Eleanor Of Aquitaine: By the Wrath of God, Queen of England

Product Information

As she speaks, LOUIS is turned away from her, murmuring an aside to BERNARD, while the perceptive BERNARD is watching ELEANOR disapprovingly.

Once, learning that the knights and tenants of Abingdon Abbey had failed to provide time-honoured service to their abbot, she wrote commanding them to comply. Earlier twentieth-century historians found it hard to be objective about Eleanor, and some even drew historical conclusions from the debunked romantic legends. Afterwards, when the parliamentary surveyors viewed the devastation, they found the building almost uninhabitable and rifled most of the stone, leaving only the gatehouse and a few rooms. First Edition thus, with frontispiece and 24 pages of coloured plates; pictorial cloth, upper board and backstrip blocked and lettered in red and black, a fine copy in publisher's board slip-case. It has thus become the stuff of legend: in Paris, on the wall of a house near Notre Dame, there is even an inscription commemorating the place where Heloise abandoned herself to the joys of consummation.Indeed, he issued a general edict to the princes of the realm, that the Queen’s word should be law in all matters. BERNARD tells ELEANOR that he has spoken with LOUIS about her request for an annulment, but LOUIS interrupts and says he is thinking about it.

And when she talks about the woman she spent months on end trying to under­stand, she is very protective and defensive. Original sources rarely reveal much about people's inner feelings or their sex lives - plenty of room for invention there! Denied for so long the exercise of power, for which she clearly had a natural aptitude, and relegated to a traditional female role which must have been stifling for one of her ability and intelligence, she finally tasted power at an age at which most of her contemporaries were either infirm or dead. Eleanor of Aquitaine will be published as a beautifully bound limited edition by The Folio Society in 2015, with new colour illustrations. Caird's production will include two choirboys from Westminister Abbey who will sing songs written by John Cameron.Eleanor had spent fifteen years married to Louis VII of France before he divorced her, only to be angered when she married his young rival. He then commiserates with them over their failed crusade, and they tell him something of their adventures since leaving the Holy Land. Most other late-twentieth-century historians have drawn other conclusions, that such allegations were fabricated by scandal-mongering chroniclers who were biased against Eleanor anyway.

In some ways, Heloise is a very modern heroine, for in making her controversial choice to place her love for Abelard above all other considerations, she defied the conventions of society and the rules of the Church. This conversation continues as they wrestle in an urgent embrace, which RAYMOND ends by pulling away. In the main house, Henry III had a canopied throne and chambers with wall paintings, and wainscot, doors and shutters painted green. I asked myself last year when, frustrated with the production's cavalier attitude to history, I resigned as consultant on the TV series of Henry VIII and his wives, starring Ray Winstone. As Alison Weir shows in her excellent biography, the Queen and Henry were, in their early years at least, passionate lovers in a royal world of arranged and loveless marriages.She is clearly a very frustrated woman, and the row that takes place in this scene, reveals much about the couple's sex life, or lack of it, and the effect on Eleanor. They discuss the dismal progress of the crusade, then THIERRY, with an extravagant show of reluctance, asks LOUIS if he has heard the rumours about Eleanor. First edition thus, slipcased hardcover, the book has a tiny skew to the binding, and a touch of creasing to the lower fore corner of about ten pages.