is a little clumsy, since the provision of a secret trysting-place clashes with the charge of open adultery brought against Henry. By explaining its purpose as a means of stopping Eleanor from catching Rosamond, Higden may have opened the way for the queen, hitherto merely glimpsed in the wings of the drama, to move centre stage.

In the middle of the fourteenth century an anonymous clerk compiled his Croniques de London, a series of annals for the years 1259-1342. In it he gives a grisly account of Rosamond's fate. However, wrongly identifying the king and queen as Henry III and his wife Eleanor of Provence, he dates it to 1262. My translation begins with the queen incurring the wrath of the populace of London:

In that year the queen was savagely booed and jeered on London Bridge on her way from the Tower to Westminster because she had had a noble young lady, the most beautiful known to man, put to death, accusing her of being the king's concubine. For that the queen had her seized and stripped naked, then made her sit between two great fires in a tightly closed room, to the terror of the lovely damsel. She, feeling sure she was going to be burnt, broke into bitter laments. Meanwhile, the queen had had a bath prepared, into which she had the beautiful girl climb, whereupon she had a wicked old woman strike her with a lance on both arms. Then as soon as her blood spurted forth, another abominable sorceress arrived carrying two hideous toads on a shovel[?]. She placed them on the lovely girl's breasts, which they immediately seized and began to suckle. Then two more old crones held her arms outstretched to prevent her from sinking into the water before all the blood had left her body. The whole time those foul toads sucked at the beautiful damsel's breasts, while the queen laughed and mocked at her, jubilant at being thus avenged on Rosamond. Then, when she was dead, she had her body taken and buried in a filthy ditch, and the toads with it.

But when the king heard the news of how the queen had dealt with the lovely damsel he so loved and cherished, he was grief-stricken and lamented bitterly: ‘Alas, wretch that I am! What shall I do for the fair Rosamond? For she never had her equal in beauty, nobility of character and courtliness.’ Having thus vented his grief at length, he wished to know what had become of the beautiful girl's body. The king then had one of the wicked witches seized and put to great torture, to make her tell the whole truth concerning their treatment of the noble damsel; and he swore by almighty God that should she tell one word of a lie, she would suffer a punishment as vicious as man could devise. Then the old woman began to talk and to tell the king the complete truth: what the queen had done with the lovely body of the noble girl, and whereabouts it was to be found.

In the meantime the queen had the beautiful damsel's body exhumed and ordered it to be taken to a religious house called Godstow, two leagues from Oxford, so that Rosamond's remains should be interred there. This was to cover up her wicked deeds, so that nobody would get to know the foul, hideous things the queen had done, and to avoid blame for the death of the most noble damsel. Then the king set out to ride to Woodstock, where Rosamond, who was so dear to his heart, had been so treacherously murdered by the queen. And as he approached Woodstock, he met with Rosamond's corpse tightly sealed in a casket strongly banded with iron. The king asked at once about the corpse and the name of the body that was being borne away, to be told that it was the body of fair Rosamond. On hearing that, King Henry immediately ordered the casket to be opened, so that he might see the cruelly martyred body. The king's command was at once obeyed, and he was shown the corpse of Rosamond, who had so foully been put to death. On having the whole truth revealed, King Henry swooned for grief and lay on the ground for a long time in a trance before anyone could draw a word from him.

When the king came round from his swoon, he swore a mighty oath that he would be well avenged for the vile crime committed out of pure envy against the noble damsel. Then he began to lament and express his deep grief for the very lovely Rosamond whom he loved so much with all his heart. ‘Alas, wretched girl!’ he said. ‘Sweet Rosamond, you never had your equal: so gentle and fair a being was never found. Now may merciful God, the Three-in-One, have pity on the soul of sweet Rosamond and forgive her all her sins. True God omnipotent, beginning and end, never suffer her soul to perish in dire torment but, in thy great mercy, grant her full remission for all her sins!’ Then, having uttered this prayer, he at once gave the command to ride straight on to Godstow with the girl's body. There he had her tomb constructed in the nuns' holy house, and ordered that thirteen chaplains should sing mass for the soul of the said Rosamond so long as the earth should endure. I tell you certainly that in this religious house of Godstow fair Rosamond lies buried. May the true, almighty God have mercy on her soul. Amen.²²

We do not know where the rather workaday and sensationalist chronicler came across this grim account, if he did not elaborate it himself. In any case, this, as far as we can tell, is the first appearance in the Rosamond story of a vengeful and jealous Eleanor bringing about her death. It could, as we saw, have been Higden who dropped the initial hint of her possible intervention; but if so, his maze has left no trace in the London chronicle. What we do find is a surprisingly vicious portrait of the queen set in sharp contrast to that of her love-sick husband, whilst praise of Rosamond and her beauty is laid on with a heavy brush: even her adultery is mentioned only as an unsupported charge by Eleanor, whereas her place in heaven seems assured.

Although it bypassed the London chronicle, the fiction of the Woodstock maze must have continued to develop in English lore. The Thesean element of the clew (ball) of thread is first found in the chronicle of another Londoner, Robert Fabyan, at the end of the Middle Ages (he died in 1513). After describing the ‘howse of wonder workyng or Dædalus’ werke which is to mean, after moost exposytours, an house wrought lyke unto a knot in a garden called a maze’, he adds: ‘the common fame tellyth that lastly the quene wane to her [Rosamond] by a clewe of threde or sylke and delte with her in such maner that she lyved not long after. Of the maner of her deth spekyth not myne auctor.’²³

The notion of a private love-bower or apartment was a commonplace of medieval romance, figuring for instance in the Tristan legend and in a form reminiscent of the Woodstock fabrication in Chrétien de Troyes's Cligés, which was composed, possibly for Eleanor's daughter Marie of Champagne, at about the time of Rosamond's death. In the romance Cligés, in collusion with Fénice the reluctant wife of the Greek emperor, smuggles her into such a retreat, which had been cunningly constructed by John, a serf of his. Cligés is first taken to view the premises, which are reached through a secret door in an isolated tower. John opens that door;

and, one behind the other, they go down a spiral stair to a vaulted apartment where John worked at his craft when he chose to make something. ‘My lord,’ he says, ‘of all the men God has created none but us two have ever been where we are now; and yet the place is well fitted out, as you’ll see very shortly. I suggest this as your retreat and that your sweetheart be hidden here. A lodging such as this is suitable for such a guest, for it contains bedrooms and bathrooms with hot water for the baths piped in under the ground. If anyone wanted to find a comfortable place to hide his sweetheart away, he would have to go far to find anywhere so delightful. When you’ve been all over it, you’ll find it very suitable.’

John then showed him everything, the fine rooms and painted vaulting, and pointed out many of his works, which pleased him greatly. Then, when they had seen the entire tower, Cligés said: ‘John, my friend, I free you and all your descendants and am entirely in your hands. I want my beloved to be quite alone in here, with no one knowing of it except only for myself and you and her.’²⁴

Through another hidden door lies a secret garden, where the lovers are eventually discovered, not by the agency of a clew of thread, but when a young knight scales its wall in pursuit of his hawk. One cannot prove the direct influence of this tale of discovered adultery on the Rosamond legend; and its ending is very different, with the betrayed emperor dying of grief and the lovers being united in a blissful and legitimized union. But at the least it has a prominent place in the background of romantic fiction against which the story of Rosamond continued to evolve.

The later medieval chroniclers and early antiquarians hand that story down in its more or less elaborated form. By the sixteenth century an implausible attempt was made to give it more historical substance by claiming that Rosamond was the mother of Henry's known bastards Geoffrey, the future archbishop of York, and William Longsword, who became Earl of Salisbury; but it is a claim that does not stand the test of chronological investigation. It was in any case the manner of Rosamond's death that most fascinated these writers. Bishop Thomas Percy in his Reliques (1765) introduces a ballad on the subject with a brief sketch of the material's history, in the course of which he refers to John Stow (d. 1605), Raphael Holinshed (d. 1580?), John Speed (d. 1629), and John Leland (d. 1552) as well as Higden:

Most of our English annalists seem to have followed Higden, the monk of Chester, whose account, with some enlargements, is thus given by Stow: ‘Rosamond, the fayre daughter of Walter Lord Clifford, concubine to Henry II (poisoned by Queen Elianor, as some thought) dyed at Woodstocke [AD 1177], where king Henry had made for her a house of wonderfulle working; so that no man or woman might come to her, but he that was instructed by the king, or such as were right secret with him touching the matter. This house after some was named Labyrinthus, or Dedalus worke, which was wrought like unto a knot in a garden, called a Maze; but it was commonly said, that lastly the queene came to her by a clue of thridde, or silke, and so dealt with her, that she lived not long after: but when she was dead she was buried at Godstow, in an house of nunnes beside Oxford, with these verses upon her tombe:

Hic jacet in tumbâ Rosa mundi, non Rosa munda:
Non redolet, sed olet, quæ redolere solet.’

How the queen gained admittance into Rosamond's bower is differently related. Holinshed speaks of it, as ‘the common report of the people, that the queene … founde hir out by a silken thread, which the king had drawne after him out of hir chamber with his foot, and dealt with hir in such sharpe and cruell wise, that she lived not long after.’ On the other hand, in Speed's Hist, we are told that the jealous queen found her out ‘by a clew of silke, fallen from Rosamund's lappe, as shee sate to take ayre, and fastened to her foot, and the clew still unwinding, remained behinde: which the queene followed, till shee had found what she sought, and upon Rosamund so vented her spleene, as the lady lived not long after.’ Our ballad-maker, with more ingenuity and probably as much truth, tells us that the clue was gained by surprise from the knight who was left to guard her bower.

It is observable, that none of the old writers attribute Rosamond's death to poison (Stow mentions it merely as a slight conjecture).

