Matilda and Eleanor She-Wolves: England's Early Queens

1953. A coronation fit for a king.

But it's a young queen who is about to be crowned.

And the crowd roars its approval.

The fact that she's a woman attracts no comment

and she will go on to reign over us for six decades.

But England's queens haven't always been greeted with such adoration,

and throughout our history,

women and power have made an uneasy combination.

800 years earlier, another female heir to the throne

came to Westminster for her coronation.

She wasn't met by cheering crowds.

Instead, she was chased away from the capital by an angry mob.

SHOUTING AND JEERING

Her name was Matilda,

the first woman to make a claim to the English crown in her own right.

But 800 years ago, power was inescapably male.

There was no question in the medieval world -

men ruled and women didn't.

A king was a warrior who literally fought to win power,

then battled to keep it.

Yet despite everything that stood in their way,

a handful of extraordinary women

did attempt to rule medieval and Tudor England.

This series is about the queens who challenged male power

and the fierce reactions they provoked.

When they pursued power like kings,

these royal women were criticised and condemned.

Most graphically of all, they'd been vilified as She-Wolves.

These are the stories of the She-Wolves of England,

and to explore them is to realise just how far we've come

and how little has changed.

On the 24th of June 1141, a 39-year-old woman

sat down here at Westminster to a sumptuous banquet.

It was a feast to celebrate her planned coronation

as Queen of England.

Matilda, it seemed, was about to become the first woman

to rule England in her own right.

Matilda was the daughter of Henry I

and granddaughter of William the Conqueror,

but you won't find her on the role-call of English monarchs.

This faint manuscript image

is the only contemporary picture of her that survives.

Her attempt to claim the crown was to throw the country

into almost 20 years of catastrophic civil war.

Matilda herself has gone down in history

as a domineering and destructive woman,

perceived by men as a she-wolf

simply because she dared to challenge the assumption

that only a man could wear the English crown.

And her bid for the throne began with a tragedy.

The death of the male heir, her brother William.

It happened not in England,

but when he and their father were returning from their territory

across the channel in Normandy.

This sleepy village - Barfleur, in Normandy -

was once the greatest port on the Norman coast.

It was from here that Matilda's grandfather,

William, Duke of Normandy, set off to conquer England in 1066.

54 years later, another Norman fleet

set out from Barfleur to cross the channel.

At it's head was the King of England, Henry I,

in his great dragon-headed longship, and behind him,

in a newly fitted-out vessel called the White Ship,

was his son and heir, William, with a large party of young noblemen.

It was November,

late in the year for what could be a treacherous crossing.

But the water in Barfleur harbour was still and glassy,

and there seemed no need for concern.

The King set sail first at twilight, to be followed by William

and his company of ebullient young aristocrats.

But when the White Ship slipped out into the dark water,

everyone on board was roaring drunk.

No-one noticed the rock at the harbour mouth.

But no one could mistake the sickening jolt as the ship struck.

CRASHING BOOM

It took only minutes to sink.

And in the freezing November waters, there was no hope of rescue.

BELL TOLLS

The chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote...

No ship that ever sailed brought England such disaster.

It was such a calamity that two days passed

before anyone dared to break the news to King Henry.

When eventually a stuttering boy was pushed forward

to tell him that his son was dead,

the king collapsed in anguish.

It was a personal tragedy,

but for a King, the personal was always political

and all Henry's hopes for his country's future

had been swallowed by the sea, along with his drowned son.

Norman Kings had worn the English crown for just over 50 years,

but already a dynasty had been founded

and a new source of potential power for future queens.

After all, they were the ones who produced sons and heirs.

But now there was no natural successor to continue the line.

No boys, just a daughter

called Matilda.

There had never been a female heir to the English throne.

But then again, there was nothing explicitly to say

that a woman couldn't inherit the crown.

The revolutionary effects of the conquest,

which had swept away all precedent and tradition

meant that Norman England hadn't yet developed fixed rules

about how a new monarch should be chosen.

But in these times, it wasn't enough to have a right to the throne.

To wear the crown, you had to fight for it, too.

That's exactly what happened with Matilda's father.

Henry the First had fought his older brother

for the rule of England and Normandy,

and once he'd become King, he had to keep on fighting

to impose his authority on his nobles.

Could this possibly be a job for a woman?

These are the two sides of a king's great seal,

the physical representation of the crown's authority

that hung from every royal decree.

