2
EVEN WHILE SHE CHERISHED her beloved Richard, Eleanor of Aquitaine continued her amazing career as queen and woman. Apart from her other qualities, she was a childbearing machine of superb efficiency. In September 1158 she gave birth to her fourth son Geoffrey, her seventh child, and the fifth with Henry. Geoffrey as an adult turned out to be short of stature, but fair and handsome, looking more Norman than Poitevin. The most charming of the Devil’s Brood, he would also prove the most untrustworthy. Shrewd, cunning, a humbug and hypocrite with a compulsive tendency to deceit, Geoffrey had one saving grace: charm. With his mother’s vivacity, he was a plausible, persuasive rogue, and with his ‘gift of the gab’ he could talk his way out of anything, and into a multiplicity of intrigues, usually directed at his father. Gerald of Wales described Geoffrey as ‘overflowing with words, soft as oil, possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the seemingly indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite and a dissembler’. Roger of Howden’s assessment was along the same lines but pithier: ‘Geoffrey, that son of perdition’.1 In 1161 Eleanor bore her second daughter, also called Eleanor and in 1165 her third, Joan (or Joanna). John, born on Christmas Eve 1166, and named for the saint’s day, was her last child, the product of a rare marital coupling when Henry held one of his itinerant courts at Angers. Twenty-nine years separated the birth of Eleanor’s first child, Mary, from the last-born, and the age gap between John’s mother and father now loomed alarmingly: Eleanor was 42 but Henry still only 34. The adult John always struck observers as being the most purely Poitevin of Henry’s sons, being short and dark, a true child of the south. In time he would rival Geoffrey for treachery. He saw little of his mother during his childhood, as in 1169 she dropped him off at the abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, in the care of the Church, ostensibly to be trained as an oblate and, it seems, he remained there five years. According to some sources, at the age of six he was moved to the household of his brother Henry, the ‘Young King’ where he received the rudiments of knightly training. His academic education was entrusted to Ranulph Glanville, one of Henry’s senior officials.2 But modern scholars tend to doubt this story, and instead emphasise the five-year continuity at Fontevraud, the termination of which can be precisely dated to July 1174, for on the eighth of that month Henry II took John with him from Normandy to England.3
Much about John’s early years is doubtful, but some aspects have become clearer as a result of modern research. For a long time it was thought that the story that he was born in Oxford was simply a corruption of the known fact that his brother Richard was born there; it now appears that both brothers may have emerged from the womb there.4 It also seems likely that Eleanor of Aquitaine was born in 1124 (rather than 1122, the traditional date), and that her childbearing record has been obfuscated by Ralph of Diceto’s clear statement that Henry II and Eleanor had six sons, two of whom died in childhood. This means that in addition to William (1153-56), somewhere along the line there was another short-lived male baby.5 Also a date of 1124 rather than 1122 for Eleanor’s birth means that she may have borne John not quite so dangerously near the menopause as has sometimes been thought - though all such generalisations are difficult, for in the twelfth century fifty counted as extreme old age. It always used to be thought that Eleanor slowed down in her childbirth pattern, whether because of stillbirth or lowered fertility with the onset of the menopause, and there may be truth in these assertions, but a last child at 42 puts Eleanor more in the realm of naturalism than mythology.6 But why was John, unlike his brothers, placed in Fontevraud from the age of three to seven-and-a-half ? It is highly unlikely that he was earmarked for a career in the Church, and the misleading term ‘oblate’ probably means no more in this context than that he was a ‘boarder’ at the abbey. John and Joan were the two youngest children, both put into care at Fontevraud because of Eleanor’s absence on the business of Aquitaine. In some ways it was an odd choice for John, for it was a ‘double abbey’, ruled by an abbess, where the women outranked, and were served by, the men7; it was a questionable environment for a prince, and an absurd one if John were really being trained as a prince of the Church, where male hierarchy was the dominant ethos. Many plausible reasons have been given for the choice of Fontevraud: it was equidistant from Eleanor’s domains in the south and Henry’s in the north; both children, and especially Joan, needed female attendants; the abbey had close ties to both Henry’s and Eleanor’s families; the nuns were aristocratic ladies; and, possibly clinchingly, Henry’s first cousin Matilda of Flanders was there as a nun in the years 1169-74.8
In later years John was notable for quasi-autistic tendencies, and he always seemed to have a grudge against the world. This has been plausibly linked to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s neglect of him. Some cultural historians have alleged that John’s infancy was not especially lonely and deprived, both by the general standards of royal childhood and the ethos and values obtaining in the twelfth century. Mothers, it is said, bore children but they did not nurture them, and it was servants, tutors and others who brought them up.9 But this collides with the known fact that Eleanor was much more involved with her older children, and especially Richard, than most high-born ladies of the time and that, in addition, she signally neglected John.10 John’s upbringing was markedly different from that of his siblings in a number of ways. Because of the seven-year age gap between him and Geoffrey, he had no brother with whom he could bond. He saw far less of his mother than his brothers had.11 He had very different relations with his sisters from those of his brothers; he did not know his eldest sister at all, and even Joan, his companion in Fontevraud, was sent off to be married when she was nine. With an absent mother, no grandmother and no sisters during his formative adolescent years, it would not have been surprising if John developed misogynistic tendencies, and there is much in his later career that points in that direction. John’s upbringing lacked stability also. Because he was his father’s favourite and constantly with him - which also meant constantly travelling and being on the move with the itinerant court - he lacked the security of a settled home environment, which Eleanor certainly provided, for three elder sons.12 Given that Eleanor and Henry were far from model parents for a variety of reasons, some of them obvious in the narrative already provided, and the ‘Devil’s Brood’ were never easy children at the best of times, John’s problems as a child can be seen as overdetermined and exponential.
From the very first John showed himself to be a peevish, cross-grained individual. The chronicler Richard of Devizes once saw the youth virtually frothing at the mouth in a fury of frustration while he lambasted Chancellor Longchamp: ‘His whole person became so changed as to be hardly recognisable. Rage contorted his brow, his burning eyes glittered, bluish spots discoloured the pink of his cheeks, and I know not what would have become of the chancellor if in that moment of frenzy he had fallen like an apple into his hands as they sawed the air.’13 There were other such incidents. Fulk Fitzwarin was a playmate of John’s at Henry’s court and was often the recipient of the young prince’s foul tempers. ‘It happened one day that John and Fulk were alone in a chamber, playing chess. John took the chessboard and struck Fulk a great blow with it. Fulk, feeling hurt, kicked John hard in the stomach, so that he banged his head against the wall and became faint and dizzy. When John swooned, Fulk became frightened and thanked his stars that there was no one in the room but themselves. He rubbed John’s ears and eventually brought him round. John then went wailing to his father the king. “Hold your tongue,” said Henry, “you are always squabbling. If Fulk has done what you say, you probably deserved it.” He then called for John’s tutor and ordered him to be thrashed for having complained.’14
John was a thorn in his father’s side before he could walk and talk, and the reason for this was the shambolic feudal system itself. Throughout his reign Henry was constantly looking over his shoulder at his nominal overlord, Louis of France. The French king loomed as a more formidable threat once he sired a son with his new wife Adela of Champagne. Contemporary eyewitnesses tell us that Paris was a riot both of colour and humanity in August 1165 when Louis was finally able to announce the birth of a male heir. Through a cacophony of church bells and tocsin calls the capital of France seemed to be on fire as the common people spontaneously lit hundreds of bonfires. A public proclamation established that the child’s name was Philip and promised that he would make France great: ‘By the Grace of God there is born to us this night a King who shall be a hammer to the English.’15 Philip was brought up to hate the English and their kings, his hatred doubtless fuelled by the rueful and envious broodings of his father, who both detested Henry and Eleanor personally and resented their great power. Louis once told Walter Map: ‘Your lord the king of England, who lacks nothing, has men, horses, gold, silk, jewels, fruit, game and everything else . . . We in France have nothing but bread and wine and gaiety.’16 The significant thing from Richard’s point of view is that within two years in the 1160s two men were born who were to prove his mortal and implacable enemies: Philip of France and his own brother John.