Percy adds Leland's reference to the discovery of Rosamond's remains at the dissolution of the nunnery: ‘Rosamunde's tumbe at Godstowe nunnery was taken up [of] late; it is a stone with this inscription, “Tumba Rosamundæ”. Her bones were closid in lede, and withyn that bones were closyd yn lether. When it was opened a very swete smell came owt of it.’²⁵

The blend of history and legend is now ready to be taken over into the domain of literature. Only the feature of the poison remains to be fully exploited. It has been conjectured that the supposed finding on Rosamond's tomb of the engraving of a cup inspired the notion that it was by taking a poisoned drink that she died at the hand of Eleanor. Be that as it may, the Elizabethans found in the tragedy a fit subject for poetry, in which flights of fancy are not merely condoned but required. From their day a body of literature has built up which has eclipsed the historical facts and largely conditioned the perception of Eleanor's character among educated circles as well as in popular lore. Let us, then, turn to some of the treatments of the Rosamond story in the literature of the next three centuries.

The ballad ‘Fair Rosamond’ published by Percy was written near the end of the sixteenth century by Thomas Deloney, a silk-weaver by trade, but poet and pamphleteer by inclination. He takes us into his story with all the gusto of popular verse:

When as king Henry rulde this land,
The second of that name,
Besides the queene, he dearly lovde
A fair and comely dame.
Most peerlesse was her beautye founde,
Her favour and her face;
A sweeter creature in this worlde
Could never prince embrace.
Her crisped lockes like threads of gold
Appeard to each man's sight;
Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearles,
Did cast a heavenlye light.
The blood within her crystal cheekes
Did such a colour drive,
As though the lillye and the rose
For mastership did strive.
Yea Rosamonde, fair Rosamonde,
Her name was called so,
To whom our queene, dame Ellinor,
Was known a deadlye foe.
The king therefore, for her defence
Against the furious queene,
At Woodstocke builded such a bower,
The like was never seene.
Most curiously that bower was built
Of stone and timber strong,
An hundred and fifty doors
Did to this bower belong:
And they so cunninglye contriv’d,
With turnings round about,
That none but with a clue of thread
Could enter in or out.
And for his love and ladye's sake,
That was so faire and brighte,
The keeping of this bower he gave
Unto a valiant knighte.

Their idyll was short-lived because, owing to the revolt of Henry's ‘ungracious’ son, he had to leave for France. His lingering farewell was punctuated by Rosamond's tearful requests to be allowed to go with him, serving as a page or squire or even chambermaid. But her pleas were in vain; and the king left, never to see her again.

For when his grace had past the seas
And into France had gone,
With envious heart, queene Ellinor
To Woodstocke came anone.
And forth she calls this trustye knighte,
In an unhappy houre;
Who with his clue of twined thread
Came from this famous bower.
And when that they had wounded him,
The queene this thread did gette,
And went where ladye Rosamonde
Was like an angell sette.
But when the queene with stedfast eye
Beheld her beauteous face,
She was amazed in her minde
At her exceeding grace.
‘Cast off from thee those robes,’ she said,
‘That riche and costyle bee;
And drinke thou up this deadlye draught,
Which I have brought to thee.’
Then presentlye upon her knees
Sweet Rosamonde did falle;
And pardon of the queene she crav’d
For her offences all.
‘Take pitty on my youthfull yeares,’
Faire Rosamonde did crye;
‘And lett mee not with poison stronge
Enforced bee to dye.
I will renounce my sinfull life,
And in some cloyster bide;
Or else be banisht, if you please,
To range the world soe wide.
And for the fault which I have done,
Though I was forc’d thereto,
Preserve my life, and punish mee
As you thinke meet to do.’
And with these words, her lillie handes
She wrunge full often there;
And downe along her lovely face
Did trickle many a teare.
But nothing could this furious queene
Therewith appeased bee;
The cup of deadlye poyson stronge,
As she knelt on her knee,
Shee gave this comelye dame to drinke,
Who tooke it in her hande,
And from her bended knee arose,
And on her feet did stand;
And casting up her eyes to heaven,
Shee did for mercye calle;
And drinking up the poison stronge,
Her life she lost withalle.
And when that death through everye limbe
Had showde its greatest spite,
Her chiefest foes did plaine confesse
Shee was a glorious wight.
Her body then they did entomb,
When life was fled away,
At Godstowe, neare to Oxford towne,
As may be seene this day.(26)

Here we see Rosamond as a paragon of beauty and even virtue: her ‘youthfull years’ may excuse her offence, and in any case she was ‘forc’d thereto’. Eleanor, though, appears as a woman pitiless in her jealousy, furiously bent on vengeance. We note that this was wreaked, with some rearrangement of history, during Henry's absence in France, where he was seeking to scotch his son's rebellion.

The timing is different in Samuel Daniel's more sophisticated poem, ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’, which was printed with a collection of sonnets in 1592.²⁷ Daniel was an Oxford-educated son of a music master. He died in 1619, having risen to a post at court and composed various masques for festivities there. In his later years he also, appropriately enough, acted as tutor to Anne Clifford, daughter of the Countess of Cumberland. Steeped in Renaissance conceits, his ‘Complaint’ views the affair in retrospect through the guilt-ridden words of Rosamond's shade:

Out from the horror of infernall deepes,
My poore afflicted ghost comes here to plain it,
Attended with my shame that never sleepes,
The spot wherewith my kind, and youth did staine it.
My body found a grave where to containe it:
A sheete could hide my face, but not my sin,
For Fame findes never Tombe t’inclose it in.
And which is worse, my soule is now denied
Her transport to the sweet Elisian rest,
The ioyfull blisse for Ghosts repurified,
The ever-springing Gardens of the blest:
Caron denies me waftage with the rest,
And saies my soule can never passe the River,
Till Lovers' sighs on earth shall it deliver.

As Rosamond proceeds with her story, we find a very Christian moral displayed within the Classical frame. Her innocent upbringing by fond parents in their country home was left behind when she came to court and the notice of King Henry.

For after all his victories in France,
And all the triumphs of his honour wonne,
Unmatcht by sword, was vanquisht by a glance,
And hotter warres within his breast begunne.
Warres, whom whole legions of desires draw on:
Against all which, my chastitie contends,
With force of honour, which my shame defends.

Even Henry's ‘feeble age’ did not quell his desire; and after a lengthy struggle, Rosamond's resistance was overcome by a go-between who urged the case for public honour against private virtue. So she was swept off by the king to a ‘sollitarie Grange’, where she was pampered with jewels and a rich casket carved with lusty mythological scenes. Prompted by ‘iealousie increas’d with age's coldnesse’, Henry built there a palace in the form of a maze:

None but the King might come into the place,
With certaine Maides that did attend my neede,
And he himselfe came guided by a threed.

Plagued, like the jealous husband of troubadour lyric and courtly romance, by the fear of prying eyes, he turned Rosamond's freedom into a resented captivity. If only, she laments, she had not come to court, ‘But liv’d at home a happy Countrey Maide’ instead of becoming a ‘maide misled’. Even in what has now become for her a prison Justice could not keep rumour at bay:

And this our stealth she could not long conceale
From her whom such a forfeit most concerned:
The wronged Queene, who could so closely deale,
That she the whole of all our practise learned,
And watcht a time when least it was discerned,
In absence of the King to wreake her wrong
With such revenge as she desired long.
The Labyrinth she entered by that Threed,
That serv’d a conduct to my absent Lord,
Left there by chance, reserv’d for such a deed,
Where she surpriz’d me whom she so abhor’d.
Enrag’d with madnesse, scarce she speakes a word,
But flies with eager furie to my face,
Offring me most unwomanly disgrace.
Looke how a Tygresse that hath lost her Whelpe,
Runnes fiercely ranging through the Woods astray:
And seeing her selfe depriv’d of hope or helpe,
Furiously assaults what’s in her way,
To satisfie her wrath (not for a pray),
So fell she on me in outragious wise,
As could Disdaine and Iealousie devise.
And after all her vile reproches usde,
She forc’d me take the Poyson she had brought,
To end the life that had her so abusde,
And free her feares, and ease her iealous thought.
No cruelty her wrath could leave unwrought,
No spitefull act that to Revenge is common;
(No beast being fiercer than a iealous woman.)
Here take (saith she) thou impudent uncleane,
Base gracelesse Strumpet, take this next your heart;
Your Love-sick heart, that over-charg’d hath beene
With Pleasure's surfeit, must be purg’d with Art.
This potion hath a power that will convart
To naught those humors that oppresse you so.
And (Gerle) Ile see you take it ere I go.
What, stand you now amaz’d, retire you back?
Tremble you (Minion)? Come, dispatch with speed;
There is no helpe, your Champion now you lacke,
And all these teares you shed will nothing steed;
Those dainty fingers needes must doe the deed.
Take it, or I will drench you else by force,
And trifle not, lest that I use you worse.
Having this bloody doome from hellish breath,
My wofull eyes on every side I cast:
Rigor about me, in my hand my death,
Presenting me the horror of my last:
All hope of pitty and of comfort past.
No meanes, no power; no forces to contend,
My trembling hands must give my selfe my end.
Those hands that beautie's ministers had bin,
They must give death, that me adorn’d of late,
That mouth that newly gave consent to sin,
Must now receive destruction in thereat,
That body, which my lust did violate,
Must sacrifice it selfe t’appease the wrong.
(So short is pleasure, glory lasts not long.)
And she no sooner saw I had it taken,
But forth she rushes (proud with victorie)
And leaves m’alone, of all the world forsaken,
Except of Death, which she had left with me
(Death and my selfe alone together be),
To whom she did her full revenge refer.
Oh poore weake conquest both for him and her.