It's an iconic image of power

that demonstrates the king's most fundamental roles.

Here, on one side, he sits with an orb and sceptre in his hands

to give justice to his people.

On the other, he rides a war horse with his sword unsheathed

to defend his kingdom.

Even today, power still looks, sounds and feels

overwhelmingly male.

Back then, there was no question in contemporaries' minds

about the order of God's creation.

Men ruled and their women obeyed.

In fact, the Anglo Saxon word for "queen" didn't mean a female king,

it meant the wife of a king

and as a king's wife, a queen could advise her husband,

or even represent him, but her authority always depended on his.

And it was this limited kind of queenship,

as royal wife to a royal husband,

for which Matilda had been prepared since birth.

When she was a small child, her father sent her to a foreign land

to be married to a complete stranger.

At the age of eight, she'd already begun an extraordinary career.

She'd left England to marry Henry the Fifth,

the King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor.

Since then, she'd been fated as his empress

at the greatest court in Europe, and as a result,

she had a powerful sense of her own majesty.

Matilda assumed that she would spend the rest of her life

as a German empress,

but when she was 23, her husband died suddenly

and after 16 years abroad, Matilda came home to England.

She was Henry's only heir

and he chose this moment to ensure the future of his dynasty.

This is Westminster Hall.

In Matilda's day, it was probably the largest indoor space in Europe.

It still has a daunting grandeur.

It was at a ceremony here that Henry promised Matilda

a startling new future.

He was suggesting that for the first time

a woman could rule in her own right as a female King.

On the 1st of January 1127, here in the great hall at Westminster,

the nobles of Henry's kingdom swore a solemn oath

that they would support Matilda's right

to succeed to her father's throne.

No-one tried to argue that a woman couldn't rule.

But the likelihood is that the nobles were paying lip service

to an idea that they thought would never happen.

And Henry had an alternative plan.

Matilda was still young. If she could give him a grandson,

England might yet be ruled by a king of his bloodline.

So once again, he sent her away to be married.

She might have been promised a powerful future,

but for the moment she was still her father's pawn.

Since the conquest, the Kings of England

had ruled both England and Normandy

but this new Anglo-Norman realm was difficult to hold together.

One way to defend it was to create alliances through marriage,

so Henry chose as Matilda's bridegroom Geoffrey of Anjou,

whose lands to the south of Normandy could protect Henry's borders.

In June 1128, Henry came here, to his Norman capital, Rouen,

to knight his prospective son-in-law.

Henry was delighted with the match, but Matilda wasn't so pleased.

The good news? Geoffrey was so handsome and athletic

that he was nicknamed "Geoffrey the Fair".

The bad? He was only 15.

Matilda clearly wasn't dazzled by Geoffrey's good looks.

He was eleven years younger than her

and her junior by far in status and experience.

She'd just lost a husband who'd been a father figure

as well as an emperor,

and now she was offered an arrogant teenager as his replacement.

She tried to resist the match, but in the end she had no choice.

She did her unpleasant duty and married him.

But Matilda didn't give in easily.

She never called herself Countess of Anjou.

Instead, she always insisted on the greater magnificence

of her own title, as empress and daughter of the King of the English.

As such, Matilda knew what her father expected of her -

that she should produce a male heir.

But just a year after the wedding,

the unhappy couple were living apart.

Matilda might have given up on her marriage, but her father hadn't.

In 1131, he imposed a reconciliation on the couple and to good effect.

In the Spring of 1133, Matilda gave birth to her first child,

a healthy boy called Henry after his proud grandfather.

A year later, she had a second son.

So, Henry had his male heirs.

But he was in his 60s,

and it would be years before they grew up and there was more.

Having a family of her own

meant that Matilda's loyalties were now split.

The arrival of his grandsons was a dynastic triumph for Henry.

But Matilda's new role as the mother of two young sons

left her caught in the middle, between her husband's ambition

and her father's refusal, even at the age of 67,

to relinquish any part of his hold on power.

And in 1135, as political disagreement escalated

into the flexing of military muscle,

Matilda stayed in Anjou with Geoffrey,

standing shoulder to shoulder with her husband.

But just as Matilda was fighting for power for her husband,

she was suddenly offered power in her own right.

Her father, Henry, was taken ill on a hunting trip in November 1135.

