All About Alais
People celebrate Father’s Day in their own special ways. 
This year, my family popped A Lion in Winter into the DVD player. As heartwarming family dramas go, it is right up there with King Lear. No one’s eyes get put out, but there’s plenty of paternal howling on the heath, filial betrayal, and general familial disillusionment. There is not a single son of Henry II who doesn’t betray him. Everyone gets disowned at least once. Stuff to warm the cockles of one’s heart. I’m just waiting it for the Plantagenet Guide to Parenting. One could shelve it right next to the Titus Andronicus Cookbook.
What I wanted to know was, what happened to Alais?
For those who don’t know the story, A Lion in Winter is a (heavily fictionalized) account of the latter days of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, as their sons play parent off against parent in an attempt to snag the crown—while Eleanor and Henry play son off against son in an attempt to score points off each other in a long-standing love match turned grudge match. In the midst of it all is the sister of the French king, long ago betrothed to Richard, then Count of Poitou, sent as a child of nine to be raised in the English court, now mistress to Henry II, passed around as a pawn from prince to prince.
In the movie, Alais is the last joy of an aging king, the May in a May and December romance. Was the poor Princess Alais Henry II’s mistress? Contemporary chroniclers certainly seemed to think so. Giraldus Cambrensis claimed that Henry had plans to annul his marriage to Eleanor, disinherit his sons, marry Alais, and breed a new line of heirs to his empire. Whether those were his ultimate plans or not, the rumor that he had taken her to his bed echoed through two kingdoms. Alais was alternately promised to both Richard and John and in the end wed to neither. Not all that unlike the movie, minus the little matter of love.
So what happened to Alais after those final credits rolled? Throughout the reign of Richard, Alais was held in close confinement, first in Rouen, then in Caen.
Brought to the English court at nine, she was thirty-three by the time she was finally released, traded back to her brother Philip as one bargaining chip among many in a treaty during the incessant wars between England and France. Although she was, by the standards of the day, not only used goods but well past her marital sell-by date, Philip found another matrimonial alliance for her: he married Alais off to Guillaume de Ponthieu, whose lands provided a buffer on the French frontier against those held by Richard on one side and the Count of Flanders on the other. She bore Guillaume three children, dying in childbed with the last at the age of forty.
Unlike the woman in whose shadow she spent her youth, the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alais seems to have had little say in her own destiny. But one can't help wondering what it must have been like to have been at the front-lines of the Plantagenet squabbles, with all those larger-than-life characters charging about.
Someone really ought to write a book about her…. Are there any overlooked historical characters who you think deserve their own novel time?
This year, my family popped A Lion in Winter into the DVD player. As heartwarming family dramas go, it is right up there with King Lear. No one’s eyes get put out, but there’s plenty of paternal howling on the heath, filial betrayal, and general familial disillusionment. There is not a single son of Henry II who doesn’t betray him. Everyone gets disowned at least once. Stuff to warm the cockles of one’s heart. I’m just waiting it for the Plantagenet Guide to Parenting. One could shelve it right next to the Titus Andronicus Cookbook.What I wanted to know was, what happened to Alais?
For those who don’t know the story, A Lion in Winter is a (heavily fictionalized) account of the latter days of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, as their sons play parent off against parent in an attempt to snag the crown—while Eleanor and Henry play son off against son in an attempt to score points off each other in a long-standing love match turned grudge match. In the midst of it all is the sister of the French king, long ago betrothed to Richard, then Count of Poitou, sent as a child of nine to be raised in the English court, now mistress to Henry II, passed around as a pawn from prince to prince.
In the movie, Alais is the last joy of an aging king, the May in a May and December romance. Was the poor Princess Alais Henry II’s mistress? Contemporary chroniclers certainly seemed to think so. Giraldus Cambrensis claimed that Henry had plans to annul his marriage to Eleanor, disinherit his sons, marry Alais, and breed a new line of heirs to his empire. Whether those were his ultimate plans or not, the rumor that he had taken her to his bed echoed through two kingdoms. Alais was alternately promised to both Richard and John and in the end wed to neither. Not all that unlike the movie, minus the little matter of love.So what happened to Alais after those final credits rolled? Throughout the reign of Richard, Alais was held in close confinement, first in Rouen, then in Caen.
Brought to the English court at nine, she was thirty-three by the time she was finally released, traded back to her brother Philip as one bargaining chip among many in a treaty during the incessant wars between England and France. Although she was, by the standards of the day, not only used goods but well past her marital sell-by date, Philip found another matrimonial alliance for her: he married Alais off to Guillaume de Ponthieu, whose lands provided a buffer on the French frontier against those held by Richard on one side and the Count of Flanders on the other. She bore Guillaume three children, dying in childbed with the last at the age of forty. Unlike the woman in whose shadow she spent her youth, the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alais seems to have had little say in her own destiny. But one can't help wondering what it must have been like to have been at the front-lines of the Plantagenet squabbles, with all those larger-than-life characters charging about.
Someone really ought to write a book about her…. Are there any overlooked historical characters who you think deserve their own novel time?
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