Having learnt her lesson too late, Rosamond expatiates upon it with her long-dying breath. One should defend one's chastity against lust:

The spot is foule, though by a Monarch made,
Kings cannot priviledge what God forbade.

Scarcely has her soul left her body than the king arrives ‘to see his dearest ioy’. Finding only her corpse, he collapses in sighs and lamentations before embracing it and wishing for his own death.

Yet ere I die, thus much my soule doth vow,
Revenge shall sweeten death with ease of minde.

That revenge is not, however, reported by the ghost of Rosamond, who simply adds that her body was interred with due ceremony at Godstow.

With all its pious moralizing (the only relief being the courtly thought that lovers' sighs may work the soul's redemption), Daniel's poem serves less as a celebration, like the ballad, than as a warning. The liaison of king and courtesan is presented not as a thwarted idyll, but as an affair steeped in sin. Yet here too Eleanor, though ‘the wronged Queene’, is depicted more as a she-devil than as a righteous avenger. Legend seems to have cast her irrevocably in the villain's role. However, if we move on a century we have a surprise in store.

In 1707 Joseph Addison tried his hand at an opera, Rosamond, on the subject.²⁸ It was a flop, as even his devotee Thomas Tickell concedes in a preface to his works. The blame, though, he lays on the music, not sufficiently to the Italian taste; but ‘the Poetry of this piece has given as much pleasure in the closet, as others have afforded from the stage, with all the assistance of voices and instruments’. In some fulsome introductory lines he asserts:

… the charm’d reader with thy thought complies,
Feels corresponding joys or sorrows rise,
And views thy Rosamond with Henry's eyes.

Addison ingeniously leavens the rhetoric, pomp and circumstance of the main action with an amusing subsidiary plot, in which Sir Trusty, ‘Keeper of the Bower’, is suspected by his wife Grideline of himself casting lecherous eyes on Rosamond. The piece opens with a page showing the bower to Eleanor and prompting from her a series of passionate outbursts:

Curse on the name! I faint, I die,
With secret pangs of jealousie. …
My wrath, like that of heavn’n, shall rise,
And blast her in her Paradise. …
In such an endless maze I rove,
Lost in the labyrinths of love.
My breast with hoarded vengeance burns,
While fear and rage
With hope engage,
And rule my wav’ring soul by turns. …
Eleanora, think betimes,
What are thy hated rival's crimes!
Whither, ah whither dost thou go!
What has she done to move thee so!
—Does she not warm with guilty fires
The faithless Lord of my desires?
Have not her fatal arts remov’d
My Henry from my arms?
’Tis her crime to be lov’d
’Tis her crime to have charms.
Let us fly, let us fly,
She shall die, she shall die.

So this is the furious Eleanor established by the earlier texts. But suddenly she seems to hesitate:

I feel, I feel my heart relent,
How could the Fair be innocent!
To a monarch like mine,
Who would not resign!
One so great and so brave
All hearts must enslave.

Her qualms are short-lived; for at that moment Henry returns from his wars to the sound of trumpet, fife and drum. It is too much for the queen:

Henry returns, from danger free!
Henry returns—but not to me.
He comes his Rosamond to greet,
And lay his laurels at her feet,
His vows impatient to renew;
His vows to Eleanora due.
Here shall the happy nymph detain
(While of his absence I complain),
Hid in her mazy, wanton bower,
My lord, my life, my conqueror.
No, no, ’tis decreed
The Traitress shall bleed;
No fear shall alarm,
No pity disarm;
In my rage shall be seen
The revenge of a Queen.

There follows a lively, comic tiff between Sir Trusty and Grideline, which causes him to lament:

How hard is our fate,
Who serve in the state,
And should lay out our cares,
On publick affairs;
When conjugal toils,
And family-broils
Make all our great labours miscarry!
Yet this is the lot
Of him that has got
Fair Rosamond's bower,
With the clew in his power,
And is courted by all,
Both the great and the small,
As principal pimp to King Harry.

Seeing Rosamond draw near, he eavesdrops on her heart-rending lament regretting Henry's tardiness in coming to her; but the high tone is deflated by his down-to-earth aside:

How much more bless’d would lovers be,
Did all the whining fools agree
To live like Grideline and me!

In the following scenes Harry arrives with another flourish of trumpets and is escorted by Trusty into Rosamond's presence, rhapsodizing as he goes. Yet after only a brief reunion, he retires to rest in a nearby grotto.

At this juncture the page, sent by Grideline to spy on Trusty, in fact points out the bower to Eleanor; and she reacts with characteristic fury:

I see, I see my hands embru’d
In purple streams of reeking blood:
I see the victim gasp for breath,
And start in agonies of death:
I see my raging dying Lord,
And O, I see my self abhorr’d!

She shortly appears before Rosamond with a bowl in one hand and a dagger in the other. She gives her fair rival the choice:

Or quickly drain the fatal Bowl,
Or this right hand performs its part,
And plants a Dagger in thy heart.

Rosamond's pleas for pity or to be shut away in some deep dungeon seem to evoke a passing scruple in Eleanor's mind:

Moving language, shining tears,
Glowing guilt, and graceful fears,
Kindling pity, kindling rage,
At once provoke me, and asswage.

But no:

Thou shalt die. …
Prepare to welter in a flood
Of streaming gore.

And faced with the dagger-wielding queen, Rosamond finally takes the bowl and drinks, though not without a desperate threat:

At dead of night,
A glaring spright,
With hideous screams
I’ll haunt thy dreams
And when the painful night withdraws,
My Henry shall revenge my cause.
O whither doe my frenzy drive!
Forgive my rage, your wrongs forgive.
My veins are froze; my blood grows chill;
The weary springs of life stand still;
The sleep of death benumbs all o’er
My fainting limbs, and I’m no more.

At once Eleanor calls for attendants and bids them bear the corpse for burial to a convent beside the Isis.

So Addison has taken the by now familiar legend, padded it out a little with a few comic scenes, and brought in the choice of death by dagger or by poison. He has, however, a final trick up his sleeve. Sir Trusty comes upon the corpse and tell-tale bowl. In a paroxysm of grief, he drains the rest of its contents before penning a brief note to the king:

‘Great Sir,
Your Rosamond is dead
As I am at this present writing.’
The bower turns round, my brain's abus’d,
The Labyrinth grows more confused,
The thickets dance—I stretch, I yawn.
Death has tripp’d up my heels—I’m gone.

In a soliloquy, Eleanor declares that ‘Rosamond shall charm no more’ and ‘My Henry shall be mine alone’.

But the opera has still a few minutes to run, the first of which are taken up by the presentation to the slumbering Henry of an angelic vision predicting the nation's glorious future. This so fires the royal blood with patriotic zeal that he solemnly vows, if with some regret, to abandon love for duty. Enter the queen at the side of a stage garnished with bowl, dagger, body of Sir Trusty, and the latter's note now being read by Henry. Still hoping to regain her husband's love, she is noticed by the distracted Henry:

But see! the cause of all my fears,
The source of all my grief appears!
No unexpected guest is here;
The fatal bowl
Inform’d my soul
Eleonora was too near.

There follows a bout of mutual recriminations; but then Eleanor's heart is softened:

My Lord, I cannot see you mourn;
The Living you lament: while I,
To be lamented so, cou’d Die.

Faced by Henry's incredulity, she asks whether, should Rosamond be alive, he would not renew the wrongs she has suffered.

Oh no; by Visions from above
Prepar’d for grief, and free’d from love,
I came to take my last adieu.

His queen, overjoyed, explains that the supposed poison was in reality a sleep-inducing drug;

But soon the waking nymph shall rise,
And, in a convent plac’d, admire
The cloister’d walls and virgin choire:
With them in songs and hymns divine
The beauteous penitent shall join,
And bid the guilty world adieu.

Mutual forgiveness follows immediately: there shall be no more disloyalty or grief between them, for they will ‘ever more united live’. After Sir Trusty has staggered in, not knowing whether he is alive or dead, king and queen proclaim together ‘the sweets of virtuous love’.

With his happy ending, Addison has finally thumbed his nose at history, though his confinement of the living Rosamond to the convent at Godstow is not wholly implausible. As for Eleanor's unexpected streak of tenderness, this is pure melodrama, not informed character portrayal.

Eleanor's fame, or notoriety, in England seems by this time to have rested largely on her apocryphal dealings with fair Rosamond. The story is taken up again in the 1820s by a curious book entitled The Unfortunate Royal Mistresses, Rosamond Clifford, and Jane Shore, Concubines to King Henry the Second and Edward the Fourth, with Historical and Metrical Memoirs of those Celebrated Persons.²⁹ The Preface contains a half-hearted attempt to accommodate history to legend, accepting for instance that Rosamond's death by poison had been ably refuted by Carte (in his History of England, 1747-55), ‘who states, that through grief at the defection of her royal admirer on his marriage with Eleanor, she retired from the world, and became a nun at Godstow, where she died, and had a tomb erected to her memory’. The author adds: ‘It is very improbable, that if Queen Eleanor had been placed in captivity, on account of the part she had in the death of Rosamond Clifford, that her youngest son, King John, who was greatly attached to his mother, should repair Godstow nunnery, and endow it with yearly revenues, that the holy virgins there might relieve with their prayers the souls of his father King Henry, and of Lady Rosamond, there interred.’ As for the real cause of the latter's death, the suggestion is that Eleanor ‘treated her harshly; with furious menaces, we may suppose, and sharp expostulations, which had such an effect on her spirits, that she did not long survive it’.