Knowing that his grandsons were not yet old enough to succeed him,

as Henry lay dying he insisted that the nobles abide by the agreement

they'd made eight years earlier to allow Matilda to rule.

And as soon as the news of her father's death reached her,

Matilda made her first move in becoming Queen.

She rode north to seize control of Argentan,

an important fortress that was crucial to the rule of Normandy.

But then she went no further.

She discovered she was pregnant.

It's impossible to know what was going through Matilda's mind

stuck out here at Argentan.

The chronicler, William of Malmesbury,

says only that she failed to return to England for "certain reasons",

which at a distance of almost 900 years is maddeningly opaque.

Maybe her pregnancy had made her ill

or maybe she believed the nobles would simply rally to her cause.

What we do know is that while Matilda hesitated

it was her cousin Stephen who seized the moment.

Stephen was a powerful man and an effective soldier.

He rode to Winchester, where his brother was Bishop,

and had himself crowned King.

For Matilda this was a shocking betrayal.

Stephen had been among the nobles who had sworn allegiance to her

when her father was alive.

Matilda believed absolutely in her right to the throne.

But her big mistake was to assume that others did too.

Male might, it seemed, still overcame female right.

According to a chronicle known as the Gesta Stephani,

The Deeds of Stephen:

"There was no one else at hand who could take the King's place

"and put an end to the great dangers threatening the kingdom."

This is hardly an impartial account.

It was written by a monk with close ties to Stephen's court

and Stephen is the hero of the story.

Unfortunately no-one was writing Matilda's story.

Stephen's masterstroke was his speedily arranged coronation.

Once God had made him King, no man, let alone a woman, could undo it.

Stephen's kingship had taken effect in the moment

he was anointed with holy oil.

But in that instant also lay the seeds of civil war.

Two different forms of royal legitimacy

now stood in opposition to one another.

Matilda was the only legitimate child of the previous king

and the nobles had sworn allegiance to her as his heir.

But Stephen had just been anointed and crowned as Henry's successor.

Victory for one now meant defeat for the other.

Stephen might have God on his side, but he needed people too.

He couldn't rule without the support of the powerful nobles.

It was a balancing act.

They would help the King keep order in the Kingdom

and defend it from attack if he offered leadership and security.

And this is what Stephen appeared to be doing,

so one by one they rallied to his cause

and his triumph seemed complete

when he won the support of Robert of Gloucester,

one of the most powerful noblemen in the country.

Hundreds of miles away in France, Matilda's cause seemed lost.

Her third son had been born safely at Argentan.

But now and she and her boys were embattled there

with little prospect of reclaiming her inheritance.

But it was Normandy that came to her rescue.

To make his throne secure Stephen needed to control

the Anglo Norman realm on both sides of the channel.

But while he established his rule in England,

it took him more than a year to cross the channel to France.

By then Normandy had collapsed into anarchy

and so did Stephen's army,

as his soldiers began to squabble among themselves.

At her base at Argentan -

news reached Matilda that Stephen's campaign in Normandy

was disintegrating into chaos.

Most significantly of all,

the uneasy alliance between Stephen and Robert of Gloucester

began to fall apart.

And in June 1138, in a dramatic about turn,

Robert declared his support for Matilda.

At a stroke her position was transformed.

Matilda now had a route to England and the throne.

Robert's lands in Normandy gave her a safe corridor to the coast.

Stephen was still the anointed king but for the first time,

cracks were beginning to appear in his regime.

How far would Matilda go

to fight for the crown that she believed was hers?

It was becoming clear that Matilda herself

would have to stand at the centre

of the campaign to secure her inheritance.

Her uniquely royal blood -

despite the female body in which it was housed -

represented the only hope

of challenging the sanctity of Stephen's coronation.

And so, in 1139, Matilda set foot on English soil

for the first time in eight years.

She came here, to Arundel Castle.

News quickly reached Stephen of Matilda's arrival

and he lost no time in marching an army to Arundel's gates.

For once, Matilda's sex worked to her benefit, not her disadvantage.

She was the daughter of a king, the widow of an emperor

and Stephen's own cousin.

Attempting to wage war on a woman of such exalted status

would be a profoundly risky business.

So Stephen was reluctantly persuaded to allow Matilda to leave Arundel.

This played straight into Matilda's hands.

She immediately went to Bristol, where Robert of Gloucester

waited in his fortress.

While Matilda's forces were still smaller than Stephen's,

support for her was growing.