Yet even without the unwelcome news that Louis, the supposed monk, had proved himself lusty enough to sire a son, Henry faced myriad problems in securing solid successions for his sons while unwinding the Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of medieval feudalism. In theory feudalism was a clearly constructed pyramid of hierarchical rights and duties; in practice it was arcane and confusing. Some writers have likened the power of the Capetian kings of France to the modern United Nations; to use Walter Bagehot’s terms, the ‘dignified’ aspect of feudal overlordship was impressive but the ‘efficient’ reality was that those who were formally vassal-states and vassal-kings defied their superiors with impunity, just as superpowers do with the UN today. Just as, other things being equal, nation-states like to make a show of deference to the UN to ward off the spectre of international chaos, so in the eleventh century vassal rulers saw ceremonial, religious and hierarchical reasons for paying lip-service to notions of fealty. Most of the de facto independent states within the confines of modern-day France recognised the king of the royal territory in the Ile de France as their feudal superior and accepted their technical position as fiefdoms by swearing oaths of homage. Technically, homage was the acknowledgement of land tenure, while fealty implied oath-taking, though naturally the formal acceptance of overlordship was usually combined with an oath of fealty. These oaths were the most important form of legal obligation in medieval society but, as has been widely realised, the paradox was that by the time the oath was the most important foundation of legal titles, it was itself largely a legal fiction; some scholars have gone further and suggested that most of so-called feudalism is a fiction.17 Men swore homage simply to get the feudal lord’s seal on their title deeds, then broke their oaths shamelessly. In the twelfth century the role of the oath as the guarantor of the feudal pyramid - king, dukes, great counts, lesser counts, barons, knights, peasants - was still potent though of steadily diminishing importance. From 1066 to 1204 it made no sense for a king of France to give orders to his ‘vassal’ the duke of Normandy, and, if he did give them, they were sure to be disregarded or disobeyed. Nonetheless, the dukes of Normandy still went through the farce of doing homage for the duchy.
Feminist historians have gone to great lengths to try to work up the importance of women in the society of the Middle Ages, but there is really no need for any special pleading, as females were of overriding importance, if only because, biologically, they survived better than infant males. Nubile heiresses had to be found husbands and, by definition, in exogamy, a woman marrying ‘out’ handed her husband new fiefs if and when her brothers died. These new fiefs were the source of much of the conflict among medieval states. Female inheritance of land conceivably could - and often did - bring mortal enemies together as fellow-subjects under a common government.18 Blood-feuds cut across the lines of feudal obligation and, in any case, female inheritance almost made nonsense of the supposed hierarchical pyramid by making the vassal more powerful than the lord. In the eleventh century every great man held a number of otherwise unconnected fiefs, each with its separate traditions and history, and held these fiefs from a number of lords. If the lords made war on each other, the vassal had to choose between them, so inevitably ended up being branded as traitor by one of them. To take the example of Henry II in France, he was count of Anjou and Maine and lord of Touraine by direct inheritance from his father, duke of Normandy through his mother, duke of Aquitaine through his wife, and in addition had shadowy claims to Auvergne, Toulouse and Britanny in the form of homage from local lords plus a claim to the hereditary Seneschalty of France. The office of Seneschal was in the gift of the king of France, and Louis had cunningly given it to Henry as it was the Seneschal’s duty to suppress rebellious vassals. One of Louis’s great rivals therefore had a duty to waste his substance and resources subduing men who in terms of realpolitik should have been his friends.
To an already complex structure Henry II added another layer when he sought a role for his sullen, jealous and rebellious brother Geoffrey, who had intrigued with King Louis against him. Originally possessor of the castles of Chinon, Loudon and Mirabel - and disappointed at these meagre morsels dispensed to him by Henry - Geoffrey lost even these as a result of allying himself with Louis and finding himself on the losing side. Henry, showing the complaisant attitude to treachery by kith and kin that was to be a marked feature of the Devil’s Brood, found a niche for him as Count of Nantes or Lower Britanny. The duchy of Britanny proper had been stable until the death of Conan III in 1148, but thereafter the territory was rent by civil war. Worn down by the endless factional turmoil and weakened by Geoffrey’s acquisition of Nantes, Duke Conan IV (or ‘Conan the Little’) gradually became tired of the struggle. When Geoffrey died at 24 in 1158 he tried to regain Nantes, but Henry claimed it was his as the inheritance of his brother.19 Crushed and demoralised, Conan lingered on a few more years until, in 1166, he sought permission from Henry to retire to his fief at Richmond in Yorkshire. With no sons, and his sister Constance certain to be married to a foreign lord, he realised that the game was up anyway. Henry nominated Constance’s husband as a cipher duke and forced him to do homage to him personally for Britanny. At the conference at Montmirail in 1169 which ended the war between Henry and King Louis, Conan IV accepted that his daughter should be betrothed to Henry’s son Geoffrey.20 Realising that Britanny was now a lost cause, he chose to do homage to Henry rather than Louis as overlord of the duchy. Since the Devil’s Brood had all done hierarchical homage among themselves and Henry II had made the meaningless gesture of accepting Louis as his feudal lord, it followed that a Breton knight now owed fealty to the following, in ascending order: Duchess Constance, daughter of Conan; to Geoffrey, her betrothed; to the Young King Henry, to whom Geoffrey had done homage; to the Old King (Henry II); and finally to King Louis. Unless all these were in agreement, our putative Breton knight was bound to end up acting treacherously to someone.