The first of the ‘metrical memoirs’ is Deloney's ballad. Then, after a long antiquarian excursus on Godstow, there follows ‘The Unfortunate Concubine; or, Rosamond's Overthrow’.³⁰ As the following extracts show, some attempt has been made in it to relocate the legend in its historical context:

As three young Knights of Sal’sbury
Were riding on their way,
One boasted of a fair lady,
Within her bow’r so gay.
I have a sister, Clifford swears,
But few men do her know;
Upon her face the skin appears
Like drops of blood on snow;
My sister's locks of curled hair
Outshine the golden ore,
Her skin for whiteness may compare
With the fine lilly flow’r:
Her breasts are lovely to behold,
Like to the driven snow:
I would not, for her weight in gold,
King Henry should her know.
King Henry had a bower near
Where they were riding by,
And he did Clifford over-hear:
Thought he immediately,
Tho’ I her brother should offend
For that fair white and red,
For her I am resolv’d to send
To grace my royal bed.

Matching deed to thought, Henry sends the girl three letters by her brother.

Then with her fingers, long and small,
She broke the seals of gold;
And as she did to reading fall
At first you might behold
The smiles of pleasant sweet delight,
As if well satisfy’d;
But e’re she had concluded quite,
She wrung her hands, and cry’d;
Why did you boast beyond your bounds,
When Oxford you did see?
You might have talk’d of hawkes and hounds,
And never bragg’d of me.
When by the King I am defil’d,
My father's griefs begin;
He’ll have no comfort of his child,
Nor come to my wedding.
Go, fetch me down my planet-book
Straight from my private room;
For in the same I mean to look,
What is decreed my doom.
The planet-book to her they brought,
And laid it on her knee;
And found that all would come to nought,
For poison’d she should be.
I curse you brother, then she cry’d,
Who caused my destiny;
I might have been some Lord's fair bride,
But you have ruin’d me.

Summoned to the court, she blushes with embarrassment at the king's demand that she grace his royal bed. However,

The gifts and presents of a King
Soon caused her to comply;
Thinking there was not any thing
Like royal dignity.
But as her bright and golden scene
In Court began to shine,
The news was carry’d to the Queen
Of this new Concubine.
At which she was enraged so
With malice in her breast,
That till she wrought her overthrow
She could not be at rest.
She felt the fury of the Queen,
E’re she had flourish’d long;
And dy’d just as she had foreseen
By force of poison strong.
The angry Queen with malice fraught,
Could not herself contain,
Till she fair Rosamond had brought
To her sad fatal bane.
The sweet and charming precious rose,
King Henry's chief delight!
The Queen she to the bower goes,
And wrought her hateful spight:
But when she to the bower came,
Where lady Clifford lay,
Enraged Elinor by name
She could not find the way,
Until the silken clue of thread
Became a fatal guide
Unto the Queen, who laid her dead,
E’re she was satisfy’d.
Alas! it was no small surprize
To Rosamond the fair:
When death appear’d before her eyes,
No faithful friend was there,
Who could stand up in her defence,
To put the potion by;
So, by the hands of violence,
Compell’d she was to die.
O most renowned, gracious Queen,
Compassion take of me;
I wish that I had never seen
Such royal dignity.
Betray’d I was, and by degrees
A sad consent I gave;
And now upon my bended knees,
I do your pardon crave.
I will not pardon you, she cry’d;
So take this fatal cup:
And you may well be satisfy’d
I’ll see you drink it up.
Then with her fair and milk-white hand,
The fatal cup she took;
Which being drank, she could not stand,
But soon the world forsook.
Now when the King was well inform’d
What Elinor had done,
His breast he smote, in wrath he storm’d
As if he would have run
Besides his senses; and he swore,
For this inhuman deed,
He never would bed with her more,
His royal heart did bleed.
The King did not stand pausing long,
How to reward her spleen;
But straight in a close prison strong
He cast his cruel queen:
Where she lay six and twenty years
A long captivity,
Bathed in floods of weeping tears,
Till his death set her free.
Now when her son he did succeed
His father, great Henry,
His royal mother soon he freed
From her captivity:
And she set many more at large,
Who long for debt had lain;
Her royal pity did discharge
Thousands in Richard's reign.

So perhaps this rhymester had a sneaking regard for Eleanor after all, which he contrived to show by adding his footnote about her attested release of many of Henry's prisoners: an odd historical touch in this welter of poetic licence. There is a note of sympathy too in a further poem, ‘The Epistle of Rosamond to King Henry the Second’.³¹ Here we find Rosamond bemoaning her guilt from the labyrinth at Woodstock while Henry lingers abroad, fighting his sons. She imagines herself an object of universal loathing:

The married women curse my hateful life,
Wronging a faire Queen, and a vertuous wife;
The maidens wish, I buried quick may die,
Well knew'st thou what a Monster I would be
When thou did'st build this Labyrinth for me.

To this the king replies in ‘Henry to Rosamond’;³²

Long since (thou know’st) my care provided for
To lodge thee safe from jealous Ellinor;
The labyrinth's conveyance guides thee so,
(Which only Vaughan, thou, and I doe know)
If shee do guard thee with an hundred eyes,
I have an hundred subtill Mercuries,
To watch that Argus which my love doth keepe,
Untill eye, after eye, fall all to sleepe.

One may think the mythological decoration overstrained not only with the unoriginal equation of Eleanor with Argus, but especially when Rosamond is seen as the Minotaur!

The section of the book on Rosamond concludes with a ‘brief history of this “Unfortunate Concubine”, from the pen of a celebrated modern writer’. We are told in lyrical vein of how Rosamond's ‘beauty, wit, and extreme good humour’ captivated her monarch, who built for her a proud palace at Woodstock and then enclosed it with a labyrinth ‘to baffle the prying curiosity of the queen’.

Months rolled on, and every day seemed but to dawn on the increasing fervour of his affection. Never were such a fond couple yet seen. Their felicity was too pure for earth; and cruel fate, as if indignant at their early anticipations of heaven, seemed resolved to mar their happiness, for the jealous queen, alarmed at the growing indifference of her royal consort, persuaded his confidential servant to hint the cause of his alienated affections. Profuse bribery was resorted to, and the ungrateful domestic was not proof against the splendid temptations that were held out to him. He consented one evening to betray the abode of poor Rosamond, and lead the infuriated queen into the very apartment that contained her enemy.

It was a fine evening, and Fair Rosamond was seated at her woodbine bower, singing the song that had so often charmed her lover. It was a strain of delicious nature, and was heard by the distant nightingale, who prolonged by her sweet voice the melancholy plaint of her rival. Tears stole down her cheek; she wept she knew not why - her Henry was indeed away, but had he not promised to return by the change of the waning moon? On a sudden the sound of approaching footsteps was heard in the silence of twilight. ‘It is my Harry,’ exclaimed the delighted girl, and sprung in ecstacy to meet him. A form did indeed advance, but it was not the form that she had been accustomed to hail so fondly. A female of haughty mien approached the affrighted Rosamond, and in a voice of passion, desired her to drink the contents of a bowl she held in her hand. The poor girl requested permission to retire, the tears stood in her lovely eyes; but the queen seemed bent on her destruction. Weary with supplication, she at last faulteringly besought permission to write one last letter to her lover, a request which was granted with a sneer. Rosamond then swallowed the envenomed contents of the bowl, and while the hues of death passed over her sweet face, inscribed this simple letter to her monarch.

‘Henry, my own dear Henry, we must part for ever; a poisonous reptile has stung your poor Rosamond to death, and she will never again behold you. But do not forget me, love; sometimes visit the grave where she who was once your's now reposes, and her spirit will yet be happy; for if souls are ever permitted to re-visit earth, I will come to you, and talk of the happiness of our re-union. Henry, I can write to you no more, I am already dying; but the last fond name that trembles on my lips, shall be the dear, dear name of Henry.’

On concluding this letter, the poor girl sank back in a swoon on her couch: she held out her hand as if imploring forgiveness on the head of her murderer, and in a few minutes her pure spirit had passed away.

It was now the change of the moon, the period promised for Henry's return. He was punctual to his appointment, and arrived in a state of ecstacy at the beautiful bowers he had so long left. He hastened to the favourite alcove of his mistress; and the woods and the grottos echoed back his fond exclamation; ‘Rosamond, dear Rosamond, why do you not come to meet me?’ No voice of greeting replied, but all was desolate and forlorn. He reached the bower, and beheld the letter of his love. He wept not—but a deep sigh escaped him, as he requested to see the spot where she was buried. There he spent days and nights in a state of the deepest gloom; and for months and months afterwards, a soft tender voice was heard at the hour of twilight, echoing through the groves of Woodstock—‘Rosamond, dear Rosamond, why do you not come to meet me?’ This could not last; he died of a broken heart, and at the hour of his dissolution, consoled himself by reflecting that he should at least meet his mistress in heaven.³³

It is plain that Romanticism has passed this way. Who is this Henry, whose soft tender voice was heard cooing through the groves of Woodstock until, poor love-lorn swain, he died of a broken heart? As for Eleanor, despite her haughty mien, she is still damned by her victim as a poisonous reptile, at least until that posibly redemptive gesture. One cannot wonder that would-be historians, familiar with such literary or sub-literary fancies along with the unreliable accounts of their predecessors, but lacking sound editions of much of the basic source material, should find it hard to strip away legend from fact. This was the case with Agnes Strickland, whose biography of ‘Eleanora of Aquitaine’ appeared in the first volume of her Lives of the Queens of England, dedicated to the young Queen Victoria.³⁴ Regarded as a standard work, this must have consolidated the picture of Eleanor in the minds of countless young (and older) Victorians.