Men who had wavered in their loyalty to Stephen

now had the royal figurehead they needed.

And while Matilda's forces had no chance

of overwhelming Stephen's army head on,

they did find a way to wear him down

with feints and lightning strikes,

a kind of guerrilla warfare that kept Stephen on the back foot.

For the next two years civil war raged in England

and it took an immense toll on the country.

The countryside was plundered

and reduced to blackened earth by hostile troops.

"It was a dreadful thing,"

said the chronicler, William of Malmesbury,

"that England, once the noblest place of peace,

"the peculiar habitation of tranquillity,

"had sunk to such wretchedness."

But out of that wretchedness

would come the moment of Matilda's greatest triumph.

In February 1141, in vicious fighting at Lincoln,

troops loyal to Matilda defeated Stephens' army

and took the king prisoner.

It had been five years since her father's death

but now the throne was within her reach for the first time.

Now Matilda knew she needed the church

and the people to recognise her as Queen.

She couldn't undo Stephen's coronation

but she could try to supersede it with one of her own.

And she found an unlikely ally

in the man who had orchestrated Stephen's coronation,

his own brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester.

Matilda cleverly promised Bishop Henry

first place among her advisors.

And in return he rallied the church to her cause.

In April 1141,

Bishop Henry convened a special counsel of the church at Winchester.

Among those who attended was the chronicler, William of Malmesbury.

This is a translation of William's chronicle

and it's an extraordinary thing more than 800 years later

to read an eye witness account.

It turned out that the Bishop was a master of political spin.

He explained to the council that when King Henry died,

he had left his crown to his daughter.

"But," he said, "because it seemed tedious to wait for the lady

"who made delays in coming to England

"since her residence was in Normandy,

"thought was taken for the peace of the country

"and my brother allowed to reign."

This was a piece of breath-taking revisionism

but the Bishop didn't stop there.

Stephen, he declared, hadn't brought peace and justice to England,

and he was now a prisoner.

So the English church spoke in the voice of Bishop Henry.

"We choose as Lady of England and Normandy

"the daughter of a king who was a peacemaker,

"a glorious king, a wealthy king, a good king,

"without peer in our time,

"and we promise her faith and support."

This was a victory

that Matilda had fought for six long years to achieve.

So here at Winchester Matilda was recognised as England's lady,

"domina" in Latin.

What that meant was that she would have dominion,

power, or lordship, of the kind that her father had enjoyed.

And once she was anointed and crowned

she would become a new kind of queen,

one who would rule in her own right.

Matilda began to prepare for her coronation,

she was on the brink of becoming England's first female king,

but as she began to act like England's new ruler

it became clear that she still had a battle to fight.

As the chronicles written at the time reveal,

when the great men of the kingdom began to be confronted

with the reality of female rule, they didn't like what they saw.

"She was lifted up into an insufferable arrogance

"and she alienated the hearts of almost everyone.

"She had brought the greater part of the kingdom under her sway

"and on this account she was mightily puffed up and exulted in spirit."

"She at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour

"instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex.

"Began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly

"and more haughtily than she had been wont, to such a point

"that soon, in the capital of the land subject to her,

"she actually made herself Queen of all England

"and gloried in being so called."

This has become the defining account

of Matilda's difficulties at this crucial moment.

She was just too arrogant to make a success of ruling.

But there's more going on here

than a previously undetected character flaw.

Matilda was trying to become Queen of England,

not in the conventional sense of a king's wife,

but in the unprecedented form of a female king.

And kings didn't deport themselves with a modest gait and bearing,

they had to be commanding and authoritative.

But when Matilda tried to do that,

she was seen as unnaturally domineering.

The great men of the realm couldn't believe that a mere woman

wouldn't take their advice without question

and as the rumblings of discontent grew louder and louder,

medieval spin doctors went to work.

True to form, the hostile chronicler of the Gesta Stephani,

the Deeds of Stephen, reported that she had demanded money

from the citizens of London.

And when they resisted...

"She, with a grim look, her forehead wrinkled into a frown,

"every trace of a woman's gentleness removed from her face,

"blazed into unbearable fury."

Stephen was still a prisoner,

but troops loyal to his cause

began to ravage the land south of the Thames

just across the river from the City of London.

Undeterred Matilda pressed on with her coronation plans.

She was so close to her moment of triumph

but at the last moment everything began to unravel.

