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 113 7. She 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. Their mar riage was annulled by mutual consent in I151. She then married Henry of Anjou. 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 suc ceeded to the English crown in I154. From this event dates the beginning of the secular strife between England and France which runs like a red thread through mediaeval history.
Eleanor bore to her second husband five sons and three daugh ters; 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 confine ment. It was during her captivity that Henry formed his con nection 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. 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 April 1, 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 400 years.
See the chronicles cited for the reigns of Henry II., Richard I. and John. Also Sir J. H. Ramsay, Angevin Empire (1903) ; K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings (1887) ; and A. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, vol. i. (1841) .