Strickland admits that ‘It is not a very easy task to reduce to any thing like perspicuity the various traditions which float through the chronicles regarding queen Eleanora's unfortunate rival, the celebrated Rosamond Clifford.’ Pinning too much faith on ‘the learned and accurate Carte’ (Thomas Carte, who wrote his History of England in 1747-55), she asserts:

It appears that the acquaintance between Rosamond and Henry commenced in early youth, about the time of his knighthood by his uncle the king of Scotland; that it was renewed at the time of his successful invasion of England, when he entered privately into marriage contract with the unsuspecting girl; and before he left England, to return to his wife, his noble boy William, surnamed Long-éspée, was born.

Strickland wonders how queen and mistress were kept in ignorance of his perfidy. She soon resorts to an even less reliable source, John Brompton, who passed as a chronicler in the first half of the fifteenth century.

As Rosamond was retained by him as a prisoner, though not an unwilling one, it was easy to conceal from her the facts, that he had wedded a queen and brought her to England; but his chief difficulty was to conceal Rosamond's existence from Eleanora, and yet to indulge himself with frequent visits to the real object of his love.

Brompton says, ‘That one day queen Eleanora saw the king walking in the pleasance of Woodstock, with the end of a ball of floss silk attached to his spur; coming near him unperceived, she took up the ball, and the king walking on, the silk unwound, and thus the queen traced him to a thicket in the labyrinth or maze of the park, where he disappeared. She kept the matter secret, often revolving in her own mind in what company he could meet with balls of silk. Soon after, the king left Woodstock for a distant journey; then queen Eleanora, bearing her discovery in mind, searched the thicket in the park, and discovered a low door cunningly concealed; this door she had forced, and found it was the entrance to a winding subterranean path, which led out at a distance to a sylvan lodge in the most retired part of the adjacent forest.’ Here the queen found, in a bower, a young lady of incomparable beauty, busily engaged in embroidery. Queen Eleanora then easily guessed how balls of silk attached themselves to king Henry's spurs. Whatever was the result of the interview between Eleanora and Rosamond, it is certain that the queen did not destroy her rival either by sword or poison, though in her rage it is possible that she might threaten both. That Rosamond was not killed may be ascertained by the charters before named, which plainly show that she lived twenty years, in great penitence, after her retirement from the king. It is extremely probable that her interview with Eleanora led to her first knowledge that Henry was a married man, and consequently to her profession at Godstow, which took place the second year of Henry's reign.

Strickland reasons that Rosamond's death twenty years later happened to coincide with Henry's imprisonment of his wife; and this gave rise to the report of Eleanor's complicity. Brompton's ‘chronology of the incidents is decidedly wrong, but the actual events are confirmed by the most ancient authorities’.

The story of Fair Rosamond was thus sanctioned by ‘history’ and indeed has remained the stuff of guide-books to this day. For later nineteenth-century writers it was available as one of the collection of popular narrative themes such as the Tristan or Faust stories and had the particular advantage of its similarity with the Garden of Eden myth, with Eleanor readily cast as the serpent. A medley of history and legend, it was there to be treated with as free a hand as the writer chose, historical truth entirely at the mercy of the individual imagination. A glance at two plays by leading Victorian poets will show Eleanor adapted to her new environment, while retaining her unsavoury reputation.

The first is an immature drama by Swinburne, published in 1860 and ignored thereafter, although not devoid of psychological and poetic interest.³⁵ A short piece, drenched in Pre-Raphaelite sentiment and verbiage, it reduces history to the dramatic setting for Eleanor's revenge. Rosamond fears the loss of Henry's love, should he be reconciled to his dark-haired, sun-dried queen, whom ‘men call … an adder underfoot’. Jealous of her fair rival, Eleanor schemes to be taken to her, promising to do her no harm, to wear men's clothes, even to kiss the dust from her guide's feet if need be. Yet she does not mask her hatred: ‘Hell's heat burn through that whorish mouth of hers!’ And in a scene with Henry her ‘French blood, south blood’ rises against him too. We are shown the king in the bower, trying to reassure the weeping Rosamond:

O sweet, what sting is this she makes in you?
A Frenchwoman, black-haired and with grey lips
And fingers like a hawk's cut claw that nips
One's wrist to carry—is this so great a thing
As should wring wet out of your lids?

In their final confrontation neither rival wants for words. Rosamond claims there was no malice in her sin:

If you could see the pained poor heart in me
You would find nothing hateful toward you
In all the soft red record its blood makes.

But Eleanor is implacable. Seizing Rosamond by the throat, she offers her in convoluted terms the choice of death by sword or by poison. She has no wish to break her oath by harming her directly. But when the drink is taken, she makes it clear that this was no potion like that dreamed up by Addison:

                                                            It is done indeed.
Perchance now it should please you to be sure
This were no poison? as it is, it is.
Ha, the lips tighten so across the teeth
They should bite in, show blood; how white she is,
Yea, white! dead green now like a fingered leaf.

Henry arrives and turns to the gloating queen:

Thou art worse caught than anything in hell—
To put thy hands upon this body—God,
Curse her for me! I will not slay thee yet,
But damn thee some fine quiet way.

With a final kiss he seals the death of Rosamond; and his lament ends the play.

Tennyson had been attracted to the theme in his youth and treated it in an unfinished lyric. When he took it up again in his five-act drama Becket, he wove it into a fully researched historical tragedy.³⁶ This was written in 1884 and successfully staged in 1891. Although he seems well versed in the facts as set forth in his day in works like Agnes Strickland's, as a dramatist he had enough belief in his art to make them dance to its tune. The result is a complex but powerful play, in which Eleanor is given a substantial role and her character allowed some development.

Time and place are straddled by the play's action; or rather actions, since the Rosmond theme is interwoven with the political, as we follow Henry's souring relations with Becket in the context of the growing conflict between Church and state. In a prologue we find the king telling his boon companion Becket, not yet priest, of his fears that Eleanor may seek the death of Rosamond, his ‘true heart-wife’, and that he has built for her a bower to save her life and ‘the soul of Eleanor from hell-fire’. The queen gets wind of this and schemes with Fitzurse, a former admirer of the girl, to bring her to the dust, have her ‘eat it like the serpent, and be driven out of her paradise’.

In London Rosamond, not yet shut away, is saved from the pursuing Fitzurse by Becket, who has her escorted to the bower in monk's disguise. Her total innocence is gradually revealed: she thinks herself married to Henry, by whom she has an infant son Geoffrey; and she believes Eleanor still to be queen of France. When accidentally enlightened by a maidservant, she is utterly bewildered. Eleanor comes to the woods round the bower and there finds little Geoffrey straying, persuades him that she is a fairy, and has him lead her to his mother, following a silken thread. With few preliminaries other than the disclosure of her identity, she offers her rival the choice of dagger or poison or else, on the sudden appearance of Fitzurse, to surrender herself to him. Rosamond indignantly rejects him and bids Eleanor strike. The queen raises the dagger, crying:

This in thy bosom, fool,
And after in thy bastard's!

But at that moment her arm is caught from behind, and the dagger falls to the ground. The hand belongs to Becket, who, though now archbishop, had once been appointed by Henry as his mistress' guardian. The good man will now take her and the child to Godstow nunnery.

We are next transported to Normandy, where Eleanor has arrived with Fitzurse, aiming to kindle Henry's anger against the archbishop. Their success is marked by the king's well-known cry: ‘Will no man free me from this pestilent priest?’ Back in Canterbury we hear Rosamond, disguised once more as a monk, pleading with Becket to spare Henry from excommunication. Events then take their more authentic course, with the archbishop being hewn down at his altar by four knights, Fitzurse among them. But the poet has reserved one last dramatic device: the Fair Rosamond, praying in the cathedral for her holy protector, has witnessed the grim deed; and as the murderers rush out, she is left kneeling alone by the body as lightning flashes through the shrine.

Although Tennyson has developed Eleanor's character along familiar lines, he has filled it out with other traditions that had grown about her. She is very much a daughter of the south: ‘I would I were in Aquitaine again—your north wind chills me.’ We even see her in the prologue composing a song, ‘for I am a Troubadour, you know, and won the violet at Toulouse; but my voice is harsh here, not in tune, a nightingale out of season; for marriage … has killed the golden violet’. Are we to feel some sympathy for a woman embittered by exile from her native land and the neglect of a truant husband? On the other hand, the cornered Rosamond reveals more knowledge of her past than we had suspected. Threatened by the dagger, she despairs of her life and her son's:

                                                            both of us will die,
And I will fly with my sweet boy to heaven,
And shriek to all the saints among the stars:
‘Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor of England!
Murder’d by that adulteress Eleanor,
Whose doings are a horror to the east,
A hissing in the west!’ Have we not heard
Raymond of Poitou, thine own uncle—nay,
Geoffrey Plantagenet, thine own husband's father—
Nay, ev’n the accursed heathen Saladdeen—
Strike!
I challenge thee to meet me before God.
Answer me there.

Eleanor seems to feel less guilt than nostalgia for that murky past. When Becket declines to retrieve the fallen dagger, she picks it up herself:

I had it from an Arab soldan, who,
When I was there in Antioch, marvell’d at
Our unfamiliar beauties of the west;
But wonder’d more at my much constancy
To the monk-king Louis, our former burthen,
From whom, as being too kin, you know, my lord,
God's grace and Holy Church deliver’d us.
I think, time given, I could have talk’d him out of
His ten wives into one.