As Matilda prepared to enjoy her feast at Westminster,

bells began to toll.

The gates of the City swung open

and out swarmed thousands of armed Londoners

to drive her away from the capital.

All Matilda's hopes of being crowned Queen

were trampled into the dirt along with the feast she had left behind.

But things were about to get still worse.

News reached Matilda that Bishop Henry had swapped sides once again

and declared his support of his brother Stephen.

Matilda pursued the Bishop to Winchester

but was caught in an ambush.

She was smuggled to safety but her greatest supporter,

Robert of Gloucester, was captured in battle.

Without him, she knew she could never hope to win

so she bought his freedom but the price was high,

she had to release her most valuable prisoner by far, her rival Stephen.

Still she fought on

and in September 1142, Matilda was besieged by Stephen's forces

in the burned and blackened city of Oxford.

For three months she held out but just before Christmas

she decided to risk everything in one last effort to escape.

Matilda's escape from Oxford is the most famous, the most daring

and certainly the bravest moment of her life.

In the cold and dark,

with a body guard of just three trusted soldiers,

she left Oxford Castle by a small side gate.

Wrapped in white cloaks as camouflage against the snow,

they walked silently across the frozen river.

An army surrounded the castle but no-one saw them pass.

They trudged seven miles through the drifting snow

before they found horses to carry them to safety.

It was a courageous escape by anyone's standards

and even the Gesta Stephani remarked on Matilda's extraordinary tenacity.

"Never have I read of another woman so luckily rescued

"from so many mortal foes and from the threat of dangers so great."

Matilda was now free, but nothing had changed.

England remained in military deadlock,

it was time to develop a new game plan.

As the destructive stalemate continued,

Matilda came to the realisation that, as a woman,

she would never fit her most powerful subjects' idea

of what a King should be

but she was the mother of a son,

Henry, and he was an entirely different prospect.

Matilda recognised that the battle she now faced

was to win the crown for her son, not to wear it herself.

If the she-wolf couldn't wear the crown, then her cub would.

While Matilda had been fighting in England,

her son Henry had grown up in France.

As a strong and energetic warrior

he had all the promise of a future King

and Matilda decided that the time had come for him to fight

for his grandfather's kingdom.

Stephen's position had depended on his ability

to offer security and leadership.

But the anarchy of the long years of civil war had undone all that.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

England's people felt abandoned by God.

Saying that while they suffered, Christ and his saints slept.

And so, in the face of dwindling support,

Stephen was forced to agree a compromise.

He would remain as King

but at a ceremony, here in Winchester,

Stephen recognised Henry as his successor.

Matilda had won.

But the cost of her victory was her own political eclipse.

She wasn't even mentioned by name

in the treaty that brought an end to the conflict

that had dominated her life.

It wasn't long though before her self denial was rewarded.

Stephen died in October 1154 and two months later,

almost exactly 19 years since Matilda's father had died,

her son was crowned King Henry II.

BELLS RINGING

With her son safely on the throne, Matilda returned to Normandy

and settled just outside its capital, Rouen,

where she acted as Henry's councillor

and sometimes his royal deputy.

Matilda had shown how hard it was

for a woman to rule in her own right.

In the end she sacrificed her own claim to the throne

to ensure her dynasty continued.

She had lost the battle but she had won the war.

Her father would have been proud of her and her son certainly was.

Henry never forgot the importance of his mother

and always called himself Henry FitzEmpress - son of the Empress.

A poem from the time recalls that,

"Nothing in the world was dearer to him than she."

Matilda died in Normandy at the age of 65

on the 10th of September 1167.

In the end it was Matilda's tough political pragmatism

that made her son King.

These Latin verses were later inscribed on her tomb:

"Ortu Magna, viro maior, sed maxima partu,

"hic iacet Henrici filia, sponsa, parens."

"Great by birth, greater by marriage but greatest in her offspring.

"Here lies the daughter, wife and mother of Henry."

Her son's triumph

was the vindication of everything she'd done

but the price to be paid for that victory

was her disappearance between the lines of her own epitaph.

This was the price that Matilda paid

for being a queen who dared to believe she might act like a king.

And still the question remained,

would a woman seeking this much power always face such outrage?

Her daughter-in-law would attempt to find out

with just as much determination as Matilda herself.

But as the centuries have gone by,

Eleanor of Aquitaine's fame has endured less as a she-wolf

than as a queen of the romantic world of chivalry and courtly love.

