Most of all, he was a keen man, with few scruples, and the Queen began
to ask him to help her in getting her marriage annulled, because she
could no longer bear to be the wife of a spoon-faced monk, as she
called the King; whereat Count Raymond laughed. Then he thought awhile
and bent his broad brows; but soon his face cleared, for he had found a
remedy. The King, he said, was surely Eleanor's cousin and within the
prohibited degrees of consanguinity, so that the marriage was null and
void; and the Pope would be obliged against his will to adhere to the
rule of the Church and pronounce it so. They were cousins in the
seventh degree, he said, because the King was descended from Eleanor's
great-great-great-great-grandfather, William Towhead, Duke of Guienne,
whose daughter, Adelaide of Poitiers, married Hugh Capet, King of
France; and the seventh degree of consanguinity was still prohibited,
and no dispensation had been given, nor even asked for.
At first the Queen laughed, but presently she sent for the Bishop of
Metz, and asked him; and he said that Count Raymond spoke truly, but
that he would have nothing to do with the matter, since it had never
been the intention of the Church that her rules should be misused. Yet
it is said that he was afterwards of the Council which declared that
there had been no marriage.
So, being sure, the Queen went to the King and told him to his face
that she had meant to marry a king, and not a monk as he was, and that
she had now found out that her marriage was no marriage, wherefore he
was living in mortal sin; and if he would save his soul he must
repudiate her as soon as they should have returned to France.
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