"The Greatest Frenchwoman"

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE AND THE FOUR KINGS (431 pp.)--Amy Kelly--Harvard University ($5).

The young Queen of France was bored. "I thought to have married a king," Eleanor of Aquitaine complained to her intimates, "but find I have wed a monk."

At the moment, Queen Eleanor's state of mind made little difference to pious Louis VII; he went right on saying his prayers. But in time the sense of incompatibility grew on Louis too; he agreed to have their marriage annulled--on the ground that they were fourth cousins and were not rightly wed in the first place. Before the year (1152) was out, Eleanor conferred her person and her provinces, which covered a third of France, on hot-blooded Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and King Louis' great enemy.

The Honey Spread. By Eleanor's alliance the Plantagenet adventure was loosed on Europe, France and Britain were pounded into dusty poverty under half a century of campaigns, the feudal system itself was staggered. Yet, also, the sweet Provengal culture was spread like honey over Britain, and three sun-washed, heroic figures rose for a long moment against the Dark Ages. They were the three great Plantagenets: Henry II, Eleanor, and their son Richard the Lion Heart. The greatest of them was Eleanor herself, though centuries passed before the world realized it.

To many of her contemporaries Eleanor was a byword for wantonness, in Shakespeare four centuries later a "canker'd grandam"; by the time of Victoria, Charles Dickens thought it sufficient to call Eleanor "a bad woman." It was only as the 20th Century began that Historian Henry Adams took the queen's full measure, and pronounced her "the greatest of all Frenchwomen." Amy Kelly's Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings is the finest attempt, in English, to tell the queen's full story. It is a tale that the queen herself might have gasped at if some trouvere had sung it to her court; and Historian Kelly, while never forsaking her facts, tells it with a poet's warmth.

The Barons Dress. When Eleanor left Louis to his orisons, she was 30, and knew more of life than most women twice her age. Married at 15, she had gone with Louis VII on the Second Crusade and on tours of their domains, had given him two daughters and (so legends tell) some reason to doubt that at least one of them was his. After the second daughter, Louis, who still had no heir, was glad to get her out of his bed.

Eleanor bore Henry a line of five sons and three daughters. A year after her second marriage, Henry's chief rival for the throne of England, Eustace of Blois, strangled on a dish of eels, and shortly after the Duke of Normandy added Britain to his fiefs. In the first years of their reign, Eleanor was Henry II's full partner in the building of empire. She made long progresses with him through their possessions, sometimes levied justice and taxes when he was away, and more than all, reformed the manners of Western Europe to woman's advantage. Item: men were no longer permitted to shamble, hang-stocking and grime-necked from the chase, into a lady's presence; instead, the bear-limbed barons were required to get up in gay, slashed mantles and pointed shoes and drench themselves in a daze of scent.

The Queen Rules. Estranged from Henry in 1168, Eleanor set up her own court in Poitiers. There, in sunny arcades, to the shapely wooing of a flute, she and her followers brought the cult of chivalric love to perfection. But the idyl of manners was brief. Henry sniffed sedition in the antics of her preux chevaliers, broke up the court, and hauled Eleanor back to an English keep. She languished there, in sumptuous jail, for 15 years.

Eleanor was 67 when Henry died, yet she sprang like a lioness to seize England for her cub, Richard. She governed it magnificently for him, too, when he went on crusade; and after his return, managed the political power while he took the field against the French.

At 80, Eleanor capped her career by a military triumph. Besieged in the castle of Mirebeau by the Franks, the wily old queen so bemused the French with negotiation that every man Jacques of them fell captive to her son John, Richard's successor,* whom she had secretly called to her aid. Two years later, as John let her continental lands slip through his fingers, Eleanor quietly died. She lies at Fontevrault, between Henry and Richard. The effigy on the tomb of the greatest and worldliest woman of her time shows a figure peacefully perusing a book--which, as one of her apologists said, need not be regarded as a missal.

The Author. Amy Kelly made six trips to Europe to retrace the travels of the queen, spent 20 years on the book altogether. It is, she says simply, "the first [book] of any importance" on the subject. Retired from Wellesley College, where she taught English for about 25 years, Author Kelly is emphatic that there will be no more books from her pen. Says she: "Most people write too many things." Author Kelly has no need to write another work; her first, though less than a great biography, is no less than a very good one, done in a handsome, gracious style, quite to the queen's taste.

* And the unhappy signer of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215.

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