In fact we know very little for certain about Eleanor's looks

or her emotional life.

The only contemporary image of her that survives

is this effigy from her tomb at Fontevraud Abbey

and it's hard to get a sense of the extraordinary woman

behind this mask-like face.

One clue to her intellect is perhaps the book she's holding -

not a typical prop for a medieval woman

but then Eleanor wasn't typical in anything she did.

She spent 80 years at the centre of European politics,

not as a passive consort but as a dynamic force in her own right.

Above all she was a woman who believed in her own agency,

her ability to determine her own fate.

Eleanor's childhood was spent in Poitiers,

one of the great cities of her father's Duchy of Aquitaine.

In her day it had a reputation as a place of poetry, romance and wit.

It was a flamboyant and sophisticated court

for a girl to grow up in.

This exquisite church, with its elaborate carvings

and richly painted walls,

gives us a rare glimpse into the sumptuousness

of Eleanor's early life

but at the age of 13 she was abruptly taken away from all this.

The beginning of Eleanor's life was entirely conventional

for an aristocratic heiress.

Just like Matilda before her,

she was an asset to be traded in marriage.

But Eleanor made a particularly powerful match.

Her new husband was heir to the French throne

and within days of the wedding the old King died.

Now, at the age of only 13, Eleanor was Queen of France,

wife of King Louis VII.

Louis, who was unworldly and young for his years,

was puppyishly devoted to his beautiful wife.

Eleanor was much less impressed.

According to later gossip she said he was more monk than King.

Eleanor's role as consort was to give Louis an heir

and it may be evidence of her distaste for the job

that it was eight years before she gave birth for the first time.

The baby was strong, healthy and perfect in every way

except for the fact that she was a girl.

But Eleanor was still only 21.

And, from their court in Paris,

there was another project consuming the royal couple.

Louis and Eleanor had decided to go on crusade.

Here at Saint-Denis, in June 1147,

Eleanor knelt to receive the Pope's blessing

during the crusade's elaborate send-off

and she almost fainted on a suffocatingly hot day

but she didn't show any such vulnerability

in the face of the very real dangers of the crusade itself.

Eleanor and Louis were joining the great battle

between the Christian West and Muslim East

to win control of Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

This adventure was the first sign

that Eleanor was not going to be a conventional wife or Queen.

A crusade was not to be taken lightly,

a treacherous journey across 1,000s of miles

to face dangers of landscape, climate, disease and war.

Ironically, though, the greatest threat to France's Queen

wasn't her position near the front line but a personal scandal.

Eleanor and Louis made their way across Europe.

In the Spring of 1148 they sought refuge in Antioch,

now in modern day Turkey,

which was ruled by Eleanor's uncle, Raymond of Poitiers.

According to one chronicler,

Raymond was the handsomest of the princes of the earth

and Eleanor delighted in his company.

Soon the intimacy between them began to spark scandalous gossip

that raced across Europe.

This was a dangerous moment for Eleanor.

She was suspected of having an incestuous affair with her uncle.

"Bad enough," you might think,

for a Queen, however, adultery was also treason.

But Eleanor seemed completely undaunted

by this innuendo and speculation.

When Louis decided to leave Antioch,

Eleanor, astonishingly, refused to go with him

and when he tried to insist,

she showed just how far she was prepared to go to escape him.

Eleanor decided to use church law to claim that her marriage was invalid.

In theory, the church banned marriages

where a couple shared an ancestor

within the previous seven generations

as Eleanor and Louis did

but this was a law that the powerful could always

get permission to ignore.

According to the chronicler, John of Salisbury:

"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 by the fourth and fifth degree."

The reality was that church law was used by powerful men

to get rid of wives who were no longer politically convenient.

And it seemed that Eleanor didn't see why she shouldn't use it too.

But Eleanor found that the King's power was greater than hers.

Louis wasn't prepared to let his Queen go

and she was forced to leave Antioch with him.

In 1149 the failed crusade trailed home

and for the next two years Eleanor

didn't waste her energy by struggling further.

She remained dutifully in Paris

and in 1150 she gave birth to another daughter.

But then she encountered the man

who would change the whole course of her life.

This man was Matilda's son, Henry, future King of England

and in 1151 peace talks brought him to Paris.

Eleanor and Henry must have met when he came to the French court

in the summer of 1151,

though the chroniclers are tantalisingly silent on the subject.

