There's no way of knowing now what Eleanor thought or felt, so we'll never be sure exactly what was going through her mind when she rebelled against her husband. And once again in Eleanor's life, emotion gets used to fill a gap left by an absence of evidence. All kings had mistresses and Eleanor was worldly wise enough to know that. But she had a formidable political brain and it's much more likely that she, like her sons, was angry that the power Henry had given her in Aquitaine wasn't everything he'd promised. Eleanor was treading an intensely dangerous path, but she had never been held back by fear. She had already done the unthinkable when she left one king to marry another. Now her second royal husband was standing in the way of her ambition and she would leave him too.