A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Eleanor of Aquitaine
ELEANOR
Of Aquitaine, succeeded her father, William the Tenth, in 1137, at the age of fifteen, in the fine duchy which at that time comprised Gascony, Saintonge, and the Comte de Poitou. She married the same year Louis the Seventh, King of France, and went with him to the Holy Land. She soon gave him cause for jealousy, from her intimacy with her uncle, Raymond, Count of Poitiers, and with Saladin; and after many bitter quarrels, they were divorced under pretence of consanguinity, in 1152.
Six weeks afterwards, Eleanor married Henry the Second, Duke Of Normandy, afterwards King of England, to whom she brought in dowry Poitou and Guienne. Thence arose those wars that ravaged France for three hundred years, in which more than three millions of Frenchmen lost their lives.
Eleanor had four sons and a daughter by her second husband. In 1162, she gave Guienne to her second son, Richard Cœur de Lion, who did homage for it to the King of France. She died in 1204. She was very jealous of her second husband, and shewed the greatest animosity to all whom she regarded as rivals. She is accused of having compelled one of his mistresses, Rosamond Clifford, generally called "Fair Rosamond," to drink poison; but the story has been shewn to be untrue by later researches. She incited her sons to rebel against their father, and was in consequence thrown into prison, where she was kept for sixteen years. She was in her youth remarkably beautiful; and, in the later years of her varied life, shewed evidences of a naturally noble disposition. As soon as she was liberated from her prison, which was done by order of her son Richard, on his accession to the throne, he placed her at the head of the government. No doubt she bitterly felt the utter neglect she had suffered during her imprisonment; yet she did not, when she had obtained power, use it to punish her enemies, but rather devoted herself to deeds of mercy and piety, going from city to city, setting free all persons confined for violating the game-laws, which, in the latter part of King Henry's life, were cruelly enforced; and when she released these prisoners, it was on condition that they prayed for the soul of her late husband. Miss Strickland thus closes her interesting biography of this beautiful but unfortunate Queen of England:—"Eleanor of Aquitaine is among the very few women who have atoned for iti ill-spent youth by a wise and benevolent old age. As a sovereign she ranks among the greatest of female rulers."