The arrangements for Henry II’s first born proved particularly troublesome, especially as the machiavellian king tied them up with devious political manoeuvrings of his own. Both King Louis of France and the dukes of Normandy claimed the border territory between their domains along the lower Seine as part of their sovereign territory. These marches were known as the Vexin, and the Vexin became a regular and predictable bone of contention between Henry and Louis; possession of the frontier fortress of Gisors was particularly sought after. In 1151 Henry had been forced to cede Gisors to Louis but he always hankered after its return.21 Thinking like a chess player, the cunning Henry contrived a way to get it back without force of arms. The key was the new Pope. The year 1159 saw a protracted struggle for the Apostolic Succession in Rome between Victor IV, backed by the German emperor, and Alexander III, backed by Louis of France; it was another papal schism, another year of pope and anti-pope of the kind that would bedevil the Middle Ages. Alexander feared that Henry II would back Victor against him as an automatic reaction to Louis’s backing of his own candidacy. But Henry had taken soundings in England, which convinced him Victor was so unpopular there that his own endorsement of Victor would carry significant political risks for himself. Determined, therefore, to back Alexander, he pretended to be agonising over the choice so as to wring a crucial concession from the new Pope. Two cardinals visited Normandy to canvass support for Alexander, so Henry told them his recognition of Alexander would depend on the Pope’s recognition of an immediate marriage between his son Henry and Margaret of France.22 The marriage of a six-year-old boy to a four-year-old girl seemed on the face of it more than a little peculiar, especially as the would-be bride was the daughter of the groom’s mother’s first husband, but there was no obstacle in canon law, since the annulment of the union of Eleanor and Louis meant that in the Church’s eyes no marriage had ever existed. Now Henry played his masterstroke. Louis could hardly oppose the wishes of a pontiff he had played such a major part in electing, so Henry insisted that Louis’s daughter Margaret be given the fortress of Gisors as a dowry. The fortress would not actually pass into the hands of the English king’s son until the marriage was celebrated, and in the meantime Gisors would be occupied by the Knights Templar as stakeholders. It did not take great sapience to foresee that the limbo period of the Templars would be a very short one - and this is indeed what transpired.23
Louis was furiously angry once he realised how he had been duped. Henry called in the papal favour immediately by achieving the marriage of young Henry on 2 November 1160. Louis mustered his forces for war but thought better of it and instead patched up an uneasy truce with the slippery Henry. But the 1160s found Henry obsessed with securing an undisputed succession for his eldest son. It was unfortunate for him that this decade also saw him locked in conflict with Thomas Becket, who was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. As Henry’s relations with Becket worsened, he found himself in a dilemma for which not even his devious mind could compass a solution. Pope Alexander, now secure in his papal office, felt he had already adequately discharged his debt to Henry over the election, angering his ally Louis of France in the process, but now here was Henry asking him for two further major favours, mutually incompatible. Henry wanted his eldest son crowned king in his lifetime, as the Capetians liked to do, and he also wanted Becket transferred to a titular see where he could not intervene in politics. A weary Alexander explained that he could grant one of the two boons but not both, since a true coronation had to be performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, following papal permission. Unable to cut the Gordian knot, Henry eventually had his son crowned king of England on 24 May 1170, with Becket’s bitter rival Archbishop Roger of York officiating.24 Thereafter young Henry was always known as the Young King to distinguish him from the Old King, his father and namesake. This coronation was a fiasco in another sense, apart from its dubious legality, for Margaret was unable to cross from France for the ceremony (some say she arrived late, others that she was deliberately delayed at Caen), leading Louis to suspect that Henry was trying to cut her out of the succession.25 Fearing papal sanctions in the form of an interdict or excommunication, Henry came up with yet another ingenious plan. He offered Becket a peaceful return to England on a ‘no fault’ basis and the opportunity to recrown his son. Becket accepted at a meeting with the king in France on 22 July 1170.
Becket did not live to carry out a proper coronation, as he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170. Henry came close to joining him in eternity the very same year. In August he lay seriously ill at Domfront in Normandy and thought likely to die. In a will drawn up at the time he confirmed the arrangements made with Louis at Montmirail the year before and codified some of the arrangements made then and since.26 The young Henry’s situation was regularised both by the dubious coronation and by the fact that he had already done homage to Louis’s son Philip in his capacity as Louis’s Seneschal. Geoffrey’s position, too, was clearer, since in May 1169 the 10-year-old had crossed from England to Britanny and accepted the homage of the Bretons at Rennes; he received another bonus two years later when Conan the Little died, handing him the territory of Richmond in Yorkshire as well. But Richard, who had almost certainly not been present at Montmirail, received fresh confirmation as the heir of Gascony and Poitou. His position in the south had been further cemented with his betrothal at Montmirail to Lady Alice (Alys), second daughter of Louis of France by his second wife, Blanche of Castile.27 The arrangement was that Alice was to be brought up in the land of her betrothed but, instead of sending her to Aquitaine, the devious Henry kept her with him at his own court, which spent most of the time travelling between England and Normandy. Henry’s thinking in making the decisive tripartite division between his three eldest sons was that his ‘empire’ was actually too fractious and unruly to be governed from the centre, and this was particularly so in the south, which was so turbulent that it could not be managed from England or Normandy but only from Poitiers or Bordeaux. Henry was well aware of the Poitevins’ taste for rebellion: it was commonly said that they had the hairy shins of wolves since they behaved like wolves to their neighbours. To keep the feudal pyramid coherent, Richard did homage for his holdings to Henry the Young King. So within a year Henry had done homage to Louis, Louis had invested the Young King with the Duchy of Normandy and the counties of Maine and Angers, and both Geoffrey and Richard in turn had done homage to the Young King. When Henry II recovered from the near-fatal illness, he was almost immediately consumed by the crisis arising from the murder of Becket. A year of public sorrow and contrition led in 1172 to his formal submission to the Pope at Avranches and his public absolution, after he swore that he had neither commanded nor desired Becket’s death. In August the same year Henry the Young King was crowned again, this time with his wife Margaret alongside him, in Winchester Cathedral.28
Immediately after the reconciliation with the Church at Avranches, Henry turned his attention to the problems of Richard and John, and this was to lead to the greatest crisis of his reign. Henry had not so far paid much attention to the South during his reign, but now he decided to cut off King Louis from Spain and in the process neutralise his old enemy Count Raymond of Toulouse, who had been intriguing with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany to become lord of Provence. An axis comprising Louis, Raymond and Frederick Barbarossa was an alarming idea, so Henry acted decisively to nip this inchoate development in the bud. He began by neutralising Louis and Raymond’s endeavours south of the Pyrenees by betrothing his daughter Eleanor to King Alfonso II of Castile. Then he sought a marriage for his son John with the daughter of Count Humbert of Maurienne, whose domains stretched from the shores of Lake Geneva to Turin, including all the Alpine passes between. The count, aware of his strategic position but desperately short of cash, agreed to a dowry of 5,000 marks and the recognition of John as his heir. Alarmed by this encirclement through dynastic marriage, both the king of Aragon-Barcelona and his long-term enemy Raymond of Toulouse suddenly saw the dangers of being destroyed piecemeal by the Angevin empire. Consequently, when Henry met Count Humbert at Montferrat in the Auvergne to discuss the details of John’s marriage (January 1173), both King Sancho VI of Aragon-Castile and Count Raymond thought it politic to attend. Henry secured one of his greatest diplomatic triumphs when the great lords accompanied him back to Limoges. There, in February 1173, in company with Alfonso of Castile and his rival Sancho of Navarre, he not only received Count Raymond’s homage for Toulouse but acted as ‘honest broker’ in arranging a peace treaty between Raymond and the king of Aragon.29 His brilliant diplomacy made Richard’s inheritance in Aquitaine even more secure, but there remained the problem of John. Henry had often joked that his youngest son should be called ‘Lackland’ as he lacked the vast territories his brothers commanded30, but the joke backfired on Henry. On the journey to Limoges, Count Humbert had time to reflect on the rather one-sided marriage arrangements and asked rather pointedly what John would be contributing to the marriage. Caught off guard and on the spur of the moment, Henry incautiously said that, why, of course, John would be inheriting the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau; on the spot he signed a document assigning this trio of fortresses to John.31