Tennyson may have failed to bring Rosamond convincingly to life (or indeed death); but he has used all his reading to broaden and deepen Eleanor's character. Left alone after her foiled attempt to undo her rival, she questions her own intentions, reflects on her value to Henry, and resolves that Becket at least must not gain his ear on the matter:

The world hath trick’d her—that’s the King;
if so,
There was the farce, the feint—not mine. And yet
I am all but sure my dagger was a feint
Till the worm turn’d—not life shot up in blood,
But death drawn in;—[looking at the vial] this was no feint then? no.
But I can swear to that, had she but given
Plain answer to plain query? nay, methinks
Had she but bow’d herself to meet the wave
Of humiliation, worshipt whom she loathed,
I should have let her be, scorn’d her too much
To harm her. Henry—Becket tells him this—
To take my life might lose him Aquitaine.
Too politic for that. Imprison me?
No, for it came to nothing—only a feint.
Why should I swear, Eleanor, whom am, or was,
A sovereign power? The King plucks out their eyes
Who anger him, and shall not I, the Queen,
Tear out her heart—kill, kill with knife or venom
One of his slanderous harlots? ‘None of such?’
I love her none the more. Tut, the chance gone,
She lives—but not for him; one point is gain’d.
O I, that thro’ the Pope divorced King Louis,
Scorning his monkery,—I that wedded Henry,
Honouring his manhood—will he not mock at me
The jealous fool balk’d of her will—with him?
But he and he must never meet again.

Tennyson's remains the most substantial treatment of the Rosamond affair. The Antioch scandal had shown us legend growing from scraps of fact and rumour. In the development of the Rosamond story we have watched the extension of this process: how, from shaky foundations, it evolved, shaped by various hands, into a neat tale with the simple coherence of a minor myth, its protagonists reduced to stereotypes. Now with Tennyson historical time and place have been refashioned into a setting within which the characters are manoeuvred to give the illusion of humanity.

At the heart of this redesigned world Eleanor appears as a woman largely at odds with it. Far from her own lands, the source of her pride and power, foreign to her subjects, betrayed by a husband with eyes only for her inheritance, their sons her sole hope for the future, we can understand if not sympathize with her jealous scheming against her rival and then Becket when her plans were foiled. Yet she was not so intent on revenge as not to feel scruples when confronted with Rosamond's disarming innocence; and she is herself left uncertain as to whether she would have steeled herself to deal the fatal stroke.

Tennyson, using the artist's privilege of devising actions and circumstances to give them coherence, has created, not discovered, character. The historian lacks this freedom as he practises a kind of psychological archaeology, unearthing known deeds and proposing the most plausible motives for them. The poet's final doubt about Eleanor's character was self-induced: the historian's is inevitable because of the nature of his exercise. Winston Churchill's sympathy did not, in the case of the Fair Rosamond story, lie with the historians; and he was surely voicing popular sentiment when he wrote: ‘Tiresome investigators have undermined this excellent tale, but it certainly should find its place in any history worthy of the name.’³⁷

THE AMAZON QUEEN

In modern times, then, the general perception of Eleanor's personality has been prejudiced by the best-known of the legends connected with her: her supposed dealings with Rosamond Clifford. Counteracting this to some extent has been her subjection to a more flattering kind of character distortion: an idealized picture of her as a romantic figure, resulting from the too ready acceptance of certain tales, some over-enthusiastic interpretation, and a good measure of wishful thinking.

Reports of her behaviour on the crusade were not wholly unfavourable, not that is before her indiscretions in Antioch; and within her lifetime they acquired more than a touch of glamour. The wholesale participation of women in the expedition caused, it is true, the raising of clerical eyebrows in some quarters; but in others it seems that their spirit was admired. One of the first to appeal for help to defend the holy places had, after all, been a woman: the revered queen mother Melisande of Jerusalem. So, in the general fervour, why should not women respond to the call? Privately, perhaps, the ladies were excited more by the prospect of exotic travel and the accomplishment of the greatest pilgrimage than by the thought of military campaigning, of which they could see plenty at home. They had heard of the wonders of the east from those who had returned from ‘Outremer’, and many had relatives living there. There was, moreover, a growing cult at this time for the legends and marvels of Classical Antiquity, not least the story of Troy as passed on through medieval Latin versions. And Troy brought to mind the exploits there of Penthesilea and her Amazon warriors.

One cannot know whether such matters entered Eleanor's head as she headed east with her companions in the crusading army. It was a decade or so later that she was to be the probable dedicatee, as we saw, of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie. There the Amazons' exploits are treated at some length.³⁸ Penthesilea brings them to the city to be greeted by Priam and told of Hector's death. They prepare for battle:

In a vast square beside an ancient towered building the Amazons armed. Penthesilea donned a hauberk whiter than snow upon frost: never, I am sure, might a man see so fine an armed figure. Two maidens to whom their lady showed great honour and much love placed her helmet on her head. It must have been precious and very costly, for the circlet and nose-piece were studded with precious stones and shone more brightly than a sunbeam. Burning with fierce rage, she swiftly mounted a Spanish bay that was bigger, stronger, more mettlesome and speedy than any other horse. It was covered with a silk cloth that seemed whiter than a lily and was hung with a hundred tiny golden, tinkling bells. Without more delay she girt on the polished steel sword, with which she will strike great powerful blows. By its strap of rich brocade she took a stout shield, whiter than snow and with a pure gold boss and bordered with gems: fine, blazing rubies and lustrous green emeralds. This she hung close at her neck. A maiden passed to her a lance of ash wood with a keen steel point and a beautiful bright pennant. Then she had her company mount quickly, without more ado. Of the thousand and more there are not ten who lack armour on heads, faces, arms and flanks. Over their double-linked hauberks threaded with gold they let their lovely hair hang free, groomed to such resplendence as to make pure gold seem dark. Bold and stout-hearted and with shields at the ready, they rode their horses straight through the gates. No such company had been seen since the world began nor will be again so long as it lasts; and each one of them bore a pennant on her sturdy, steel-tipped lance.

It is no wonder if those familiar with such accounts of noble, female warriors should find an analogy with the band of ladies who rode off to the crusade. Towards the end of the century the Greek chronicler Nicetas Choniates surely had Eleanor herself in mind when he described the arrival of the crusaders at Constantinople:

Even women travelled in their ranks, boldly sitting astride in their saddles as men do, dressed in male clothes and, with their lances and armour, looking just like men. With their warlike looks, they behaved in an even more masculine way than the Amazons. Among them there was even a second Penthesilea: a woman who, because of the gold embroidery on the hem of her dress, was nicknamed Chrysopus (Golden Foot).³⁹

So glorious a sight was apt to turn the heads of historians, who were even inclined to ascribe to the ladies much of the initiative in the crusade. Thus Joseph Françcois Michaud, who wrote his history of the crusades in 1812-22:

A great number of women, attracted by the example of Eleanor of Guienne, took up the cross, and armed themselves with sword and lance. A crowd of knights eagerly followed them; and indeed a species of shame seemed attached to all who did not go to fight the infidels. History relates that distaffs and spindles were sent to those who would not take arms, as an appropriate reproach for their cowardice. The troubadours and trouvères, whose songs were so much liked, and who employed themselves in singing the victories of knights over the Saracens, determined to follow into Asia the heroes and the dames they had celebrated in their verses. Queen Eleanor and Louis the Young took several troubadours and minstrels with them into the East, to alleviate the tediousness of a long journey.⁴⁰

The prim Agnes Strickland did not approve of such goings-on:

When queen Eleanora received the cross from St Bernard, at Vezalai, she directly put on the dress of an Amazon; and her ladies, all actuated by the same frenzy, mounted on horseback, and forming a lightly armed squadron, surrounded the queen when she appeared in public, calling themselves queen Eleanora's bodyguard. They practised Amazonian exercises, and performed a thousand follies in public, to animate their zeal as practical crusaders. By the suggestion of their young queen, this band of mad-women sent their useless distaffs, as presents, to all the knights and nobles who had the good sense to keep out of the crusading expedition.

Strickland's acceptance of the legend is plain from her very anti-feminist vituperations:

Such fellow-soldiers as queen Eleanora and her Amazons would have been quite sufficient to disconcert the plans and impede the projects of Hannibal himself; and though king Louis conducted himself with great ability and courage in his difficult enterprise, no prudence could counteract the misfortune of being encumbered with an army of fantastic women …

The freaks of queen Eleanora and her female warriors were the cause of all the misfortunes that befell king Louis and his army, especially in the defeat at Laodicea. The king had sent forward the queen and her ladies, escorted by his choicest troops, under the guard of count Maurienne. He charged them to choose for their camp the arid but commanding ground which gave them a view over the defiles of the valley of Laodicea. … Queen Eleanora acted in direct opposition to his rational directions. She insisted on her detachment of the army halting in a lovely romantic valley, full of verdant grass and gushing fountains. The king was encumbered by the immense baggage which, William of Tyre declares, the female warriors of queen Eleanora persisted in retaining in the camp at all risks.

Our historian goes on to tell how Louis, obliged to go looking for her, was ambushed by the Arabs and at one point forced to defend himself from the branches of a tree.

At length, by efforts of personal heroism, he succeeded in placing himself between the detachment of his ladies and the Saracens. But it was not till the dawn of day that he discovered his advanced troops, encamped in the romantic valley chosen by his poetical queen. Seven thousand of the flower of French chivalry paid with their lives the penalty of their queen's inexperience in warlike tactics; all the provision was cut off; the baggage containing the fine array of the lady-warriors, which had proved such an encumbrance to the king, was plundered by the Arabs and Saracens; and the whole army was reduced to great distress.⁴¹

Although there is no reliable evidence to support the notion of these noble wives of warrior husbands seeing themselves in the Amazon role and by their frivolous cavortings undermining the whole enterprise, modern writers have been reluctant to dismiss it entirely. Amy Kelly, for instance, speaks of the legend of their transvestite antics at Vézelay, but adds: ‘This dazzling dramatization of the story of the Amazons, popular in every castle, must have made a sensation and stimulated the recruiting notably.’ And later she affirms: ‘She appears to have kept en route to her role of Penthesilea, which, as it is said, had been such a success and inspiration at Vézelay.’⁴² But although we may sometimes suspect Eleanor of drawing inspiration from the courtly literature of her day, our caution in this instance cannot be too extreme.

