Eleanor of Aquitaine had stopped off at Portde-Piles in France. The goal of reaching her native Poitou was almost in sight, just a short distance to the south. It was warm and relaxed - in stark contrast to the austere gloom of the Paris she was leaving behind. As she rested, news reached her from eyes and ears active across the region of another plan to kidnap her. It was the second plot within days. She had barely made it south from the county of Blois, slipping through the fingers of Count Theobald V.
In March 1152, the senior churchmen and nobility of France had gathered at Beaugency on the banks of the River Loire in Blois, If the spring was warm, the welcome for Queen Eleanor had been decidedly chilly. At the age of 28, her 15-year marriage to King Louis VII of France was annulled on the grounds of consanguinity, a too-close familial relationship that everyone had conveniently just remembered.
Eleanor had enjoyed a great deal of influence over her husband, whom chroniclers consistently portrayed as a love-sick puppy led astray by a woman who threatened to be the ruin of his reign and his kingdom.
Louis had led a failed military campaign into Toulouse as part of an ongoing dispute with Eleanor's family over ownership of the county. He had waged war on some of his most powerful subjects when Eleanor's sister had begun an affair with a married older man. The royal couple had gone on crusade to the Holy Land together, but that had all gone terribly wrong. Monk chroniclers had furrowed their brows, searched for a reason for all this calamity, and aimed their inky bile at the queen. It had to be her fault so that it wasn't the king's.
For her part, Eleanor seemed disappointed in her husband. Her father, Duke William X of Aquitaine, had died in April 1137 in his late thirties. At 13, Eleanor was his heir. She was placed into the care of King Louis VI, who quickly married her to his son to bring the sprawling duchy of Aquitaine under Capetian control.
On 25 July the 13-year-old Eleanor and the 17-year-old heir to the French throne were married. Just a week later, on 1 August, Louis VI died. When Eleanor and her husband entered Paris, they did so as King