He was nine years younger than Eleanor,

a fiery and charismatic young man

with boundless energy as a soldier and a leader

and just seven months later, the difficulties in Eleanor's marriage

erupted into the open once again.

This time it was Louis who had given up the fight

to keep his wife by his side.

In March 1152 a committee of French bishops annulled their marriage

and Eleanor left Paris immediately for Poitiers.

BELLS RINGING

Just eight weeks and two days after her divorce she married Henry.

In doing so she changed the balance of power in Europe.

Eleanor had inherited the vast Duchy of Aquitaine from her father

and by adding this to Henry's lands in England, Normandy and Anjou,

she helped him build an empire that

stretched from the Pyrenees to the Scottish borders.

Eleanor had already shown that she would determine her own future

but now in her second royal marriage, she found

she wasn't the strongest female influence in her husband's life.

That role went to her new mother-in-law, Matilda.

We don't know anything about the relationship between these

two formidable women.

But what we do know is that while Eleanor did her duty

as Henry's Queen, producing eight children in 15 years,

it was Matilda who was the elder states woman in his government.

That was to change in 1167 when Matilda died less than a year

after the birth of her last royal grandchild.

Now, at the age of 43,

Eleanor's political career was about to begin in earnest.

The task of governing Henry's huge and unwieldy empire

was a challenging one, which kept him constantly on the move.

Aquitaine, at its most southern edge, was culturally

and politically alien to Henry but it was Eleanor's homeland.

And in 1168, Eleanor went to govern the Duchy in her husband's name.

For Henry this was a matter of political strategy,

but for Eleanor an opportunity and a welcome homecoming.

Hidden inside what are now the law courts in Eleanor's city

of Poitiers is all that remains of her vast palace.

We don't know very much about the details of Eleanor's rule

but it's clear that she exercised independent power here,

holding great courts where she gathered

Aquitaine's lords around her.

But she wasn't accused of unnatural pride,

as Matilda had been in England.

Instead, her role as Aquitaine's Duchess was accepted.

A woman in charge was much less challenging, it turned out,

if she were ruling as the lieutenant of an absent husband.

However, the stories that surround this period of Eleanor's life

are tales of romance and chivalry.

Aquitaine was the home of the troubadours

who sang of knights declaring their passionate devotion

to unobtainable ladies

and attempting heroic deeds of valour to win their hearts.

One 12th century text entitled De Amore

puts Eleanor at the centre of these stories,

ruling over a court of love that pronounced judgement

on questions such as whether true love could exist in marriage.

There's no evidence that the courts of love ever really existed,

but it's interesting that the idea has persisted so powerfully.

How much easier to think of Eleanor as the Queen of romance

concerned with emotions, not politics.

But what Eleanor did next, I think, demonstrated

in the most dramatic way, just how important power was to her.

This magnificent castle at Chinon along the banks of the Loire

was one of the most important centres of Henry's rule.

It was also the setting for what was to be

Eleanor's most assertive bid for power.

Eleanor never had a claim to be a monarch in her own right,

but her children did

and, as a mother, she was prepared to fight tooth and claw

for her sons' rights.

It was a fight that would dominate the rest of her life.

Male heirs were a medieval king's greatest asset,

the insurance that his dynasty would prevail,

but grown-up sons weren't always prepared to wait patiently

while their father still reigned.

When Eleanor's three eldest boys reached their teens,

they were champing at the bit for a share

in ruling their father's empire.

And although Henry promised them a role to play,

he couldn't bring himself to delegate real power.

In 1173, their oldest son

had had enough of his father's empty promises.

Under cover of night, he rode away from Chinon to defect

to Henry's great enemy and Eleanor's ex-husband, the King of France.

Eleanor's husband was devastated at their son's betrayal,

but Henry was about to get a much bigger shock.

When he sent for his wife and his younger sons,

he discovered that Eleanor and the boys had also left for Paris.

It was clear that Eleanor too was in open revolt

against her husband and King.

Why did Eleanor turn on her husband?

The story that's often told is that she was violently angry

about Henry's affair with a beautiful young woman

named Rosamund Clifford,

known as "Fair Rosamund" the "Rose of the World".

There's no way of knowing now what Eleanor thought or felt,

so we'll never be sure exactly what was going through her mind

when she rebelled against her husband.

And once again in Eleanor's life, emotion gets used to fill

a gap left by an absence of evidence.

