When their sons grew to manhood, Eleanor encouraged them to demand their inheritance. Henry the Young King, Richard, and Geoffrey wanted lands to rule; Henry II refused. In 1173, when the princes fled to France, Eleanor supported them. Chroniclers later claimed she disguised herself as a man to join them—an image that has haunted legend ever since.

Her rebellion failed. Henry II’s forces captured her later that year while she travelled through Poitou. For the next sixteen years she was kept under guard, a queen turned prisoner. Yet even captivity could not erase her influence: her sons would continue to fight in her name.

When Henry of Anjou (later Henry II, also known as Henry Plantagenet) married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, they created a political alliance of breath taking scale. Henry was heir to the English throne; Eleanor, just divorced from King Louis VII of France, brought with her the duchy of Aquitaine, one of the wealthiest and most independent regions in Europe.

For a time, their marriage was a true partnership. Eleanor rode beside Henry on campaign, governed Aquitaine in his name, and bore him eight children. Together, they forged the Angevin Empire stretching from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees.

But power and passion soured into mistrust. By the 1170s, the marriage had collapsed into open hostility.

It was in the chaos of the Anarchy that one man carved out a reputation so dark that even in an age of violence, his name stood out: Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex.

Geoffrey inherited immense lands and titles but he wanted even more, shifting loyalties between Stephen and Matilda whenever it suited him, extorting charters and privileges from both. When Stephen finally moved against him in 1143, Geoffrey unleashed a reign of terror across eastern England.

Chroniclers such as the Peterborough Chronicle and Orderic Vitalis described him as a robber baron, commanding brutal mercenaries who pillaged the countryside. Hardly chivalric, the man was a misogynist bully who preyed on the weak. For women, especially widows and nuns, he was the Devil’s own demon.