Trashy Royals

England's King John is truly one of a kind. He was a king so bad at the job that there's never been another British ruler willing to adopt the moniker. In the Robin Hood lore, Prince John is often depicted as a usurper while the rightful king, John's brother Richard, was away on crusade.

Indeed, that John became king at all is an accident of history. His father, King Henry II, had four sons with Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and John was the baby. As a young man, he was known as John Lackland, because he lacked land. But his oldest brother died, then the brother closest in age to him. What was left was King Richard the Lionheart - away at Crusade - and a scheming John playing all the angles.

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Eleanor’s life was no less interesting following the death of Henry II. Rather than fade into the background, her son, King Richard I, instead made her his most powerful deputy in England while he went to the Holy Land on Crusade. In fact, Richard I was an extremely disinterested monarch and spent very little of his decade-long reign in the country. His brother, the future King John, at one point tried to raise and army and take the crown by force, but his mother put an end to that. Then there was the ransom of Richard the Lionheart, by Austrian Duke Leopold V. Eleanor personally traveled to negotiate with, and pay ransom to, Holy Roman emperor Henry VI.

Eleanor’s final years were spent in the reign of her youngest son, King John, during which she traveled among her children in Europe, arranging marriages for her granddaughters. By the time she died in 1204, at the age perhaps of 82, she had seeded her offspring among the royal houses of the continent, where they and their offspring would be players for generations to come.

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After Eleanor finally succeeded in ending her marriage to Louis VII of France, she had a brief turn of wedded bliss to the future Henry II of England. It’s not that the marriage was short, just her happiness. Henry II, it turns out, was a king of questionable judgment, as Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket would find out. He was also loathe to cede power to their children, and little was helped when Henry’s head was turned by a young noblewoman named Rosamund Clifford – an affair that contributed to Eleanor urging her sons to rise up against their father in England. For her treachery, Eleanor would spend more than a decade and a half confined; their sons were welcomed back into the fold in a “boys will be boys” way. But this was not the end for Eleanor. Upon the death of Henry II in 1189, she was the extremely involved Dowager Queen of England while her sons, Richard the Lionheart and King John, would take their turns on the throne.

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There are no Plantagenet kings after Henry II without Eleanor of Aquitaine.

History is not without examples of powerful women, to be sure, but even in that pantheon, Eleanor of Aquitaine is a special case. In this first part of her story, Alicia takes us through her early life in the French province of Aquitaine, where her father was the ruling Duke, and her first, disastrous marriage to the future (it turns out by a matter of days) Louis VII of France. A marriage that would, after many unhappy years, be annulled, allowing Eleanor to create one of history’s most audacious political romances: she married the future Henry II of England, son of Empress Matilda, paving the way for Eleanor to have been both Queen of France and Queen of England through separate marriages!

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It's a sad week, friends, and we are distracted by the losses of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. Today, we do a little Royals Round Up with chatter about Harry and Meghan, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Sarah Ferguson, and their daughter. Then, we share some listener emails and answer their questions to the best of our distracted abilities.

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