THE COURTS OF LOVE

Tennyson's depiction, following Strickland, of Eleanor as a ‘troubadour’ is not totally implausible, though there is no documentation to support it. We know of a handful of trobairitz, the female counterparts of the troubadours, noble ladies with a countess or two among them; so there were no social impediments to Eleanor's practising the art. Her family, we remember, had its exponents in the shape of her grandfather William and her favourite son Richard; and she may well have tried her hand at a tactful song or two. It is also a safe assumption that more troubadours than Bernard of Ventadour enjoyed her patronage at one time or another. Even if she did not herself compose, we can reasonably conclude that she had a lively interest in new ways of handling the eternal theme of love and in observing the social and literary posturings of its aficionados. All this had, after all, acquired in large measure the character of a refined courtly game.⁴³

If these conclusions can be drawn with some confidence, they have not been enough to satisfy past generations of scholars as well as popular historians, who have magnified unreasonably Eleanor's role in this romantic revolution. She has been seen as presiding at Poitiers over actual ‘courts of love’ in the full juridical sense, where specific cases were debated and judgements issued. In this she would have been no mere observer, but would have played a leading part in promoting and codifying the amoral system of fin amor which for more than a century has been commonly known as ‘courtly love’.

The whole idea stems from what is now accepted as a too literal interpretation of the treatise De Amore by Andreas Capellanus, or Andrew the Chaplain, which I mentioned earlier. Nothing certain is known of this Andrew, who seems to have written his provocative work between 1186 and 1196 at the court of Eleanor's daughter Marie of Champagne. It purports to be instruction offered to a young man in the ways and proper conduct of lovers. In it Andrew defines the nature of love and its various manifestations, and how it may be pursued and maintained by the discriminating; particular cases are pronounced upon, and the God of Love's thirty-one rules are listed as vouchsafed to a British knight at King Arthur's court. In a final section, however, Andrew calls all his instruction into question by recommending his young friend to turn his back on it and think rather of directing his thoughts to God. The retraction is reminiscent of Ovid, the work's principal inspiration; and the very brevity of this final section suggests a conniving wink from Andrew as, living up to his nominal office, he offers his unexpected advice to the young tyro.

To overturn in this way his previous lessons would seem a gratuitous snub to the fine ladies whose judgements he had just reported. They were Marie herself, an anonymous group in Gascony, Louis's third queen Adela of Champagne, Eleanor's niece the countess of Flanders, Ermengarde countess of Narbonne, and Queen Eleanor herself. The first of the latter's judgements concerned a lover who, having obtained his lady's permission to transfer his affections elsewhere, later returned to her claiming that he had remained faithful, having merely wished to test her constancy. The lady did not accept his explanation and refused him her love.

But the opinion of Queen Eleanor, who was consulted on the matter, seems to be just the opposite of this woman's. She said, ‘We know that it comes from the nature of love that those who are in love often falsely pretend that they desire new embraces, that they may the better test the faith and constancy of their co-lover. Therefore a woman sins against the nature of love itself if she keeps back her embraces from her lover on this account or forbids him her love, unless she has clear evidence that he has been unfaithful to her.’

After this, Eleanor pronounced on two other cases:

A worthless young man and an older knight of excellent character sought the love of the same woman. The young man argued that she ought to prefer him to the older man because if he got the love he was after he might by means of it acquire an excellent character, and it would be no small credit to the woman if through her a worthless man was made into a man of good character.

To this Queen Eleanor replied as follows: ‘Although the young man may show that by receiving love he might rise to be a worthy man, a woman does not do very wisely if she chooses to love an unworthy man, especially when a good and eminently worthy one seeks her love. It might happen that because of the faults of the unworthy man his character would not be improved even if he did receive the good things he was hoping for, since the seeds which we sow do not always produce a crop.’

This other love affair was submitted to the decision of the same queen. A certain man who had in ignorance joined in love with a woman who was related to him, sought to leave her when he discovered his fault. But the woman was bound by the chain of love and tried to keep him in love's observances, saying that the crime was fully excused by the fact that when they began to enjoy the love it was without any sin.

In this affair the Queen answered as follows: ‘A woman who under the excuse of a mistake of any kind seeks to preserve an incestuous love is clearly going contrary to what is right and proper. We are always bound to oppose any of those incestuous and damnable actions which we know even human laws punish by very heavy penalties.’⁴⁴

It is hardly surprising that Andrew's text was seized upon by social and literary historians alike. Here is not only a manual of courtly love, that profoundly influential twelfth-century phenomenon, but also the romantic Queen Eleanor herself giving her measured opinions on sexual relationships, in which she was in more than one sense a past mistress, or so popular report had it. For good measure it was supposed that the book records the minutes, as it were, of a council of grand ladies assembled for amorous debate at Eleanor's court at Poitiers, presumably some time in the late 1160s or early 1170s. It all seems, alas, too convenient to be true.

Eleanor's own judgements could, of course, be taken as the expression of the royal conscience, especially as regards the problems of age difference between the partners and the belated discovery of consanguinity. But they could equally well have been devised as oblique comment on the marital difficulties of the Plantagenets, especially if taken together with the countess Marie's considered verdict that true love cannot exist within marriage. It is risky to take too seriously a writer schooled by Ovid who makes a show of recanting at the end of his work. It is even more rash to conclude, without any support from the text, that the ladies in question were, on this or any other occasion, assembled together for their pronouncements.

The fact is that we have no evidence for there having been any contact after Eleanor's divorce from Louis between herself and her daughter Marie, who was seven at the time. As for the ‘courts of love’, they too lack any basis in recorded fact. It has even been argued that the court of Champagne should not be seen either as a centre for the promulgation of the courtly love ethic or ‘as a point of literary interchange between north and south’.⁴⁵

It is with some regret that we have to consign yet another of Agnes Strickland's romantic pages to the realm of legend:

The political sovereignty of her native dominions was not the only authority exercised by Eleanora in ‘gay Guienne’. She was, by hereditary right, chief reviewer and critic of the poets of Provence. At certain festivals held by her, after the custom of her ancestors, called Courts of Love, all new sirventes and chansons were sung or recited before her by the troubadours. She then, assisted by a conclave of her ladies, sat in judgement, and pronounced sentence on their literary merits. She was herself a popular troubadour poet. Her chansons were remembered long after death had raised a barrier against flattery, and she is reckoned among the authors of France. The decisions of the young duchess-queen in her troubadour Courts of Love, have met with the reprobation of modern French historians, on account of their immorality; they charge her with avowing the startling opinion, that no true love could exist between married persons; and it is certain, that the encouragement she gave to her sister Petronilla and the Count Raoul of Vermandois, offered too soon a practical illustration of these evil principles.⁴⁶

Strickland situates the gatherings at the time when Eleanor was queen of France. Amy Kelly, in one of the more extravagantly imaginative chapters of her biography, allows us to eavesdrop on one such occasion at Poitiers in about 1170. There she has installed Marie of Champagne as mistress of ceremonies; and it is a pleasure for us to suspend our disbelief as we mingle with the elegant company in the queen's new hall, listening to musical preludes and a Breton lay or episode from a romance. Then the lady jurors are called to attention as a young knight puts a point of love-conduct to them, through an advocate so as himself to remain anonymous. His own case then another are debated and judgements given before the court adjourns to the moonlit terrace for a breath of air and snatches of song.

But the April moon sets at last upon the grand assize of the ladies, and cocks call for the sun from a distant croft in the valley. Quiet falls upon the palace and the little streets of the high place where the carven saints and angels dream in the portals of the Romanesque façcades; and in the stillness lauds sound faintly from the precincts of Saint Porchaire.⁴⁷

One would wish it so and is willing, even eager, to join the author in her eavesdropping. But then one remembers that this too may be no more than legend, woven from the highly suspect evidence of a clerical ironist.

THE CANK’RED QUEEN

There is nothing romantic about Shakespeare's Eleanor in his Life and Death of King John, which revolves round the tragic fate of Arthur of Brittany.⁴⁸ It is Arthur's mother Constance who refers to the queen as a ‘cank’red grandam’ (Act II, Sc. 1); and the French ambassador is no more flattering in speaking of John's mother as ‘An Ate, stirring him to blood and strife’ (Act II, Sc. 1), Ate being the personification of blind folly and the loss of moral judgement. As such, we feel Eleanor's brooding presence throughout the play until her death is reported in the fourth act. She is above all a schemer, determined to protect her son's right to the throne in the face of Constance's ambitions for Arthur. On her release and Arthur's capture at Mirebeau, John assures the boy of his own and his ‘grandam's’ love for him; but then, as Eleanor draws Arthur aside with an endearing ‘Come hither, little kinsman; hark, a word’, John turns to Hubert to order his murder (Act III, Sc. 2). When we learn in quick succession of three deaths, those of Arthur, Eleanor and Constance, that of the old queen gives us least cause for regret.

