XXVI. Love can deny nothing to love.
With this little group of laws in mind one can but reflect that, pushed to their logical conclusion, they are suggestive of moral laxity. We are not, however, left to guessing. According to Andrew the Chaplain, the court of the Countess of Champagne was asked, on April 29, 1174, to decide this question: "Can real love exist between married people?" The countess and her court decided "that love cannot exercise its powers on married people," the following reason being given in proof of the assertion: "Lovers grant everything, mutually and gratuitously, without being constrained by any motive of necessity. Married people, on the contrary, are compelled as a duty to submit to one another's wishes, and not to refuse anything to one another. For this reason it is evident that love cannot exercise its powers on married people. Let this decision, which we have arrived at with great deliberation, and after taking counsel of a large number of ladies, be held henceforward as a confirmed and irrefragable truth."
Quite in line with this judgment is one reported from the court of Queen Eleanor. A gentleman, the complainant in the suit, was deeply in love with a lady who loved another. Taking compassion on him, however, she promised that, if ever she should lose her first lover, the complainant should be received as his successor. The lady shortly after married her lover. Thereupon the complainant, citing the decision of the Countess of Champagne, demanded her love. The lady refused, denying that she had lost the love of her lover by marrying him. Wherefore the complainant humbly sued for judgment, we presume it might be called a writ mandamus amare. The honorable court handed down a decision for the complainant, declaring that the solemn decree of the court of the Countess of Champagne was of force in the present case, and issuing the writ mandamus amare as prayed for: "We order that the lady grant to her imploring lover, now the complainant before this court, the favors which he so earnestly entreats, and which she so faithfully has promised."
One other decision of the gay Queen Eleanor is so righteous that we cannot forbear repeating it. A gentleman brought suit because a lady of whom he was enamored had accepted numerous handsome gifts from him and yet persistently denied him her love. We are not altogether sure whether the gentleman was not really bringing suit to recover his presents; but Queen Eleanor gave judgment: "A lady who is determined to be inflexible must either refuse to receive any gifts which are sent with the object of winning her love, or she must make compensation for them, or she must be content to be classed as a courtesan."
In all this world of love and song were the women merely objects of the troubadour's song, or merely patronesses of the troubadour? Were there no poetesses? The names of fourteen ladies who may be called troubadours by reason of their own works are all of whom we have record, and even of these fourteen not one was really a professional troubadour; in most cases it is but one song, or even one part of a tenson, which gives the lady a right to be named among the poets. We find Clara D'Anduse, the beautiful love of the troubadour Uc de St. Cyr, remembered for but one song; and but little more remains of the work of Countess Beatrice de Die, who loved Rambaut d'Orange, and who tells of how this troubadour loved her, and grew cold to her, and finally was faithless, forsaking her for another; but she and her sister troubadours are shadowy figures: the time had not come for woman to take a permanent place in literature.
In our attempt to present the literary and artistic side of Eleanor's life, and to tell something of the brilliant society of Provence in which she played no small part, we have neglected the facts of her career in England. As Queen Eleanor of England, however, we shall not have much to say of her. Even now she does not play a very prominent part in history, and the development of her character is quite in line with the moral training one would acquire in the Courts of Love. It does seem as if there were such a thing as reaping the whirlwind.
Eleanor was eleven years older than her new husband. She had despised Louis because he was too austere, too cold, too plain in mind and in morals. Her new husband soon gave her ample cause to develop a new passion jealousy. She learned to hate him for vices the very opposite of Louis's colorless virtue. She herself had been notoriously a coquette, and not an innocent one. She felt the eleven years of difference between herself and Henry. The gossips said she could hardly expect to retain Henry's affection, she who was so much older, and who had been, it was rumored, the mistress of Henry's own father. Despite the gallant principles she had professed in her own Court of Love, despite the latitude to which she had thought herself entitled, she became furiously jealous of Henry. There was, indeed, much reason for jealousy. Young, hot-blooded, passionate, as greedy of pleasure as of power, Henry lost no time in giving her numerous rivals. No means were too vile or too violent when Henry wished to gratify his passions. It is said that he even dishonored the young Princess Alice of France, betrothed to his son Richard, and for that reason would never allow Richard to marry her. There we're fierce quarrels between Eleanor and Henry, and tradition has ascribed to her the murder of Fair Rosamond Clifford, whom she is said to have pursued into the labyrinth of Woodstock and stabbed with her own hand.
Finding it impossible to avenge herself in any other way, Eleanor stirred up her sons against their father. They were all turbulent enough, and needed little encouragement. The eldest living son, Henry, injudiciously crowned king by his father's desire, persuaded himself that he must be king in deed, and was spurred on by his mother and by her friend, the restless troubadour Bertrand de Born. Raymond of Toulouse, who had been sought by them as an ally, revealed the plot of the queen and her sons to Henry. Young Henry and his brothers fled to France, where they were received by Louis with royal honors. Eleanor was imprisoned in her own duchy, and in prison she remained during Henry's lifetime. The troubadours, devoted to their duchess, sang dolorous songs upon her captivity, and voiced their hatred of her jailer, Henry, in burning sirventes. But Henry went on relentlessly in the intermittent struggle with his sons, conquered Bertrand de Born, and kept his rebellious subjects in check. Not till he died, cursing Richard and John, who had again been in revolt against him, was the queen released.
Hardly had Richard been crowned before he departed for the Crusade, leaving Eleanor as regent. Even against her own son the old queen intrigued; yet it was partly her indignant intervention which later helped to release Richard from the German prison where the emperor, instigated by Philip Augustus, would have kept him. The son whom she loved best, John, loved and trusted her no more than did Richard. In the struggle between Philip Augustus, championing Arthur of Brittany, and John, Eleanor seems to have kept faith with her son, and to have given him shrewd if cruel counsel. We hear of her but once or twice more in active affairs. In 1200 she was sent by John into Spain to bring back his niece, Blanche de Castille, who was betrothed to Prince Louis of France by one of the terms of a treaty just concluded between John and Philip Augustus. On her return, when passing through Bordeaux, a mob set upon and killed one of her party, the detested Mercader, captain of Richard's Brabançon mercenaries. Eleanor, old, and sick with fatigue and fright at this scene of horror, could proceed no further, and stayed in the abbey of Fontevrault, sending Blanche on with the Archbishop of Bordeaux. She rallied from this illness, however, and two years later had a narrow escape from being captured by her grandson, Arthur. She was besieged, and very hard pressed, in the Château de Mirebeau, when Arthur and his followers were surprised and captured by John. This episode of a grand-mother besieged by her own grandson is quite in line with the traditions of the family. "It is the fate of our family that none should love the other," said Geoffrey Plantagenet.
In the midst of the triumph of Philip Augustus over her miserable son John, old Queen Eleanor died, in the convent of Beaulieu, in 1204. The miseries of her declining years make us more charitable toward her; but it is impossible to respect a character such as that of England's troubadour queen. One sometimes finds her praised for a splendid virtue, that of impulsive generosity; but there was no generosity in her nature; she was merely lavish in spending for her own pleasure. In keeping with what a great historian has said of her son Richard Coeur de Lion, one may say that she was a bad wife,--to two husbands,--a bad mother, and a bad queen. There was in her nature none of the tenderness which alone can ensure domestic love, nor yet enough force to enable her to make herself a great queen.