It was at this point that the Young King came clearly into the historical picture in his own right, having so far played the dutiful son. The 18-year-old was the original fairy-tale prince: popular in his time he has been a favourite of romancers ever since and was the only one of the Devil’s Brood not to attract harsh criticism. To begin with, he was tall, fair and good-looking: ‘the most handsome prince in all the world, whether Saracen or Christian’.32 Looking like a northerner but with the southerner’s traditional taste for frivolity and dissipation, charismatic, affable, courteous, benign, charming, young Henry was a creature of romance in more senses than one. A devotee of tournaments, he filled his kingdoms with jousts and thus enhanced the status of knights. ‘Henry the Young King made chivalry live again, for she was dead or nearly so. He was the door by which she entered. He was her standard bearer. In those days the great did nothing for young men. He set an example and kept men of worth by his side. And when men of high degree saw how he brought together all men of worth they were amazed at his wisdom and followed his lead.’33 Yet against these undoubted advantages, the Young King had many grave faults. He was vain, shallow, irresponsible and impatient, a man who wanted the good things of life now and was unwilling to wait. A hedonist and wastrel, permanently in debt, he was prodigal, improvident, insouciant and foolish; the notion of paying his way or balancing budgets was unknown to him. Henry had tried to train him in court politics and administration, especially after the first coronation in 1170, but the young man proved an unwilling apprentice, lazy, incompetent and empty-headed. As with most charismatic figures, he was given the benefit of the doubt, and sagacious observers, bedazzled by his charm and magnetism, put their intellectual faculties on hold and indulged in a primitive form of sun worship. Henry was bored by everything that did not involve adventure, pleasure or high excitement of all kinds. Essentially a case of arrested development, the Young King always remained a child at heart, a hopeless politician, incapable of thinking things through or calculating several moves in advance like his father, unable to concentrate on anything serious. Like many weak men he took advice from the last person he had spoken to and then changed his mind as successive opinions were delivered.34
It is clear that, at least when his son was a youth, Henry II idolised the young man. His desire to decentralise his empire was sound but his understanding of human nature was poor for, by dividing his domains and setting up his sons as rivals to his power, even ordering his vassals to do homage to them, he was putting irresistible temptations in front of them; some writers have suggested that he committed the classic King Lear mistake. But the Young King did not lack malicious advisers who urged him to assert himself against his father. Shortly after the second coronation and before Henry II’s great conference at Limoges, where he made the incautious promise to give John the three castles, Henry the Young King had a meeting with King Louis (November 1172), who mischievously urged him to assert himself as a king in fact as well as name now that he had been crowned.35 Perhaps an even more salient influence on the Young King were the troubadours, the propagandists of chivalry itself. Throughout the Young King’s life the troubadour Bertran de Born was never far away, fanning discontent between father and son for his own reasons. ‘I would that the great men should always be quarrelling among themselves’, he wrote, in a highly revealing statement. 36 Some have always seen Bertran de Born as the evil genius behind the Young King. The classic medieval statement is in Dante’s vision of Hell, where the troubadour is found in the eighth circle, walking with his head in his hand, swinging it by the hair as if it were a lantern. Dante puts the following words into his mouth: ‘I am Bertran de Born, he that gave to the Young King the ill encouragement. I made father and son rebellious to each other. Achithophel did not more with Absalom and David by his wicked goadings. Because I divided persons so united, I bear my brain, alas!, divided from its source which is in this trunk.’37
But the influence of the troubadours, real or alleged (and it probably was real), cannot alone explain the scope and extent of the Young King’s discontents. Young Henry had about him in his own dissolute court his own version of the young Prince Henry V’s Poins, Pistol, Bardolph, Peto and Falstaff; in this as in other ways the relationship of Henry II and his son uncannily pre-echoes that of Henry IV and Henry V, and all the evidence suggests that these ‘irregular humorists’ constantly stirred the pot about their master’s political impotence. It angered the Young King that his father would give him no real power and that when he gave an order to his father’s agents and officials in England, it was habitually disregarded. He was supposed to be the crowned king of England and had received the homages of Normandy and Anjou, yet his father had assigned no lands whose revenue would allow him and his queen to live in the proper state. His father chose the members of his household and had even had the ‘impertinence’ to dimiss one of them.38 His explicit demand for his inheritance had been brushed aside as a poor joke on two occasions when he lobbied his father. Henry’s answer presumably would have been that he had tried to give his son responsibility but he had shirked it; a true king needed to be administratively competent, not just a showpiece figurehead in glittering finery. Yet the putative answer is unconvincing: Henry should have taken the measure of his son’s failings before promoting him so high so fast. Another grievance was that Henry would not allow him unlimited access to money to fund his lavish lifestyle. He had to borrow money from private sources, usually Jewish moneylenders who in this era were despised as much for the sin (so defined in canon law) of Usury as for being ‘the killers of Christ’. To make matters worse, the moneylenders regarded Henry’s son as a bad risk, since he had no real security in his lands and possessions.39
Then there was the fact that Henry and Pope Alexander had made all the decisions about the archbishopric of Canterbury without consulting him. Shortly after his first coronation Henry had met Becket at a famous conference at Freteval on the borders of Touraine in France and agreed to the terms of the exiled archbishop’s return to England. Reasons of high politics and relations with the papacy were involved in Henry’s decision to seek a compromise, but one of the terms accepted was that Becket would be able to discipline the archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury who had assisted at the first coronation of the Young King. Becket’s heavy-handed excommunication of all three clerics (with the authority of a papal bull) just before he crossed the Channel was one of the precipitants towards his murder at the end of the same year, but what infuriated the Young King was that the divines who had officiated at his own coronation had now been branded ecclesiastical outlaws. Pointedly he refused to receive Becket at Windsor when the archbishop returned to England. The restoration of harmony with the Pope and the appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170-72 had likewise been carried out without any consultation with the Young King.40 But most of all the Young King enviously compared his own career unfavourably with that of his father when a young man; at seventeen Henry II had been ruling fatherless in Normandy and now the Young King was already nearly two years older than when Geoffrey of Anjou had handed over the duchy of Normandy to his son. There was the added consideration that Henry II was still only forty. How long would the Young King have to wait? Now came the last straw: the demand for the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau. This was a grotesque interference in the Young King’s domain, and was anyway a transparent ruse whereby Henry wrested back control of three key fortresses from an eldest son who had angered him both by his peremptory demands and his intrigues with King Louis. The Young King would have none of it. Not only did he not give his consent, as Count of Anjou, to the handover but he used the occasion to demand, yet again, the real transfer of some part of the lands he had supposedly inherited: it did not matter which - it could be England, Normandy or Anjou.41 And so the six-year-old John became the pretext for a mighty struggle between the two Henrys. As one historian has noted, the issue of the castles ‘stirred up a trouble which was never again to be laid wholly to rest until the child who was its as yet innocent cause had broken his father’s heart’.42 The Young King, a poor politician, showed his hand by telling his father that King Louis and the barons of Normandy and England wanted the transfer of lands. The shrewd Henry II immediately realised that this was no sudden temper tantrum by his son but part of a long-planned and deeply-plotted manoeuvre. He therefore insisted that the Young King accompany him on his progress north to Normandy. As yet, he did not realise how far the tentacles of the plot reached, so left his wife with Geoffrey and Richard at Poitiers. This was despite a warning from the two-faced Raymond of Toulouse - who had been stirring the pot with Richard and Eleanor - that his entire family was ranged against him: ‘I advise you, King, to beware of your wife and sons.’ A conspiracy of such dimensions seemed incredible, so Henry concentrated on the Young King, virtually dragging him and his entourage with him as far as Chinon. There, on 5 March 1173, the Young King bribed the castle guards to lower the drawbridge, allowing him and his followers to decamp by night. There followed a long and breathless pursuit across what is now north-west France, across the Loire, towards Normandy, through Le Mans, Alençon and Argentan. But it was all in vain: on 8 March the Young King crossed the French border and headed for Paris. Henry II sent a deputation of bishops across the frontier to demand his son’s return. In a famous scene, King Louis asked the envoys who had sent them on such a bizarre errand. They replied that it was the king of England who sent them. ‘What nonsense,’ Louis replied, ‘the king of England is here. His father may still pose as king, but that will soon be over, for all the world knows he has resigned his kingdom to his son.’43
To his consternation and stupefaction Henry II now realised that his wife Eleanor, his sons Richard and Geoffrey and other great magnates were all in league with Louis. Geoffrey, almost fifteen, was already revealing his true serpentine nature; it seems he had ambitions for an independent Britanny. He also saw the chance to indulge his taste for plundering and looting, which was to be so marked a feature of his career. Some claim that Geoffrey was the most intelligent of the Devil’s Brood but he was certainly the one without any redeeming features. He accepted evil as an irreducible fact of life and even revelled in the knowledge. He seemed to have something of a grudge against the Church, perhaps because it preached the triumph of good and the doctrine of redemption, but it is certain that he took a particular relish in sacking and despoiling churches, abbeys and shrines. Richard and his Poitevin allies were meanwhile angry that at the great meeting with the southern powers at Limoges on 21-28 February, when Henry II achieved his great diplomatic triumph, Count Raymond had paid homage for Toulouse to the king of England rather than to himself, the lord of Aquitaine, whose right to Toulouse had already been recognised by King Louis. But all three sons had, in their own minds at least, compelling motives for rising up against their father. The spectre of anarchy and chaos, never far from the surface in the Angevin empire, was once more abroad. It seemed that yet another of those ancient prophecies of Merlin in which Roger of Howden, convinced believer in miracles and the supernatural, so delighted was about to be fulfilled: ‘The cubs shall awake and shall roar loud, and, leaving the woods, shall seek their prey within the walls of the cities. Among those who shall be in their way they shall make great carnage, and shall tear out the tongues of bulls. The necks of them as they roar aloud they shall load with chains, and shall thus renew the times of their forefathers.’44
Yet it was the defection of Eleanor of Aquitaine that most shocked contemporaries. It was a seismic event that seemed to betoken the swallowing up of the natural world by a realm of chaos, for such unwifely behaviour seemed against the laws of Nature themselves. Ralph of Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, seeking for parallels for the events of 1173-74, claimed to have found more than thirty examples of sons rebelling against fathers but none of queens raising the standard of revolt against their kings and husbands.45 Peter of Blois, one of Henry II’s political protégés (he had whisked him from the Norman court in Sicily to serve as his secretary), an erudite, witty, acidulous man and a noted literary stylist, reminded Eleanor in a letter of all the famous biblical injunctions requiring a wife to obey her husband and pointed out that many ecclesiastical sanctions, including, at the limit, excommunication could be exercised against her for this ‘sin’. Invoking the chaos principle, he wrote: ‘Unless you return to your husband you will be the cause of general ruin.’46 More patronising commentators, citing ‘woman’s weakness’ asserted that, although she was responsible for her sons’ rebellion, she was more sinned against than sinning. The usual story was that she had been misled by her uncle and confidant Ralph de Faye, seneschal of Poitou, who was well known to favour Aquitainian separatism and to be a major influence on her.47 But Eleanor was her own woman and needed no éminence grise to seduce her down unwise byways. We know for certain that the decision to rebel was hers and hers alone; for one thing, her sons Richard and Geoffrey would have listened to their mother but would not have heeded mere counsellors, even ones as eminent as Ralph de Faye. Given that Eleanor was the guiding spirit of the conspiracy and that Richard, the classic mother’s boy, would do all in all as she did, the only remaining question is, why did Eleanor act as she did?
A variety of explanations has been offered, and we have to work upwards or inwards towards the most plausible. The most far-fetched is the suggestion that Becket’s murder was the trigger for Eleanor’s rebellious actions. The idea is that Eleanor’s apostasy was so sudden - she had spent most of 1170 supporting Henry’s policies - that we must seek a key event between December 1170 and the revolt in 1173, and that event could only have been Becket’s assassination.48 Presumably, the thinking is that for the first time Eleanor saw Henry for the monster he was and noted how in the opinion of all Europe he was a moral pariah. Eleanor did not see Henry for two years until the Christmas court of 1172, and some dramatists have seized on this court as the decisive moment when the marriage unravelled in a dramatic way, perhaps following a row about the king’s plans for her beloved Richard, when she might have taunted him for his tyranny and the murder of Becket. The trouble with this argument is that by 1172 Henry had won European opinion round by his abject obeisance to the Pope and his obvious contrition for the murder, which he never authorised.49 Moreover, Eleanor and her sons were never particularly close to Becket, so the entire theory seems a post hoc contrivance. More promising is the idea that Eleanor deeply resented her position as a non-entity in the reign and government of Henry II, that she came to feel she had miscalculated by her marriage to the king, which brought her neither the power nor influence she assumed to be her due; maybe Henry’s overpowering mother Empress Matilda, who did not die until 1167, was a factor in this.50 The only snag with this idea is that it does not explain why Eleanor rose in revolt in 1173 rather than at some earlier time, and, if she was really vexed by Matilda, she would presumably have wished to wipe the smile off her face before her demise. In a word, chronology works against an argument from purely personal pique.
Similar considerations apply to one of the most popular of all motifs allegedly explaining the rebellion of 1173: the ‘hell hath no fury’ theme, according to which Eleanor could finally take no more of Henry’s infidelities and particularly the serious long-standing liaison with Rosamund Clifford. The affair with ‘Fair Rosamund’ seems to have begun in 1165 and continued until her death in 1176.51 Of Henry’s passionate love for Rosamund there can be little doubt, as in 1191 we still hear of her tomb, covered in silk cloth, being devotedly attended by the nuns of Godstow Priory; Henry had made this a condition of a generous gift to the convent. The legend of Eleanor of Aquitaine makes her out to have been incandescent with fury over this liaison and to have murdered Rosamund. One story has her personally tearing the mistress’s eyes out and another coldly offering the trapped paramour the choice between poison or the knife. What none of the myths explain is how Eleanor could have accomplished all this while she was Henry’s close prisoner. Yet even if we discard all this nonsense and admit her powerlessness in the matter of Rosamund, it is still possible that Eleanor was that figure beloved of romance: the sexually jealous, vengeful woman. ‘Eleanor did not take revenge by murdering Rosamond; she did it by raising Poitou,’ is one modern verdict.52 Another writer concurs: ‘Henry had broken faith: he had prized lechery above creative sharing, and now the joy of courtly love was gone forever.’53 But one does not have to be a feminist to find this view of Eleanor deeply patronising and insulting, and it is indeed absurd to imagine Eleanor motivated to revolt in this way.54 She was a woman of the world and had made a hard-headed match with Henry right at the start, though doubtless sexual attraction played its part. And it is somewhat anachronistic to import the ‘wronged woman’ scenario into the snakepit of twelfth-century politics. Any intelligent queen - and no one has ever denied Eleanor that epithet - accepted that her husband would have mistresses; indeed, according to the troubadour code, true love between husband and wife was impossible anyway.
Perhaps this alerts us to the true motive for rebellion. Maybe the 1173 rebellion had nothing to do with the collision of personalities but instead represented a clash of cultures? According to this view, Aquitaine, home of the troubadours, represented hedonism, dalliance, the cult of open-handed largesse, the sentimentality expressed in the aubades when a lover departs from his lady in the dawn’s early light, a milieu of music, dancing, tournaments, knight-errants and fair damsels in distress, while Henry’s dominions to the north symbolised sobriety and joylessness, the world of the quotidian, of stubborn and irreducible facts, the boring domain of penny-pinching accountants, nit-picking lawyers and pedantic administrators, scouring the latest royal writs for loopholes and escape clauses. It was the cult of adultery against the institution of marriage, neo-paganism against the doctrines of the Church and, ultimately, the world of the female and feminine values against the male and masculine ideals.55 Why else was the Young King permanently in debt, except that his open-handed generosity was in collision with the mean-mindedness of the North? But the myth of Aquitaine as a kind of Camelot avant la lettre and courtly love as a dominant ideology has been taken too seriously by some historians.56 Moreover, the idea of an ‘aesthetic’ Eleanor ranged against a ‘philistine’ Henry falls foul of the obvious objection that Henry in fact commissioned more artists and poets than she did - he had more money - and even Bertrand de Ventadour wrote more for Henry than for Eleanor.57
When we have discarded all the fanciful scenarios for Eleanor’s defection in 1173, there remains the overwhelming probability that she was motivated solely by her concern for Aquitaine and the fear that it was being absorbed anonymously in Henry’s Angevin empire. Eleanor loved her southern domains, and many scholars think that in the twelfth century Aquitaine was the most important territory in what is now France, certainly wealthier than King Louis’s ‘France’ and more important for a would-be empire builder than either Normandy or England.58 In this context the homage sworn by Raymond of Toulouse may have been the real precipitant for her rebellion. It was true that at Limoges Raymond had done homage to Richard but he had also done homage to the Young King. Well aware of the Anglophobe feeling among Poitou nobles - a definite cause of the death of Earl Patrick of Salisbury - she knew that they, as well as she, resented any implication that there was a pyramid of power and influence that placed England and Normandy above Aquitaine. It may even be that her anger was more furiously concentrated by the ceremony at Limoges, for the dukes of Aquitaine had always claimed Toulouse and yet there was Count Raymond offering homage and so, by implication, reinforcing a de jure claim to Toulouse, repudiating her own claims. The fact that Henry was backsliding for Anglo-Norman and Angevin raison d’état may also have occurred to her; it was unlikely to have slipped her mind that the king had been prepared to fight for Toulouse in 1159 but no longer.59 At any rate we know for certain that Eleanor was the guiding hand behind the conspiracy, for Richard and Geoffrey, at fifteen and fourteen respectively, would not have rallied to anyone else in defiance of their father.
The anti-Henry alliance that Eleanor had revised was formidable. There was no question here of some comic-opera palace revolution; instead there was the most deadly threat that Henry II ever faced. The motives of the rebels were bewilderingly heterogeneous, mainly to do with strictly local ambitions and grievances. In Normandy and England there were particular discontents about the technicalities of knight-service, with Henry trying to change the rules so that the barons were forced to supply more men. He also ruffled feathers by trying to eliminate corruption in Normandy via a new form of Domesday Book. Ralph of Diceto says that most men joined the Young King ‘not because they regarded him as the juster cause, but because the father . . . was trampling upon the necks of the proud and haughty, was dismantling or appropriating the castles of the country, and was requiring, even compelling those who occupied properties which should have contributed to his treasury, to be content with their patrimony.’60 Of the southern lords, apart from Ralph de Faye, Count William of Angoulême, Geoffrey and Guy of Lusignan and Geoffrey de Taillebourg, lord of Parthenay, enlisted under the rebel banner. Farther north Count Théobald of Blois, Matthew, count of Boulogne and his elder brother Count Philip of Flanders pledged their support to the Young King. In England four magnates declared for him: the earls of Norfolk, Leicester, Chester and Derby. Ralph de Fougères raised Britanny in rebellion against Henry. But it was the support of the kings of France and Scotland that seemed most likely to portend success for the Young King. For the first time ever all parts of the Angevin empire were in simultaneous revolt, and Henry was aware that there were many ambivalent nobles who were sitting on the fence, waiting to see how events turned out. Particular suspicions were entertained about Richard de Clare, lord of Leinster, about the king’s cousin Earl William of Gloucester, and also the bishops of Durham and Lisieux.61 The chronicler Roger of Howden took the view that all who were not with Henry were against him and, on this basis, roundly declared: ‘nearly all the earls and barons of England, Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou and Britanny rose against the king of England the father’.62 In Paris Louis summoned a great council of French barons to pledge support to the Young King, and in return Young Henry and his brothers swore never to make peace with their father unless King Louis and the French barons had consented.63 Horsetrading, not to mention chicken-counting, was the order of the day at the council, as the great lords extracted their pound of flesh for their support, in the form of lands, estates and castles.
Never a man to panic, Henry II calmly stood on the defensive, waiting to see what his enemies would do. His situation would have been perilous indeed, if there had been a first-class military mind directing the coalition, as he simply did not have the manpower to cover all the potential theatres of war. It would have been easy to catch Henry between two fires, depriving him of any local military supremacy, and he would have been forced to act lest the fence-sitters concluded he was losing and started stampeding to join the Young King. On paper, then, he had few obvious cards to play. What he did have was vast financial resources and, as a consequence of this, a fearsome battle-hardened army of ruthless mercenaries of alien tongue - Basques, Brabançons, Navarrese, Germans. The role of mercenaries was crucial in medieval warfare. They were usually either crossbowmen or light horsemen, armoured in mail, unable to face charging knights. These ‘routiers’ were essential for siegework, as knights got bored with it and could not be disciplined; mercenaries on the other hand, once paid, had either to obey orders or be hanged. Routiers were regarded as low-lives, beyond the pale, condemned to eternal damnation by the Church, since in canon law a man who risked his life for wages was a kind of suicide. A mercenary was automatically excommunicate, whereas a vassal following his liege lord escaped theological anathema because he was merely fulfilling his feudal obligation to a superior. Only real thugs and gangsters served as mercenaries; when not employed they banded together as highwaymen or ‘routiers’ properly so-called, to loot, rape and plunder. They were largely recruited from the Low Countries, where there was surplus population. Such was Henry’s secret weapon.64
Henry also took heart from the failure of large parts of faction-ridden Aquitaine to join his enemies - they used the civil war as a golden opportunity to pursue ancient feuds that Henry’s rule had hitherto dampened down - and from his low opinion of King Louis’s strategic skills. In this last judgement he was soon proved correct. Instead of coordinating simultaneous assaults on all parts of the Angevin empire, in May Louis and the Young King began operations with a less than inspired three-pronged probe into eastern Normandy, which gave Richard his first taste of battle; the idea was that all three armies would converge on Rouen while Earl Hugh of Chester led the Bretons in the west on a diversionary thrust. The Young King invested the castle of Gournay, Louis of France besieged Verneuil, while Philip of Flanders, commanding the northern operation, laid siege to Drincourt but lost heart after his brother Matthew of Boulogne was killed by a sniper’s crossbow quarrel at the end of August, and ordered a retreat. Louis ordered all coalition forces to pull back, but this was a grave error. Sensing that his moment had come, Henry made one of his lightning counter-attacks, first routing King Louis’s rearguard near Vernueil, then turning rapidly westwards to bottle up the Breton rebels at Dol, west of Avranches, in eastern Britanny. The Bretons had imagined themselves to be along for the easiest of rides but now, panic-stricken at Henry’s forced marches, they lost their nerve and surrendered without a fight; Earl Hugh and Ralph de Fougeres became Henry’s first prize captives of the campaign.65
The outcome was much as Henry had hoped and imagined. Louis, a man who liked easy victories, became despondent and put out peace feelers. A conference was held at Gisors, where Henry offered generous terms to his sons: four castles and half the revenues of Aquitaine to Richard, with similar proposals to Geoffrey and the Young King. He was even prepared to increase the revenues on the decision of an independent arbitrator but adamantly refused to waive his overall jurisdiction. 66 Louis advised the sons to reject the terms, for Earl Robert of Leicester had put fire in his belly and proposed a new stratagem. The earl crossed to Norfolk with a force of Flemings and joined the English rebels at Framlingham. The grand rendezvous point for all the Young King’s English supporters was to be Leicester, but, as the East Anglian force under Earl Robert marched west, it was intercepted and defeated by a scratch force loyal to Henry II that was said to have been outnumbered four to one. Great slaughter ensued in the fens, and Earl Robert joined the lengthening roster of rebel captives. Freed from immediate anxieties in England, Henry campaigned in Touraine and on the Loire during November-January 1173-74, ignoring the usual ‘winter quarters’ break from fighting. After leading his Brabançons in a thrust south of Chinon, taking the castles of La Haye, Preuilly and Champigny and threatening the lands of Ralph de Faye, he had another of those amazing strokes of luck that always seemed to attend him. His wife Eleanor tried to escape from the war zone and join her sons, but on the road from Poitiers to Paris was captured while disguised as a man, betrayed, some said, by Henry’s secret agents in Poitou; henceforth she would be Henry’s prisoner and never see freedom again until his death. Meanwhile, a major French attack on the nodal town of Séez in southern Normandy was also beaten off by his forces. By the spring of 1174 the initiative seemed to lie with Henry, and Louis’s defeatism was again pronounced.67
Henry could now afford to regroup, retrench and consolidate. Louis dithered over his next move right through spring and into summer. Finally, he opted for the strategy he should have employed from the very beginning. To draw Henry from his position in Normandy, the coalition would have to mount a major threat to England and this time the omens were propitious, for King William of Scotland was finally ready to make his move. In collusion with northern rebels under Roger de Mowbray and secretly advised by the bishop of Durham, William crossed the border, laid siege to Carlisle and proceeded to gobble up a string of lesser castles at Liddell, Burgh, Appleby, Harbottle and Warkworth. Yet the war in England soon bogged down in an inconclusive struggle in the Midlands, centring around the rebel stronghold of Leicester, with coalition forces maybe just having the edge for a while. But King William’s campaign in the north-east was running out of steam, with Carlisle, held for Henry II, still defiant, and meanwhile King Henry’s bastard son scored a crushing victory over Roger de Mowbray, who was trying to link up with the rebel core at Leicester.68 And still Henry remained unperturbed in Normandy, refusing to cross the Channel and provide Louis with the opportunity he yearned for: another invasion of the northern Angevin empire. The coalition therefore braced itself for what it hoped would be the masterstroke: a substantial invasion of England to be led by Count Philip of Flanders and his Flemings. Finally alarmed by this, Henry sailed from Barfleur to England on 7 July. When the coalition learned of his arrival, they foolishly did not press on with the invasion plan and instead Philip of Flanders joined Louis for a large-scale assault on eastern Normandy and Rouen.69
Yet even while they drew up their forces outside Rouen, Henry enjoyed yet another slice of his almost supernatural good luck. On arrival in England, the king visited Becket’s tomb at Canterbury and, barefoot and fasting, submitted to a public scourging, to show that the cause of the rebels had nothing to do with vindicating the cause of St Thomas. A few days later it seemed that God had given him the nod of approval. On 13 July King William of Scotland and his knights were surprised in the mist near Alnwick by a scratch force of loyalists; among the few who survived the resultant slaughter was William himself. The capture of the Scottish king tore the heart out of the rebels, who felt themselves accursed. Henry moved rapidly down to the Midlands, where the opposition collapsed like a house of cards.70 So easy was his victory that the king was back in Barfleur on 8 August, just a month after he had departed. Thinking he had all the time in the world, Louis had gone about the siege of Rouen in a leisurely fashion, and now he was taken in the rear. So desperate was Louis to seize Rouen that he tried to take the city by trickery, breaking the sacred terms of a truce as part of the subterfuge, but just failing, again in the most aleatory circumstances. When Henry and his army arrived next day and began mauling the French troops, Louis once more lost heart and retreated. By the end of September he was suing for peace.71 As King Henry’s treasurer gloatingly remarked: ‘So the mighty learned that to wrest the club from the hand of Hercules was no easy task.’72
Yet if Louis so signally bowed the head to a greater general, the 16-year-old Richard was made of sterner stuff. The capture of his mother seems to have enraged him so that the iron entered his soul. In the spring of 1174 he tried to capture the great mercantile centre of La Rochelle, using the trading rivalry of nearby Saintes against it. But the young Richard was no match for his father, who made another of his lightning swoops, westward, while Richard imagined he was celebrating Whitsun in Poitiers. Richard and a handful of followers made an undignified scramble to escape and fled downstream to the castle of Taillebourg, leaving behind most of his military stores and equipment, to say nothing of his best knights and archers captured in Saintes.73 But the Scottish king’s debacle and Louis’s weakness soon left the young duke of Aquitaine out on a limb. The three-week truce between Louis and Henry on 8 September expressly excluded Richard, who now became king Henry’s target. Not daring to face his father in battle, Richard steadily retreated, increasingly at a loss and angry as he realised the scale of his desertion by Louis and the Young King. Finally convinced that his cause was lost, on 23 September Richard threw himself on his father’s mercy. Weeping, he prostrated himself before the king and begged forgiveness.74 Henry raised him up and gave him the kiss of peace, but punished him by more stringent terms than those refused at Gisors. At the reconvened conference on 29 September at Montlouis (between Tours and Amboise), Richard accepted half the revenues of Aquitaine but only two non-castellated demesnes. The Young King did much better: two castles in Normandy and £15,000 annually. On the other hand, he was forced to accept the conditions that had originally propelled him into rebellion: he had to grant John the disputed castles and revenues in England, Normandy and Anjou.75
Henry II’s indulgence to his rebellious sons, akin to Napoleon’s notorious connivance at his brothers’ faults and crimes, to say nothing of his leniency towards other rebel leaders, attracted astonished comment at the time, and not everyone approved his merciful approach. It was said that he should have followed up his advantage by smiting King Louis hip and thigh and, in particular, that he should have extirpated the troublesome Flemings. Yet Henry was as good as his word: he made peace on the basis of how things were before the war began, except that he insisted on demolishing a swathe of rebel castles. It was said that after 1174 ruined castles could be seen throughout the Angevin empire, visible testaments to Henry’s determination that his supreme power could not be denied.76 But there were no executions or forfeitures and the king did not levy ransoms for those captured in battle. By 1177 even those rebel lords who had been most uncompromising in their opposition to Henry were free once more: the earls of Chester and Leicester, Ralph de Fougeres. King William of Scotland paid the heaviest price for the events of 1173-74: he had to declare himself Henry’s liegeman, to make a public submission at York and to surrender five castles in Scotland. Henry did, however, draw the line at declaring himself overlord of Scotland or intervening in Scottish affairs.77 All this was misconstrued by those who habitually confuse restraint with weakness. Henry’s motives for smoothing things over were simply that he did not want an endless cycle of war and civil disturbance, which a draconian reaction to the rebellion would certainly have engendered, and he was concerned that the barons who had taken no part in the rebellion on either side had converted themselves into local warlords, largely free of royal influence. He derived immediate satisfaction in other ways, tightening up central government, making tax evasion more difficult, taking a hard line on the forest laws. Above all, he made sure that men loyal to him occupied every castle in England.78
But he could not long allow the ‘neutral’ magnates to be virtual kings in their own domains, and this problem was particularly acute in Aquitaine, where most of the great barons had held aloof during the armed struggle of 1173-74. It soon became abundantly clear that they had not had the slightest interest in the cause of the Young King, but had simply used his revolt as an excuse to throw off the Old King’s overlordship. It may be that Henry was particularly impressed by the cool-headed way the 17-year-old Richard had handled himself during the latter stages of the rebellion, for in January 1175 the king sent his second son to Aquitaine with a dual set of orders: he was to raze all castles occupied by the rebels during the rebellion and he was to bring to heel the neutral lords who now bade fair to turn their bailiwicks into independent principalities.79 In effect Henry appointed Richard his Regent in the south, with full powers over all Angevin armed forces there and all revenues and officials. There was a prime irony here, in that Richard was turning against some of the very people he had urged to rebel against his father, but Henry had given him a bed of nails, since the ‘independent’ lords of Aquitaine were arrogant, contumacious and self-confident, not having tasted the horrors visited on Normandy, Britanny and the north by the combination of mercenaries and blitzkrieg. Richard at once proved his calibre and evinced a genius at siegecraft by reducing the powerful castle of Agillon-sur-Agen, even though his critics have always tried to belittle this feat, on the grounds that the castellan, Arnold of Bouteville, was not a major baron.80
At first he was able to pick off his enemies one by one, but by the beginning of 1176 they had made common cause, presenting a formidable coalition of southern barons: the count of Angoulême, Viscount Aimar of Limoges, Viscount Raymond of Turenne and the lords of Chabanais and Mastac. Even the dauntless Richard soon found the task beyond him, and went to England in April 1176 to consult his father on the next step. Henry made available large sums of money and fresh cohorts of mercenaries, only to find that his opponents in turn had hired a force of Brabançons, commanded by the count of Angoulême’s eldest son, Vulgrin Taillefer.81 On his return to the continent, Richard hastened to meet this force in Poitou and defeated it in May at Bouteville near Angoulême.82 Pressing on to Limoges, then a city in two parts, Richard cunningly made use of the ancient rivalry between ‘city’ and ‘citadel’ (the two different parts of the town) to force its capitulation after a couple of days’ siege. Early in July the Young King joined him at Poitiers. Young Henry had petitioned his father for permission to make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but the Old King suspected this was just a ploy to enable his eldest son to raise another rebellion. He therefore ordered him to assist his brother in the Aquitaine campaign. The Young King, however, flounced off once he had got a taste of Richard’s martial ability. He did not like campaigning, resented being under Richard’s orders, and was jealous of his military talents.83 Undeterred, Richard took the castles of Châteauneuf and Moulinef and then pressed on to Angoulême for a final reckoning with Aimar, Angoulême, Chabanais and the others. Bottled up in the citadel these grandees seemed to have nothing to lose by fighting on, and desperate combat was expected in a last-ditch stand, but the rebels surrendered tamely after just six days. Richard sent the great lords prisoner to England for Henry to deal with; at Winchester on 21 September 1176 William of Angoulême and the other Aquitaine rebels had to make the self-same obeisance on their knees that the humbled Richard had endured two years earlier.84 But Richard was already a military hero as a result of this campaign; truly he had won his spurs.
By 1176 the career of Henry II fully justified his treasurer’s boast that he was ‘the greatest of the illustrious rulers of the world’.85 He had decisively relegated Louis of France to second place, and even the great Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, was no longer the colossus of yore after his defeat at Legnano by the Lombard League in this very same year. Henry’s fame had spread to the point where in November 1176 his court at Westminster received envoys from Barbarossa, from Emperor Manuel Comnenus in Constantinople, the duke of Savoy and the count of Flanders. He was clearly recognised as a power broker in Spain, and the kings of Aragon and Castile asked him to act as arbiter in all their disputes, pledging themselves to abide faithfully by any decision. Even the king of Sicily was interested in Europe’s new supremo, and asked for the hand of his daughter Joan in marriage.86 For the first time in its history England was a major European power. Henry and his second son were both recognised as great warriors. But the 19-year-old Richard was already showing himself to be a very different proposition from his 46-year-old father. Henry waged war only when he had to.87 Richard, on the other hand, loved war and everything about it, clearly placing himself on a line that runs through history from Alexander the Great to General George Patton. The shrewd Gerald of Wales put his finger on the fundamental flaw in Richard’s personality, which was that he ‘cared for no success that was not reached by a path cut by his own sword and stained with the blood of his adversaries’.88 Even if Aquitaine had not been a notorious cockpit of anarchy, the omens for peaceful resolution of its problems were not favourable.