In an early ballad, ‘Queen Eleanor's Confession’, collected by Bishop Percy, we see her in a contrite mood, thinking herself to be on her death-bed. The merry poet shows her to have little affection for ‘King Henry's youngest son’ in his scurrilous account of her past misdeeds.⁴⁹

Queene Elianor was a sicke woman
And afraid that she would dye:
Then she sent for two fryars of France
To speke with her speedilye.
The king called downe his nobles all,
By one, by two, by three;
Earl marshall, Ile goe shrive the queene,
And thou shalt wend with mee.
A boone, a boone, quoth earl marshall,
And fell on his bended knee,
That whatsoever queene Elianor saye,
No harme thereof may bee.
Ile pawne my landes, the king then cryd,
My sceptre, crowne, and all,
That whatsoever queen Elianor saye,
No harme thereof shall fall.
Do thou put on a fryar's coat,
And Ile put on another;
And we will to queen Elianor goe
Like fryar and his brother.
Thus both attired then they goe:
When they came to Whitehall,
The bells did ring, and the quiristers sing,
And the torches did lighte them all.
When that they came before the queene
They fell on their bended knee;
A boone, a boone, our gracious queene,
That you sent so hastilee.
Are you two fryars of France, she sayd,
As I suppose you bee?
But if you are two English fryars,
You shall hang on the gallowes tree.
We are two fryars of France, they sayd,
As you suppose we bee,
We have not been at any masse
Site we came from the sea.
The first vile thing that ever I did
I will to you unfolde;
Earl marshall had my maidenhead,
Beneath this cloth of golde.
That’s a vile sinne, then sayd the king;
May God forgive it thee!
Amen, amen, quoth earl marshall;
With a heavye heart spake hee.
The next vile thing that ever I did,
To you Ile not denye,
I made a boxe of poyson strong,
To poison king Henrye.
That’s a vile sinne, then sayd the king,
May God forgive it thee!
Amen, amen, quoth earl marshall;
And I wish it so may bee.
The next vile thing that ever I did,
To you I will discover;
I poysoned fair Rosamonde,
All in fair Woodstocke bower.
That’s a vile sinne, then sayd the king,
May God forgive it thee!
Amen, amen, quoth earl marshall;
And I wish it so may bee.
Do you see yonders little boye,
A tossing of the balle?
That is earl marshall's eldest sonne,
And I love him the best of all.
Do you see yonders little boye,
A catching of the balle?
That is king Henrye's youngest son,
And I love him the worst of all.
His head is fashyon’d like a bull;
His nose is like a boare.
No matter for that, king Henrye cryd,
I love him the better therfore.
The king pulled off his fryar's coate,
And appeared all in redde:
She shrieked, and cryd, and wrung her hands,
And sayd she was betrayde.
The king lookt over his left shoulder,
And a grimme look looked he;
Earl marshall, he sayd, but for my oathe,
Or hanged thou shouldst bee.

With this ballad we have returned to the picture of the licentious Eleanor, the ‘giddy queen’ as Agnes Strickland dubbed her, subject to bouts of ‘disgusting levity’. The poem, of which a Scottish version exists, seems to have been first printed in the late seventeenth century. Its origins, though, may go much further back; for the theme of the husband acting as his unsuspecting wife's confessor was a popular one found, for instance, in an Old French fabliau and in one of Boccaccio's tales. That it became personalized round Eleanor is not surprising in view of her reputed sexual misdemeanors.

Here, then, we have a further example of the continual give-and-take between history and legend. We have seen the process operating in different ways. With the Antioch scandal, events and attitudes gave rise to rumours, baseless or not, from which lurid fictions evolved. In other circumstances, historical facts could evoke memories of well-known tales circulating at the time; and the two sets of data might then become merged in a hybrid account or ‘tall story’ in which truth was overlaid with fantasy. The Amazon crusaders would fall into this category. I would suggest that another instance, though not directly involving Eleanor, is found in the accounts of the future Philip Augustus's misadventure on his way to be crowned. It will be remembered that, separated from his hunting party, the prince became lost in the forest. Rigord, a monk of Saint-Denis, gave a graphic description of his encounter with a hideous, coal-black, misshapen giant of a man, who nevertheless turned out to be amiable enough to rescue him from his plight.⁵⁰ Unless I am mistaken, Rigord's testimony, still found in history books, had been embellished by reference to an episode in Yvain, one of Chrétien de Troyes's romances. Fiction has added a tasty relish to fact.

In the above cases, history has been the starting point for legendary development. With ‘Queen Eleanor's Confession’ the process has been reversed. There a popular tale had brought to the mind of some balladeer memories of the English queen as he understood her to have been; and he amused himself and us by casting her in the ready-made role he found there. Her ‘confessions' are, of course, part of her legend; but the frame-story is from another, independent tradition.

These, then, are the main legends which can be set against the known facts of Eleanor's life and some suggestions as to the processes involved in their formation and growth. In my final chapter I shall be skating on thinner ice. The medieval narrative poets and, increasingly from the thirteenth century, writers of prose were apt to smuggle into their works disguised references to real characters or events. With this in mind, I shall explore the possibility of such largely ‘incognito’ appearances of Eleanor and her activities, real or imagined, in a variety of medieval texts. These will for the most part be in French, the main literary language on both sides of the Channel in and well beyond her own day. Can she even be credited with some discreetly formative influence on a wide area of Western literature? I can promise only a speculative answer.

Notes

1. Other references to Eleanor's behaviour at Antioch are studied by Ruth E. Harvey, The Troubadour Marcabru and Love (London, 1989), pp. 131-9.

2. Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, pp. 52-3.

3. See Harvey, The Troubadour Marcabru, pp. 131ff.

4. William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, tr. E. A. Babcock and A. C. Krey (New York, 1976), vol. II. pp. 179-81.

5. Gervase of Canterbury, Opera Historica, vol. I, p. 149; Gerald of Wales, De Principis Instructione, p. 299.

6. Récits d’un Ménestrel de Reims, ed. Natalis de Wailly (Paris, 1876), pp. 3-7 (my translation).

7. Richard of Devizes, Chronicle, pp. 59-60.

8. Wace, Roman de Rou, ll. 24-36 (my translation).

9. L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, ll. 9507-10, 9872-6.

10. Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, pp. 475-7.

11. Helinant de Froidmont, Chronicon, ed. J.-P. Migne (PL 212, Paris, 1855), cols 1057-8.

12. Quoted by Pacaut, Louis VII, p. 59.

13. Gerald of Wales, De Principis Instructione, pp. 298-303.

14. Ibid., pp. 300-1.

15. See Gerald of Wales, ‘The Journey through Wales’ and ‘The Description of Wales’, tr. Lewis Thorpe (Penguin Books, 1978), Appendix B (‘Gerald of Wales and King Arthur’).

16. Richard le Poitevin in Delisle (ed.), Recueil des historiens, vol. XII, p. 419; Merlin's prophecies in Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, tr. Lewis Thorpe, pp. 174-5.

17. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi, vol. I, p. 42.

18. On Rosamond Clifford and her legend see the article by T. A. Archer in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen, vol. XII (London, 1887), pp. 75-7; and Virgil B. Heltzel, Fair Rosamund: A Study of the Development of a Literary Theme (Evanston, 1947).

19. Gerald of Wales, De Principis Instructione, pp. 165-6. A variant reading is given in DNB, p. 75.

20. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Regis Ricardi in Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi, vol. II, pp. 231-2 (my translation).

21. Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon, vol. VIII, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby (RS 41, London, 1882), pp. 52-5. Trevisa's translation is given on facing pages.

22. Croniques de London, ed. G. J. Aungier (London, 1844), pp. 3-5.

23. DNB, vol. XII, p. 76.

24. Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, tr. D. D. R. Owen (Everyman, 1987), pp. 168-9.

25. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. R. A. Willmott (London, n.d.), pp. 251-2.

26. Ibid., pp. 252-7.

27. Samuel Daniel, The Complete Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, vol. I (n.p., 1885), pp. 79-113.

28. Joseph Addison, The Miscellanous Works, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, vol. I (London, 1914): Rosamond. An Opera is on pp. 293-332; see pp. xvii-xviii for Tickell's preface.

29. Sir Thomas More, Michael Drayton, Thomas Hearne, &c., The Unfortunate Royal Mistresses, Rosamond Clifford, and Jane Shore, Concubines to King Henry the Second and Edward the Fourth, with Historical and Metrical Memoirs of those Celebrated Persons (London, 1825?). See pp. iii-iv and 7 for my quotations from the introductory remarks.

30. Ibid., pp. 34-40.

31. Ibid., pp. 41-7.

32. Ibid., pp. 48-54.

33. Ibid., pp. 60-4.

34. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, vol. I, 4th edn (London, 1854). The biography of Eleanor is on pp. 237-93.

35. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Tragedies, vol. I (London, 1905). Rosamond is on pp. 227-88.

36. Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Life and Works, vol. XI (The Works, vol. VII: London, 1899). Becket is on pp. 1-155.

37. Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. I: The Birth of Britain (London, 1956), p. 160.

38. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, ed. Léopold Constans, 6 vols (SATF, Paris, 1904-12). See vol. IV, ll. 23357ff. for the episode of the Amazons; my translation is of ll. 23426-79.

39. Die Krone der Komnenen: Die Regierungszeit der Kaiser Joannes und Manuel Komnenos (1118-1180) aus dem Geschichtswerk des Niketas Choniates, tr. Franz Grabler (Byzantinische Geschichtsschreiber VII: Graz-Vienna-Cologne, 1958), p. 95 (my translation).

40. Michaud's History of the Crusades, tr. W. Robson, 3 vols (London, 1852), vol. I, p. 343.

41. Strickland, Lives of the Queens, pp. 246-8.

42. Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine, pp. 35, 38.

43. See D. D. R. Owen, Noble Lovers (London, 1975).

44. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love: Eleanor's judgements are on pp. 168-70.

45. John F. Benton, ‘The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center’, Speculum, XXXVI (1961), pp. 551-91 (p. 589).

46. Strickland, Lives of the Queens, p. 243.

47. Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine, ch. 15 (p. 167).

48. William Shakespeare, King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (The Arden Shakespeare, London, 1954).

49. Percy, Reliques, pp. 257-9.

50. For Rigord's account see Guillaume le Breton, Gesta Philippe Augusti. Philippide, ed. H. F. Delaborde, 2 vols (Paris, 1882-5), vol. II, p. 11.

Abbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography

DNB Dictionary of National Biography

PL Patrologia Latina

RS Rolls Series

SATF Société des Anciens Textes français