The loud, confused cries of hundreds talking in groups, of the lawyer-priests spreading their crackling parchments, and of serving men passing in and out of the doors, ceased to a sharp order from the archbishop’s serjeant and the ringing of his pike upon the stone floor of that church. There were only a few hurried whispers passing between the clerks of the queen, and these also fell when the archbishop rose and gravely put his question, whether any one present desired to come forward on the plea of the king and of the queen that their marriage, being contracted within the decrees forbidden to Christian men and women, should be made null and of no effect. But if such consanguinity were not established, then let them preserve the sacrament of their marriage in God’s name. When he had sat him down again, those who stood ready behind the king--his relatives, and witnesses of his rolls and archives--came forward one after the other, and each stretched forward his right hand open, palm downwards, over the relics, taking the oath assigned. Such and such was the degree of consanguinity between Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII, of that name, King of the French and Duke of Aquitaine. Eleanor, upon her throne apart, heard in those proud royal formulæ titles hardly greater than her own. She had behind her generation after generation of the great dukes, her fathers, of whom she came, the sole heiress, summing up in her presence the story of the Roman south, and Poitiers on its hill, and Bordeaux and Bayonne, and the vineyards of Angoulême. She would take good care into whose hands all those hundred miles of countryside should go. She foresaw the wars. When the long and formal business of that Court was over (the depositions inscribed, signed and sealed, the pleas of either party heard, the documents declared, the relationship established), the bishops consulted for their verdict, and gave it in corporate form, so that the great clerics outside their body--the Pope, their chief, and even great St. Bernard himself (the spiritual master in Christendom)--said nothing more. They gave their verdict upon the undoubted text of the Canon Law. They declared this marriage of fifteen years now null. And their solemn sentence was delivered, the silence broke again for a moment, and once again the serjeant of the archbishop, with the pound of his pike upon the stone floor, commanded silence. The queen took from her head the gold circle of the woman’s crown and set it down in symbol of the change. She had another crown before her eyes, and one that should be greater in Europe for fifty brilliant years than the crown of the Capetian. She was to be mistress of the Angevin, and to command in her own fashion, through so many wars, so great a government.