ELEANOR OF

AQUITAINE (c. 1122-1204)  , wife of the English king Henry II., was the daughter and heiress of Duke William X. of Aquitaine, whom she succeeded in April 1137 . In accordance with arrangements made by her father, she at once married Prince Louis, the heir to the French crown, and a month later her husband became king of France under the title of Louis VII . Eleanor bore Louis two daughters but no sons . This was probably the reason why their marriage was annulled by mutual con-sent in 1151, but contemporary scandal-mongers attributed the separation to the king's jealousy . It was alleged that, while accompanying her husband on the Second Crusade (1146-1149), Eleanor had been unduly familiar with her uncle, Raymond of Antioch . Chronology is against this hypothesis, since Louis and she lived on good terms together for two years after the Crusade . There is still less ground for the supposition that Henry of Anjou, whom she married immediately after the divorce, had been her lover before it . This second marriage, with a youth some years her junior, was purely political . The duchy of Aquitaine required a strong ruler, and the union with Anjou was eminently desirable . Louis, who had hoped that Aquitaine would descend to his daughters, was mortified and alarmed by the Angevin marriage; all the more so when Henry of Anjou succeeded to the English crown in 1154 . From this event dates the beginning of the secular strife between England and France which runs like a red thread through medieval history . Eleanor bore to her second husband five sons and three daughters; John, the youngest of their children, was born in 1167 .

But her relations with Henry passed gradually through indifference to hatred . Henry was an unfaithful husband, and Eleanor supported her sons in their

great rebellion of 1173 . Throughout the latter years of the reign she was kept in a sort of honourable confinement . It was during her captivity that Henry formed his connexion with Rosamond Clifford, the Fair Rosamond of romance . Eleanor, therefore, can hardly have been responsible for the death of this rival, and the romance of the poisoned bowl appears to be an invention of the next century . Under the rule of Richard and John the queen became a political personage of the highest importance . To both her sons the popularity which she enjoyed in Aquitaine was most valuable . But in other directions also she did good service . She helped to frustrate the conspiracy with France which John concocted during Richard's captivity . She afterwards reconciled the king and the prince, thus saving for John the succession which he had forfeited by his misconduct . In 1199 she crushed an Angevin rising in favour of John's nephew, Arthur of Brittany . In 1201 she negotiated a marriage between her grand-daughter, Blanche of Castile, and Louis of France, the grandson of her first husband .

It was through her staunch

defence of Mirabeau in Poitou that John got possession of his nephew's person . She died on the 1st of April 1204, and was buried at Fontevrault . Although a woman of strong passions and great abilities she is, historically, less important as an individual than as the heiress of Aquitaine, a part of which was, through her second marriage, united to England for some four hundred years . See the chronicles cited for the reigns of Henry II., Richard I. and John . Also Sir J . H . Ramsay, Angevin Empire (London, 1903) ; K . Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings (London, 1887); and A . Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, vol. i . (1841) . (H . W .

C .