SOURCE: “Eleanora of Aquitaine, Queen of Henry II” in Lives of the Queens of England, Boston: Taggard & Thompson, 1864, pp. 166-203.

In the following excerpt, Strickland follows Eleanor's life through 1171, including her role in the Second Crusade, her attitude toward the institution of marriage, and her reaction to her husband's affair with Rosamond.

The life of the consort of Henry II. commences the biographies of a series of Provençal princesses, with whom the earlier monarchs of our royal house of Plantagenet allied themselves, for upwards of a century. Important effects, not only on the domestic history of the court of England, but on its commerce and statistics, may be traced to its union, by means of this queen, with the most polished and civilized people on the face of the earth, as the Provençals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries indisputably were. With the arts, the idealities...