All kings had mistresses

and Eleanor was worldly wise enough to know that.

But she had a formidable political brain and it's much more likely

that she, like her sons, was angry that the power Henry

had given her in Aquitaine wasn't everything he'd promised.

Eleanor was treading an intensely dangerous path,

but she had never been held back by fear.

She had already done the unthinkable

when she left one king to marry another.

Now her second royal husband was standing in the way

of her ambition and she would leave him too.

Sons rebelling against their father were a cause of outrage and sorrow,

but the 12th century had seen it all before.

A wife rebelling against her husband

was a new and profoundly alarming phenomenon.

One chronicler scoured his archive to find more than 30 examples

of sons taking up arms against their father,

but not a single precedent of a queen in revolt against her husband.

In a public letter, the Archbishop of Rouen told Eleanor

that she threatened the very fabric of society.

"Man is the head of woman", he said.

"We know that unless you return to your husband,

"you will be the cause of a general ruin".

But Eleanor, as always, refused to be cowed.

She set about mustering support from the disaffected Lords of Aquitaine

who were always ready to resist Henry's rule.

Finally, she rode North to join her sons. But she never arrived.

She was captured on the road by her husband's forces.

According to one chronicle, they found her disguised as a man.

With Eleanor captured, the boys were no match for their father.

By the autumn of 1174, they had no choice

but to throw themselves on his mercy.

Henry was generous in victory and offered his sons peace with honour.

To Eleanor, he was not so magnanimous.

Eleanor was taken as a prisoner from France to England

and for the next 15 years she's almost lost in silence.

We don't even know for certain where she was held,

but for a woman who'd always believed in her own agency,

captivity can only have been relentlessly difficult to endure.

Eleanor was blamed for their family's descent into civil war.

But during the 15 long years, she was kept under lock and key,

THEY kept on fighting.

It was a conflict that claimed the life of her eldest son

and it didn't stop until 1189 when, at the age of 56,

in his fortress of Chinon, Henry II died.

His body was taken to Fontevraud Abbey,

ten miles westward along the Loire River.

His heir was his second son, Richard,

Eleanor's favourite child,

who would one day be known as the Lion Heart.

It was dusk when Richard stepped into the church to look

for the last time at his dead father's face.

Then he sent word to England

that his mother was now a free woman.

Eleanor was 65 years old,

and, after 15 years in captivity, her moment had come.

And this time, she wasn't just given the Duchy of Aquitaine to rule

but the kingdom of England.

Richard sent word that his mother should have the power of doing

whatever she wished in the kingdom.

Eleanor had to rule England because Richard was away on crusade.

And unusually for Eleanor's controversial career,

her power didn't provoke critical comment.

It seemed that a queen mother ruling on behalf of her son, the King,

was infinitely more acceptable than a queen ruling in her own right.

To establish her son's new regime,

Eleanor travelled from city to city and castle to castle

at the head of her queenly court,

an unusual adjective for the chronicler

Roger of Howden to choose,

but one that emphasised the rare spectacle of a woman alone

at the helm of English government.

And she had to do the job for much longer than anyone had anticipated.

On his way back from the Holy land, Richard was captured,

and spent more than a year behind the walls of a German castle.

It was Eleanor who kept the peace in England during his absence

and Eleanor who raised the ransom that eventually bought his freedom.

When Richard died in 1199, struck by a stray arrow at a siege in France,

it was Eleanor who secured the succession

of her youngest son, John.

Amazingly, at the age of 75, she travelled hundreds of miles,

the length and breadth of France to support John's rule.

But eventually age and exhaustion caught up with Eleanor.

She returned here to Fontevraud to rest

and from that point on she retreated into silence.

Eleanor died on the 31st March 1204 at the age of 80.

Despite her long years of conflict with her husband,

she was laid to rest beside him.

Matilda and Eleanor both believed in their right to rule for themselves.

Matilda got to the very brink of her own coronation as Queen of England.

And when Eleanor's power and autonomy were threatened,

she went so far as to lead a rebellion against her own husband.

But in practice, it turned out that the sight of a woman

pursuing power for herself caused consternation and horror.

The fear of the she-wolves had begun.

In the next programme,

we meet the queens who inspired that title in literature.

One accused of murder,

the other of plunging the country into the Wars of the Roses,

Isabella and Margaret each fought for power

in one of the most brutal periods of English history.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd