Richard and John

As a military leader Richard was improving all the time. Since Henry was keen to intervene in the affairs of Spain, he began by ordering Richard to make sure the road from Bordeaux south to the Pyrenees was as secure as roads at the height of the Roman or Mongol empires. Clearing the farrago of bandits, feudal levies and rebellious lords from the traditional pilgrim route meant sustained warfare. Basing himself at Bordeaux for the Christmas feast of 1176, Richard swept south early in the new year and laid siege to Dax and Bayonne while his armies of Brabançons trawled the entire territory from Bordeaux to Cize on the Spanish border. Having emulated his father with a stunning winter campaign, waged over the Christmas festivities when no one was ever supposed to be on the warpath, Richard prematurely announced that the pacification of Aquitaine was complete and discharged his mercenaries.² No longer on the payroll, the savage Brabançons began to pillage and plunder the countryside. The backlash was severe: an ‘army of peace’ organised by the disgruntled clergy and nobility caught the Brabançon marauders off guard near Brive and slaughtered them mercilessly.³ Henry thought that Richard had his hands full in the far south, so sent the Young King on an auxiliary mission to bring to heel the rebellious territory of Berry in north-east Aquitaine. Here was yet another collision between Angevin centralising power and local folkways. Ralph de Deols, lord of Berry, died and left his daughter as sole heiress. In England an unmarried heiress was at the disposal of her overlord, who could marry her off to a husband of his choice, but this right was not recognised in Berry. When King Henry claimed wardship of the heiress, and her kin refused to give her up, warfare was the inevitable result. But Richard was irritated by the arrival of the Young King for two different reasons. In the first place his uninvited intervention clearly encroached on Richard’s rights as duke of Aquitaine but, then, he proceeded to campaign so feebly that Richard concluded he must secretly be favouring the rebels.

Then the Old King heard disquieting rumours that Louis of France did not intend to stand idly by. Fearing possible intervention against the Young King in Berry, Henry sent an embassy to Paris, demanding a final resolution of the agreement to marry Margaret and Alice, Louis’s daughters. In short, he asked that the Vexin be handed over as Margaret’s dowry and Berry likewise be earmarked for Alice.⁴ This was cool cheek on Henry’s part, for everyone knew that it was Henry who had broken the terms of the previous agreement by hanging on to Alice far too long - she had been fifteen years at Henry’s court and, it was widely whispered, was already his mistress. Indeed the situation had already reached the stage where Pope Alexander, primed by Louis, was threatening to place the entire Angevin empire under a papal interdict if the Alice marriage was not soon celebrated. For a year the nuncio at Henry’s court had been insisting that Alice either be married to Richard forthwith or returned to her father.⁵ Always a master of stalling, Henry signed a new fourfold agreement with Louis in September 1177 at the so-called Colloquy of Ivry. He agreed to submit the Berry dispute, in which Louis claimed an interest, to arbitration; he agreed that Richard would marry Alice; and he proposed a non-aggression pact with Louis on condition that the two of them went on crusade to save the beleaguered Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. This last condition was crucial: Louis dearly wanted to take the Cross but dared not leave for Palestine with France and his young son Philip at the mercy of the Angevins.⁶ But Henry had no more intention of going on crusade than he had of returning princess Alice. Moreover, in typical Henrician mode and again in defiance of this agreement, he and Richard continued campaigning in Berry and solved the issue there by military force, under the pretext that he (Henry) finally had time to punish the rebels who had submitted to him at Winchester in September 1176.⁷ Henry continued to enrage and outwit Louis. In November 1177 he and the French king held a fruitless conference at Graçay about their competing claims in the Auvergne. Then, in a political coup that demonstrated how clearly money could speak, Henry suddenly purchased the vast fief of La Marche from a despondent and abdicating duke. Technically subject to Aquitaine, La Marche had always enjoyed virtual independence, so here was another signal instance of Henry’s tightening power.⁸

Henry’s policies in the late 1170s have to be understood in light of a threefold aim. He continued his long, bitter conflict with Louis and France, opting for diplomacy until and unless Louis lost patience; meanwhile he was determined once and for all to break the local power of Angoulême and its allies - the same who had caused him so much trouble in 1175-76 - because Angoulême commanded the important trade routes in the Charente valley and was potentially poised to dominate west-central France; and finally he aspired to be the power in northern Spain. Unfortunately the later ambition collided with an equal and opposite one entertained by the young King Alfonso II of Aragon, count of Barcelona, who had fantasies of being the ‘emperor of the Pyrenees’ and in 1178 allied himself with Castile as a prelude to gobbling up Navarre.⁹ The fact that Alfonso stood forth as a champion of troubadour culture at the very moment Richard was finding himself at odds with the troubadours within Aquitaine added further ingredients to a very turgid political bouillabaise. It was mainly to counter the expansionism of Aragon that Henry in 1178 again sent Richard to the far south. As Richard advanced on Dax, he received some welcome tidings: Alfonso’s ally the count of Bigorre had been seized by the townspeople who wanted to hand him over to Richard to avoid the rigours of a siege.¹⁰ Alarmed by this development, Alfonso, who regarded Bigorre as his true friend, was forced to come in person before Richard to plead for his comrade and ally and to give surety for his behaviour. Triumphant on the Spanish border, Richard then turned back to deal with the opposition in Angoulême, now led by Count William’s son Vulgrin. William himself, after the humiliation at Winchester, departed for a pilgrimage in the Holy Land and, as his son had not made the submission, technically he was within his rights to resist Richard. Vulgrin allied himself with the powerful baron Geoffrey de Rancon, an important figure in Poitou and the veteran of revolts in 1168 and 1173-74. De Rancon’s castles at Pons and Taillebourg were so situated as to be able to cut communications between La Rochelle and Saintes in the north and Bordeaux in the south,¹¹ so it was to the investment of these strongholds that Richard applied his already formidable skills in siegecraft.

The siege of Pons began badly, as it became clear that Geoffrey de Rancon had laid in huge food supplies and would not crack easily. For Richard, on the other hand, his credibility as duke of Aquitaine hinged on being able to bring Geoffrey to heel.¹² To save face, he invested, forced to surrender and then demolished five easier targets, the castles at Richemont, Genzac, Marcillac, Grouville and Anville. Having thus restored his men’s morale after the humiliation at Pons, he gambled everything on an attempt to reduce the supposedly impregnable fortress of Taillebourg - a task no one had even attempted before because of its supposed impossibility. The stronghold of Taillebourg was situated on an outcrop of rock on the right bank of the River Charente. Three sides were inaccessible on account of the sheer rock face and the fourth, approached over marshy ground, was protected by a triple ditch and a triple wall; additionally, the castle was well stocked with food and defended by well-armed men. On 1 May 1179 the dauntless Richard brought up siege engines and trebuchets and began bombarding this fourth side, pitching his tents alarmingly close to the walls. With his wonderful eye for ground, he saw that the one weak card in an otherwise unbeatable hand was that Taillebourg would have to open the town gates if the burghers wanted to make a sortie. He then unleashed his troops on a scorched-earth rampage around the nearby fields and vineyards. Seeing the smoke of their ravaged property drifting skywards on a daily basis, the defenders finally took the bait and sallied out on 8 May. The sortie was repelled with heavy losses and, as the defeated throng crowded back into the town that lay beneath the citadel itself, the pursuers followed them in before the gates could be closed. Richard’s troops spent three days ostentatiously laying waste the town and taunting the garrison in the citadel with having seized most of their supplies. Finally the defenders in the citadel could take no more and surrendered.¹³ Aghast at this ‘impossible’ exploit, Geoffrey de Rancon threw in the towel and surrendered Pons also. Outflanked by this surprise development, Vulgrin had no choice but to capitulate. Richard methodically razed Taillebourg and Pons then went on to demolish the walls of Angoulême and Montignac, controlling the River Charente, which he had demanded as the price of making peace with Vulgrin.

At the age of 21 Richard had crowned a five-year apprenticeship in the art of war with a stunning success. Having crushed all opposition he went to England to be greeted by his father with all the honours due a military hero. As a warrior Richard was a hard worker, a close observer and meticulous planner, not too proud to learn from his mistakes or take advice from followers like Theobald Chabot.¹⁴ Siegecraft was almost more important than winning battles for a twelfth-century conqueror in western Europe for it meant victory without enormous loss of life and without tempting the fates; too many battles hinged on luck or accident or depended on circumstances one could not control. A master of sieges was therefore more highly esteemed than a battlefield commander. Sieges were seldom protracted, for in a long drawn-out affair, where a castellan stubbornly refused to surrender after a suitable period of time had elapsed in which to save face, there was the danger of a wholesale sack and massacre. Usually a commander would refuse to surrender and then do so some days later, unless the besiegers concluded that the mission was impossible and moved on elsewhere. It was normal practice to set a date for surrender, leaving the overlord or allies time to relieve the castle. If they failed to do so, once the castellan had delayed the enemy for long enough, it was in everybody’s interest that sense, i.e. surrender, should prevail. The art was to work out how long a castle could hold out before a bloodless surrender occurred; if the castellan surrendered too soon, the element of enemy hampering was lost; if too late, the besiegers might assuage frayed tempers and casualties with atrocities. In the twelfth-century kaleidoscope of shifting alliances not to mention fratricidal warfare, where today’s enemy was tomorrow’s ally, it made no sense to shed blood needlessly. And it was usual for surrender terms to be observed punctiliously.¹⁵ Certainly while he fought in Western Europe, Richard always obeyed these traditional rules.

After the triumph at Taillebourg, Richard’s biography enters a black hole, for the sources unaccountably dry up for the year 1180. In part this was because Henry II was in France and the chroniclers naturally focused on his achievements and exploits. But it surely was in part because Aquitaine was unusually quiet. Led by old Count William of Angoulême, the vanquished of 1179 travelled en masse to the Holy Land, glad to be away from the scene of their humiliation by Richard.¹⁶ Meanwhile Richard, as duke of Aquitaine, enjoyed powers over the province no ruler had ever managed to attain before. As far as the south was concerned, Henry’s policy of devolving power to his sons while still retaining overlordship was proving itself. Henry always had autocratic and centralising tendencies and his ‘federalism’ was always pragmatic, but he worked within the art of the possible. Military dictatorship was not an option for the Angevin empire, as the necessary technology was lacking and, even with Henry’s vast revenues, it was too expensive to try, for another situation like that of 1173-74 might arise, where all potential enemies suddenly became actual simultaneously. The use of force therefore had to be selective, focused on the most dangerous threats. In contrast to the Young King’s lacklustre performance, Richard had proved a sensational success, though the very success was dangerous, since one day the son might think himself strong enough to defy the father. For Richard the problem was that he was now bitterly unpopular in Aquitaine. Although he was almost certainly not a harsh ruler, he did believe in the Latin motto oderint dum metuant (let them hate provided they fear), and certainly made the pips squeak all the way from La Rochelle to the Pyrenees.¹⁷ Stripped of their traditional liberties and privileges, the dispossessed nobility brooded and bided their time, waiting for Richard to make a bad mistake. Their chance came in 1182.

The crisis in Angoulême that year was in many ways a rerun of the imbroglio at Berry four years earlier. Once again it involved a collision between Angevin overlordship and local mores and customs. Count Vulgrin of Angoulême died, leaving only an infant daughter, Matilda. This meant, according to Richard, that Matilda should inherit the county of Angoulême and he, as duke and overlord, should have wardship over her: in effect it was introducing the English law of primogeniture into an alien context. Naturally, this was not at all how the brothers of the dead Count Vulgrin, who stood to gain from the traditional divided inheritance, saw matters. In their eyes Richard’s stance was a tyrannical breach of the ancient traditions of western France, which ultimately called in question the entire structure of fiefs and thus introduced uncertainty and chaos. Driven out by Richard when they contested his claim, Vulgrin’s brothers Richard and Aldemar fled to their half-brother Aimar of Limoges, where they were joined by the count of Périgord and the viscounts of Ventadour, Comborn and Turenne. These men were united in what they saw as a sacred struggle against Richard’s contempt for their inheritance customs.¹⁸ Richard struck back hard at them, launching a surprise attack on the count of Périgord’s fortress at Périgeux in April 1182, then cutting a swathe through the Limousin territory of his foes, burning and looting as he went. Although temporarily with a local inferiority in numbers, Richard had received assurances that his father was on the way to help him, and his confidence was not misplaced. At a conference at Grandmont in May, Henry summoned the rebels before him to hear their predictable complaints about Richard’s tyranny, though the mere fact of the conference led some optimists to suppose that Henry was secretly displeased with Richard’s actions. Such hopes were vain. Henry dismissed the charges as mere baronial contumacity and began a systematic campaign of reducing enemy strongholds in the Limousin. He and Richard, collaborating on a major military mission for the first time ever, took castle after castle: Excideuil, St Yrieix, Pierre-Buffière, Puy St-Front. Joined on 1 July by the Young King and his forces, the tripartite army swept all before it, forcing the rapid surrender of Aimar of Limoges and Elie of Périgord; Richard took particular delight in demolishing the walls of Périgord.¹⁹

It was quite clear that the combined forces of the Angevin empire were irresistible and no enemy could stand against them. The trick was to divide the Devil’s Brood, and this was a task for which the troubadour Bertran de Born was particularly suited. He set himself at once to whip up discontent against Richard and to inveigle the Young King into fresh rebellion. Bertran de Born is himself an historical conundrum in more ways than one. A fine poet and a mighty warrior, he was a genuinely wicked human being. The source of his manifold discontents was that his father had bequeathed the family castle of Hautefort jointly to Bertran and his brother Constantine. Bertran found this intolerable and fought an almost continuous mini-civil war against Constantine, in which the castle constantly changed hands. This struggle was a microcosm of the father-son conflict in the wider kingdom, for Constantine sought and received support from Henry the Old King and Bertran from Henry the Young King. Within Aquitaine Bertran, who could put 1,000 men in the field was forever at daggers drawn with his neighbours the count of Périgord and the viscount of Limoges and above all Duke Richard, who composed his own political satires or sirventes in response to Bertran’s and easily held his own in the ideological duel; indeed it has been suggested that Bertran’s low output of love songs was basically caused by his concentration on the political battle with Richard. He liked to insinuate to the Young King that Richard was becoming too powerful and it was a grave mistake to help him quell the opposition within Aquitaine. Bertran de Born was at root a cynic who tipped over into nihilism and advocated political anarchy: ‘I would that great men should always be quarrelling among themselves’ was his most famous dictum.²⁰ A believer in ‘the war of all against all’ and ‘permanent revolution’ Bertran was an obvious forerunner of both Thomas Hobbes and Leon Trotsky. An avowed lover of war - ‘peace gives me no comfort’, he declared - he reveals through his poems a malevolent ideology of ‘chivalry’ that Dante found deeply shocking. Bertran loved war because it carried off both the mighty and the lowly and he famously stated that the pleasures of sleep, drink and food could not compare with the cry of ‘charge’, the sight of riderless and disembowelled horses neighing in agony or the sound of wounded men crying out for mercy.²¹ At first blush his love of war should have aligned him more naturally with Richard than with the Young King, but Richard’s love of war was always purposive rather than mindless and he always despised de Born.

Some historians have affected to relegate Bertran de Born to the briefest of footnotes, on the ground that he has been taken too much at his own inflated estimate .²² Yet his influence on the Young King seems undeniable. And even if he were only a minor political gadfly, he represented something significant in the state of Aquitaine. The struggle between the rebels of the south and the Angevin empire turns out to have been more socio-economic than cultural. Bertran de Born and the other troubadours were usually spokesmen and propagandists for the minor nobility - la petite noblesse - constables of castles, holders of minor fiefs, landless younger sons of knightly families. The aim of the troubadour ethos was a new, more broadly based nobility, with class distinctions more important than distinctions of wealth and power. Alongside the promotion of courtly love, hunting and tournaments, they advocated increasing the number of courtiers and forcing the great magnates to share their wealth with lesser barons. The ethos of constant warfare was, in the minds of more thoughtful troubadours, though not Bertran de Born, a means of forcing the great barons to keep landless knights permanently on their payroll and thus in time to accept a de facto widening of the nobility. It can be seen why, for most of the troubadours, Richard was public enemy number one. In their eyes he was a boorish pragmatist, uninterested in tournaments or courtly love. They portrayed him as a harsh lord and a despot because he refused the customary Aquitaine right of vassals to wage war on each other without leave of their common lord. From Richard’s point of view, he was bringing civilisation to the south. He kept mercenaries and routiers but they were paid punctually and so did not rampage through the countryside. He believed in what later writers would call ‘the monopoly of violence’ for he expressly forbade his vassals to hire mercenaries; any routiers who came into Aquitaine other than in his service were hunted down ruthlessly, hanged, drowned or blinded. Peace, rigidly enforced laws, legal codes that emphasised primogeniture and swept away uncertainty and dispute, and a clearly stratified hierarchy of the kind the Angevins preferred sounded the death-knell for the ambitions of la petite noblesse.²³

Bertran de Born did not abandon hope. Another ace in the hole for him was the new king of France. Philip Augustus had been a sickly child, to the point where Louis VII of France visited England in 1179 and got Henry II to accompany him to Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. There he prayed for the intercession of the saint and martyr on behalf of the seriously ill Philip. His prayers were answered but he himself suffered a severe stroke almost immediately on returning to France. He died on 18 September 1180.²⁴ Unlike Henry, he was never unscrupulous, but was modest, God-fearing and chaste, living proof that a king could also be a model of chivalry. Although he could not match Henry in deeds and achievement, he left behind a far more glowing reputation, and his career did much for the prestige of the French monarchy. His successor, Philip Augustus, was only fifteen at the time, but was destined to become one of the great kings of France, second only to Louis XIV in power and magnificence according to some historians. Philip was another paradox, a physical coward who never mastered horsemanship or learned to ride properly - it was said that the one destrier he could master was kept in readiness to carry its rider away from any fighting at full tilt - but he became a master strategist and the hammer of the Plantagenets.²⁵ Where the ruthless Henry II had always been able to outwit the ingenuous Louis VII, the Devil’s Brood were to find that they had in the new French king a man even more cunning and ruthless than their own father. From very early days he was convinced he had been marked down by destiny to carry the house of Capet to glory. When still no more than a child, he sat dreamily at a meeting of the King’s Council, chewing a hazel twig. When asked what was on his mind, he replied that it was his ambition to make France as great as it had been in Charlemagne’s day.²⁶ He began his reign as he meant to go on by intervening in the crisis over Vulgrin of Angoulême in Aquitaine and accepting the homage of Angoulême. Bertran de Born could scarcely believe his luck. ‘Now we will know for sure’, he wrote, ‘whether king Philip takes after his father or follows in the footsteps of Charlemagne.’²⁷

Things were starting to go de Born’s way, but he had one final obstacle to remove before the Young King could be persuaded to break ranks with his father and brothers. At young Henry’s side rode the original knight paladin sans peur et sans reproche, Sir William Marshal. Since 1170 the Young King’s mesnie (military household) had been led by Marshal, who was already famous throughout Europe. He had led something of a charmed life, having narrowly escaped death as a child. In 1152 his father Geoffrey Marshal was besieged by King Stephen in Newbury Castle. In accordance with the usual custom, he agreed to surrender on a given date and sent out his son William as hostage; then he broke his word and, by the laws of the sword, the boy’s life was forfeit. The ruthless Geoffrey shrugged the matter off: he said that as his wife was with him in the castle, he could spare a son, since he had both the hammer and the anvil with which to make others. Stephen reluctantly gave the order for the boy to be killed - he had to, or the whole business of hostage-taking would lose credibility. But when he emerged from his tent, he saw the child playing gleefully with the headman’s sword; his heart ruled his head and he pardoned the boy.²⁸ When Henry II ascended the throne of England, young William Marshal was sent to Normandy to be brought up by his cousin the count of Tancarville. After receiving a thorough grounding in the use of arms, he proved himself a natural with lance and sword and soon made his mark in tournaments.

In 1168 he became famous for prowess in real battle also. He was in Earl Patrick of Salisbury’s party when the earl was killed, sensationally - for great lords were not supposed to die in battle - during Eleanor of Aquitaine’s campaign against the earls of Lusignan. This death was considered murder by medieval reckoning for, by the rules, if you caught an enemy out hunting when he was not wearing his chain mail, you had to take him prisoner, not kill him. William donned his hauberk but his horse was immediately killed under him. He landed on the ground unharmed and then took up station by a thick hedge which protected his back, where he defied the men of Lusignan to try their luck. When they charged, he killed six horses and held his own against their mailed riders, being overcome finally only when a Poitevin rider jumped his horse over the hedge and was able to work round behind him; William was taken prisoner with a speared thigh. As a prisoner he was treated harshly to make him keen to pay the suggested ransom, and lay with his wound untended until a kitchen-maid took pity on him and gave him a dishcloth to bind up his wounded leg. William’s problem was that, as a landless younger son, he had no tenants to ransom him and might well have died in a Lusignan dungeon. It was Eleanor of Aquitaine, out of admiration for his gallantry in the Earl Patrick episode, who ransomed him from her private purse.²⁹

William Marshal soon became the Lancelot of his time - the knight everyone wanted to beat but no one could - and was acknowledged as the king of tournaments. Early medieval tournaments, and certainly those in the twelfth century, are much misunderstood, since there is an almost inevitable ‘feedback image’ from the ideal-type of tournament familiar from Malory. In the eleventh century one-on-one combat would have been regarded as a curiosity, since tournaments featured companies of knights fighting each other all day long. Knightly combat in this era, whether in a tournament or on the battlefield, was not concerned with killing opponents but capturing them for ransom. The ‘battleground’ was seldom a special area surrounded by caparisoned horses and gaily-coloured tents but simply the high road, at the side of which were wicker-work pens or ‘lists’ where those who found the going too tough could rest and recuperate on ‘safe’ ground until they felt energetic enough to rejoin the combat; indeed almost the only rule of ‘chivalry’ in this period was the sanctity of the lists, and all kinds of dirty tricks were employed to gain the advantage. When William Marshal became the Young King’s military counsel, he always advised him to hang back at the beginning of the day and make a limp showing, allowing the other side to exhaust itself during the heat of the day, then charge in the evening when the opponents were tired and prisoners could be picked up easily. Prisoner-taking was the name of the game; deaths in tournaments were rare except through falls from horses or being cut up by hooves. Ransom levels were set much lower than in real warfare, and usually the terms of captivity in these cases were not severe. The immediate advantage to the victor was that he took possession of the horse and chain mail, a considerable prize.³⁰ In this way William Marshal soon became not just famous but wealthy. One summer, while fighting on the side of a Flemish knight, Sir Roger de Gaugi, he took 103 knights prisoner with their horses and mail plus many more riderless horses. Immensely strong - he was able to carry a knight in his armour clean off the battlefield - generous, wildly popular, he was said to be tolerant of most things except lending money at interest. A famous story was told of him that an interlocutor tried to make him angry by reciting the details of various ‘sins’: William listened impassively to tales of adultery, theft and the breaking of clerical vows but became incensed only when usury was mentioned.³¹

On paper William was the perfect mentor and guardian for the Young King, who was obsessed with tournaments. But there were several problems. In the first place, even when coached by William and taught all his lore, Young Henry was not very good at jousting. Although tall, strong and handsome, he simply could not be bothered to put his back into knighthood as a real professional would: his attention span was too limited, he was too easily bored and in jousting, as in so many other ways, he was a dilettante. Gradually he became more and more irritated with William’s success and fame. In tournaments opponents tried to unhorse William Marshal but ignored the Young King. Troubadours composed poems about the great Marshal, not about the great Henry. It did not help matters that William could be tactless and, in his cups, could rival d’Artagnan’s Gascon boastfulness. The Young King liked to try to put him in his place by reminding him of his duties as a liegeman. But events always seemed to conspire to place him in a bad light and William in a favourable one. On one occasion the Young King found himself out of money in a Flemish town, unable to pay the (inevitably) huge bills run up by himself and his sycophantic entourage. The burghers simply refused to accept his word that he would pay, closed the gates against him and lined the walls to prevent him from leaving. Condemned to remain a virtual prisoner until money was fetched from his duchy in Normandy, the Young King was providentially delivered by William Marshal, who pledged on his word of honour as a knight that the debt would be paid.³² Immediately the situation was transformed and the gates opened, for the solemn promise of the greatest knight in Christendom was an international currency. Unlike both Old and Young Kings William Marshal always kept his word.

Yet another problem was that Henry II banned all tournaments in his domains, as did Kings Louis and Philip in France proper (the Ile de France). Enforcement of this law was impossible in Aquitaine and intermittent in Normandy, but sometimes the Young King dared not defy his father openly and was forced to decamp to Flanders or Brabant, in terms of tournaments the Reno or Las Vegas of their day. Henry Il’s opposition to tournaments was twofold: they damaged crops and property and they were condemned by the Church, which Henry was anxious to conciliate in the post-Becket years. According to canon law, tournaments stood in much the same light as mercenaries: they were anathematised as a form of suicide, and this was confirmed by Canon 14 of the Second Lateran Council in 1139. In theory, to be granted absolution after Confession for having taken part in a tournament, you had to give back all ransom money, horses and armour gained through jousting, so that not a groat of financial profit remained.³³ Since William Marshal was honourable, he often nagged the Young King about holding tournaments in Normandy, thinking they should be held only in the godless Low Countries. For all these reasons the Young King chafed under Marshal’s tutelage and looked for a way to take him down a peg. We may suspect the direct or indirect influence of Bertran de Born in the final parting of the ways. The Young King was notably uxorious and cherished his wife queen Margaret, who was popular, even though she indulged her selfish and calculating brother Philip. Despite the reputedly happy marriage, the royal couple were childless, as a son born to Margaret died in infancy and there were no further pregnancies. Suddenly rumours began to proliferate that the admiration Margaret expressed for William Marshal and the easy relations they enjoyed betokened something more than mere liking. After listening to troubadour-inspired tittle-tattle that Marshal was now Lancelot in another sense, with Margaret as Guinevere, the Young King angrily accused Marshal of being over-familiar with his wife. Intemperate words were exchanged, and William Marshal stormed from the meeting, leaving his service immediately after. The Young King claimed he had dismissed Marshal for ‘conduct unbecoming’.³⁴

When the Young King suddenly quit the 1182 campaign with Richard against the count of Angoulême and rushed back to a tournament in the Low Countries, it was clear that Bertran de Born’s poison had done its work and he had removed the main moderating influence on Henry II’s eldest son. Time had not mellowed or improved the Young King: instead of twelve years’ experience since his coronation he had merely one month’s worth repeated more than a hundred times. Henry was classically one of those personalities that relish freedom without authority, rights without duties, power without responsibility. At the very moment Henry was carrying out his administrative overhaul in England, in the years 1176-79, the Young King chose to be absent on the continent, flitting into tournaments in the Low Countries whenever it was suggested he did anything useful in Normandy. As Ralph of Diceto tersely put it: ‘Henry the son of the king of England, leaving the kingdom, passed three years in French contests and lavish expenditure.’³⁵ He spent money like water, indulging in the kind of mindless fripperies more redolent of the Sun King at Versailles five centuries later. Some of his jeux d’esprits recall the lunacies of Domitian or Elagabulus, the most decadent emperors of ancient Rome. On one occasion he held a banquet for a hundred knights, all of them called William. Whenever his father asked him to help Richard in Aquitaine, the Young King would take an unconscionable time about getting there, would then half-heartedly join in a siege, then become bored and depart without a word to anyone.³⁶

Surrounded by toadies and sycophants, all young wastrels like himself, the Young King adored to spend money, but hated its reality. Groaning with debt which he yearned not to pay, or to write off by simple decree, he was rescued time and again by his father or William Marshal, which simply made him more resentful, since that meant, in his mind, that they were patronising him or ‘giving him laws’. At the same time Bertran de Born and the other troubadours urged on him the credo that largesse was a ruler’s most desirable quality - not surprisingly, since they would end up the major beneficiaries of a glad-handed prince. To encourage him in his mindlessness, his courtiers showered him with compliments, making him out to be the greatest knight in Christendom, the flower of chivalry. Pro-French propagandists joined in the encomia, especially after the Young King’s death.³⁷ Gerald of Wales wrote: ‘He was the honour of honour, worthy to be the ornament of the whole world; the splendour, glory, light and summit of chivalry; surpassing Julius Caesar in cunning, Hector in courage, Achilles in strength, Augustus in conduct, Paris in beauty . . . He was another Hector, the honour of his knights, the terror of his foes, the love of all; a thunderbolt of war, in every mind the chief hope or the chief fear; in peace mild, affable, kind and generous; in war terrible.’³⁸

The Old King was visibly ageing and the Young King was both heir apparent and joint king. But he did not have the patience to wait until he could succeed to the throne naturally. By 1182 the temptations had once again become too great. He wanted the real powers Richard enjoyed in Aquitaine and he wanted them now. His visits to Aquitaine had persuaded him that there was wholesale opposition to Richard in the duchy and he could win a civil war against him there, but he was not certain what side his father would take in such a fratricidal dispute. In autumn 1182 he asked Henry to be given outright rule in Normandy, but the king refused. The Young King stormed off, declaring he would take the Cross, and went to Paris to see the young monarch Philip Augustus, who realised that here could be the first instrument of his lifelong campaign to destroy the Angevins.³⁹ Philip liked the Young King personally and was grateful for the help he had given him in 1180-81 when some of the French nobles under the counts of Blois and Flanders had opposed his succession. Henry II soon cajoled his son back to his side by offering him an increased annual allowance (equivalent to £110 a day) and a year’s pay for his troops plus the upkeep and subsistence of a hundred knights; in return the son swore an oath that he would remain faithful to the king and make no more demands. The Young King now had three choices: he could remain loyal to his father in accordance with his oath; he could go to Jerusalem on crusade; or he could make war on Richard. The last always seemed the most tempting prospect. Richard himself had crusading ambitions - indeed that was the rationale for his heavy taxation of Aquitaine - and the Young King had no wish to compete in Outremer with a proven warrior. Dozens of prominent would-be rebels were just waiting for the nod from the Young King before rising against Richard, and they had already opened secret channels to the young man, promising they would recognise him as duke of Aquitaine. From all sides the Young King heard the same story - that Richard ‘oppressed his subjects with burdensome and unwarranted exactions and by an imperious despotism’.⁴⁰

By the autumn of 1182, however, Bertran de Born was beginning to despair. He had no hopes of Philip Augustus, whom he now despised for his lack of martial talent. And the southern barons were genuinely afraid of Richard and wanted an almost cast-iron guarantee of success before they would rise against him. As de Born said: ‘I am making a sirvente against the cowardly barons, and you will never hear me speak of them, for I have broken a thousand spurs on them without being able to make a single one of them run or trot.’⁴¹ This was the point at which yet another angel of darkness came to his aid. The most evil of all the Angevins finally emerged from the shadows. Knighted by his father in 1178 at twenty, Geoffrey, lord of Britanny combined the qualities of the Young King with those of his younger brother John. On the one hand he was handsome, charming and debonair; on the other cruel, scheming, serpentine, mendacious and untrustworthy. In some ways he was by far the most natural ally for Bertran de Born since he believed in mindless violence - he would gut houses and lay waste towns on a whim - and was forever changing sides. He had no fixed beliefs and would fight with anyone against anyone. An indefatigable intriguer, he poisoned Richard’s mind against the Young King when he performed so badly at Berry while simultaneously stoking resentment in the Young King against Richard.⁴² Careful and methodical, he did not at first reveal his hand as duke of Britanny. Unlike Richard, he made no real attempt to impose his father’s law and left the old traditions and folkways of Britanny alone and gave his easy-going minister Roland de Dinan a free hand. In 1181 Henry II allowed him to marry Constance, heiress of the late Conan IV of Britanny. Since the Old King habitually interfered in his sons’ private lives and had humiliated Richard by not allowing him to marry Alice, this concession could be seen as a great favour. Henry indeed seemed very indulgent towards Geoffrey and there is even some evidence that he secretly encouraged him to meddle in his brothers’ affairs in Normandy and Aquitaine on the ‘divide and rule’ principle. But Geoffrey secretly hated his father. In his mind Henry had toyed with him by allowing the marriage to Constance after a lifelong betrothal. Moreover, even when he became duke of Britanny by rights of succession through his marriage, Henry would still not let him rule there independently.⁴³ His resentment towards his father thus had the same cause as Richard’s, but Richard did not harbour deep, abiding hatred the way Geoffrey did.

Geoffrey planned his strike against his father meticulously. First he established that the quid pro quo for non-interference in Breton folkways was that his writ should run in all corners of Britanny. He campaigned against the nominally independent Viscount Guiomar of Leon and crushed him in 1179. With growing confidence he then dismissed Roland of Dinan and replaced him with his own henchman Ralph de Fougeres - a known enemy of both Richard and Henry II.⁴⁴ A better judge of human beings than the Old King could have inferred a lot about Geoffrey’s true filial feelings from that alone. While Guiomar, following the example of so many defeated magnates in this era, departed on crusade, Geoffrey allowed his eldest son to have nominal suzerainty over the north-west of the duchy but established his own hegemony by fortifying the port of Morlaix and occupying it with his own troops. Cunningly, Geoffrey established tight administrative and ecclesiastical control before his masterstroke in 1185, when his famous Assize established the principle of primogeniture in succeeding to fiefs.⁴⁵ In June 1182 he used the occasion of a visit to his father at Grandmont to intrigue with the anti-Richard barons of the Limousin. The chroniclers tended to impute Geoffrey’s motives to simple moral depravity, to see him as Original Sin incarnate, but it may be that Geoffrey’s devious mind was working towards the day when his father was dead. If a revolt removed Richard and the feeble Young King assumed the Crown, it would not be hard for Geoffrey to become the power behind the throne and the real decision-maker in the land. Everyone thought that, as a third son, he had done extremely well, but Geoffrey thought Britanny far too small a cockpit for his ambitions.⁴⁶

By autumn 1182 rebellion was again breaking out in Aquitaine. The perfidious Taillefer brothers and their ally viscount Aimar once more broke their word, hired mercenaries and denounced the treaty to which they had put their names. This was the moment for the trio of plotters, Geoffrey, Bertran de Born and Philip Augustus, to find the casus belli that would justify waging war on Richard, and he fell into their trap by fortifying and rebuilding Clairvaux Castle, a fortress nominally in Anjou, which he aimed to use against his next most likely opponent, viscount Chatellerault of Poitou.⁴⁷ Clairvaux was disputed territory, as under one interpretation of feudalism it belonged to Poitou and on another to Anjou. The Young King naturally claimed that Richard was fortifying strongholds in his (Henry’s) domain but, unless he was simply being disputatious or trailing his coat, he should have submitted the dispute to the Old King.⁴⁸ Nonetheless, he was confident that in an armed challenge to Richard he would have the support of his father. Some say the Old King was losing his touch in not acting decisively right at the beginning, but other authorities claim that the real problem was located in Henry II’s erratic personality: ‘Although extremely sensitive to what he took to be betrayal in others, Henry II showed a remarkable capacity for deceiving himself about his sons, and an astonishing indulgence even to their most patent duplicity.’⁴⁹ The upshot was that he prevaricated and, instead of issuing a judgement, summoned all his sons to a Christmas court at Caen: it was to be a magnificent occasion, and none of his sons or liegemen were allowed to hold any other court that Yuletide.

In the simulated ambience of peace and goodwill William Marshal thought he discerned a good chance to patch up his quarrel with the Young King. He offered to refute the calumny that he had been queen Margaret’s lover by challenging any of his accusers to single combat. The peevish Young King said that Marshal was simply offering a contest he was sure to win, which was no proof at all. Marshal riposted that he would face any three champions on successive days and, if any of them beat him, he would admit his guilt whatever the truth. The Young King still did not fancy the odds so, in desperation, Marshal offered to have a finger cut from his right hand just before the joust, promising he would fight with the wound still bleeding. When the boorish Young Henry would not even accept this offer, Marshal asked for a written passport and set off on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Magi at Cologne.⁵⁰ This high drama aside, the Christmas court was notable mainly for backstairs intrigue. Among the thousand knights who assembled in the vast halls of the Caen palace was the inevitable Bertran de Born, who had already been doing his best to whip up opposition to Richard. His sirvente on the subject of Clairvaux was both arch and insinuating: ‘Someone had dared to build a fair castle at Clairvaux in the midst of the plain. I should not wish the Young King to know about it or see it, for he would not find it to his liking; but I fear, so white is the stone, that he cannot fail to see it from Mateflon.’⁵¹ Meanwhile at Caen de Born lobbied both the Old King and Richard for support against his brother Constantine who held the family castle at Hautefort. In a bizarre but not untypical melange of caddish-ness and chivalry de Born claimed that only the beauty of Henry II’s daughter Matilda, now married to the exiled duke of Saxony, prevented him from dying of boredom during the tedious proceedings at Caen.⁵²

Naturally his best chance to regain Hautefort was finally to tip the Young King over into rebellion, but the Old King’s diplomacy at first made this a difficult aim to compass. Henry announced a conference at Mirebeau where the disaffected barons of Aquitaine could put their grievances to him. Then he persuaded an initially very reluctant Richard to hand over Clairvaux to him. Finally, he sought to bind up the wounds of the Angevin empire by a complex skein of renewed oath-taking. First his sons were to swear perpetual fidelity to him; this they did without demur. Then he sought to impose oaths of overlordship binding his younger sons to the Young King. Geoffrey accepted readily enough - it fitted well with his own designs - but Richard refused adamantly. He pointed out that royal brothers were supposed to be equal in status and so he should not have to swear an oath of submission on the Gospel; if the Young King had rights of primogeniture from his father, he, Richard, had a countervailing right of inheritance from his mother. In feudal terms Richard was right for, though Henry II had inherited portions of his empire from his mother and father, Aquitaine was his only by the right of marriage to Eleanor. Moreover, Richard’s arguments about equality were validated by the existing system of homage: the Young King did homage to the king of France for Normandy, as did Richard for Aquitaine, so, feudally speaking, both brothers were on the same footing.⁵³ In other words, Richard’s case was that, in trying to get him to swear an oath of subjection to the Young King, Henry II was trying to change the rules and make Aquitaine answerable to the rest of the Angevin federation rather than to France.

After much cajolery Richard finally agreed to pay the required homage provided the Young King made a solemn pronouncement that Richard and his heirs would possess Aquitaine forever. At this point the Young King drew back and upset all his father’s careful diplomacy. He refused the proferred conditions because the new terms of homage conflicted with the secret assurances he had already given de Born and the Aquitaine rebels. On 1 January 1183 the Young King came clean and admitted as much: he told his father he had pledged himself to the rebels because of the Clairvaux affair. But Henry II trumped this ace by pointing out that Richard had already handed over Clairvaux to him. He insisted that the oaths of peace and the amended terms of homage be implemented and told the Young King that he intended to force the rebels to re-affirm the original treaty at Mirebeau. Finding themselves in a trap, Geoffrey and young Henry recast their plans. Geoffrey ‘volunteered’ to go south and bring the Limousin rebels to Mirebeau and the Young King, in collusion with him, then announced that he would follow Geoffrey to bring maximum pressure to bear. His true intention, of course, was to get the rebellious barons to sign up to him as duke of Aquitaine.⁵⁴ Even more deviously, he got his father to agree that at Mirebeau the rebels would not have to confirm the original treaty but could negotiate a new one instead. When Richard heard of this new instance of ‘goalpost moving’ he exploded. In an angry scene with his father he remonstrated vociferously: why had he and Henry campaigned together to crush the rebels in 1182 if a farcical surrender to their demands the next year was to be the net outcome? Tempers ran high at the father-son conclave. Finally losing patience with his father’s approach, Richard told him bluntly that Aquitaine came from his mother, not the Angevins, and therefore it lay outside the king’s jurisdiction. The meeting ended badly and Richard stormed out; he swept out of the court contemptuously, without royal permission, and rode south to fortify his castles in Poitou.⁵⁵

The battle lines were now clearly drawn. The Young King and Geoffrey were fighting against Richard, and expected their father to join them after Richard’s ‘unreasonable’ behaviour. The Young King secretly hoped that, with Richard defeated, he would then be able to dethrone his father and inherit the entire empire. Richard was determined this would not happen and, rather than accept such an outcome, was prepared to break away from the Angevin federation and declare Aquitaine an independent duchy. Much hinged on Henry II’s actions: would he really go to war against Richard on behalf of rebels the two of them had just defeated? And what was the king of France’s role in all this? Just to be on the safe side the Young King sent his beloved wife Margaret to Philip’s court in Paris. He then rode south to join Geoffrey and the rebels at Limoges. At first everything went well for the insurgents. Aimar and his mercenaries browbeat the city of Limoges into joining the revolt, and every day news of the disarray in the Angevin family brought more recruits and waverers to the rebel banner. On paper Richard faced a daunting and almost impossible task, given the strength of the forces arrayed against him. But none of his enemies possessed his military genius. In no mood for peace or compromise, he first struck out at Geoffrey’s forces in Britanny and scattered them. Then, on 12 February, after riding non-stop for forty-eight hours, he and his cavalry fell on Aimar’s routiers at Gorre near Limoges, when the mercenaries confidently imagined he was still the other side of Poitiers. Richard himself slew the mercenary leader William Arnald and with the others used his draconian exemplary methods of drowning, blinding and hanging. Aimar and a handful of followers managed to get away only because Richard’s horsemen were too exhausted to pursue them.⁵⁶

The Old King now came south with a handful of followers to try to patch up a peace before his empire disintegrated. Already angered by reports that his son Geoffrey had persuaded the disaffected Aquitaine nobles not to meet him at Mirebeau, he was thrown into incredulous consternation as he approached Limoges. The garrison in the citadel of St Martial there - it was yet another city with a clear bifurcation between town and castle - panicked and attacked the tiny royal party; Henry narrowly escaped with his life. He then sought safety with Richard at Aixe, where the Young King visited him and tried to explain away the armed contretemps outside Limoges. Shocked and angry at such lèsemajesté , the Old King would not listen. The Young King returned to Limoges to tell the rebels that one moment of madness had placed the king on Richard’s side; the dauntless Aimar made ready for a siege. There followed two weeks of pointless overtures and negotiations while Richard and his father assembled enough troops to deal decisively with the enemy. During one of these parleys the king was again shot at, and an arrow would have found its target if his horse had not suddenly reared its head and caught its death blow from the shaft.⁵⁷ Still shaken by the Young King’s treachery and scarcely able to believe that his cosseted heir might actually wish him dead, Henry grimly built up his forces, gradually and remorselessly tipping the scales against the rebels. There is some evidence that the Young King himself thought he had gone too far and tried to save himself from the vortex of events, but Geoffrey and Aimar held him to his unfaithful course. Reduced to appealing to the Taillefer brothers to rise again and attack Richard’s castles, the Young King found his fortunes momentarily enhanced when Philip Augustus finally made the first moves in what would be a thirty-year war against the Angevins. The arrival of his Brabançons for a time reduced Aquitaine to a chaos of plundering mercenaries, guerrillas and condottieri. Atrocities proliferated, especially at St Léonard de Noblat and Brantôme where the routiers left hardly a stone standing and massacred the inhabitants to the last infant.⁵⁸ With the entire south in a state of vicious civil war, the evil genius of the piece, Bertran de Born, managed to wrest Hautefort from his brother.

Like so many others caught up in the confusing welter of feudal loyalties, William Marshal, returning from Cologne, could not be sure where his primary loyalty lay, to King Henry or to the liege lord who had dismissed him. He decided to resolve the conflict by placing himself at the Young King’s side and trying to steer him in the direction of peace. Always Henry had at his side the guardian angel William Marshal and the angel of darkness Bertran de Born. This time events worked in Marshal’s favour, for it turned out that the Young King’s seneschal, who had been the principal accuser against Marshal in the charge of adultery with Queen Margaret, had concluded that the Old King would prevail in the coming test of strength and had decamped from Young Henry’s court. For the flaky Young King this fact, much more than Marshal’s offer of trial by combat at Caen, was the clincher. He welcomed William Marshal back enthusiastically and asked him whether there was any way out of the current impasse. Marshal said that the face-saver for all knights who had made a disastrous mistake was to take the Cross. In a solemn ceremony in Limoges the Young King vowed he would go on crusade, provided only that all existing rights reverted to him on his return.⁵⁹ But all this soon seemed academic for at last, by the beginning of March, Richard and his father concluded they had sufficient forces to deal decisively with the enemy. Ignoring the bands of plundering routiers, they concentrated on the citadel of St Martial and dug in for an arduous siege. Now out of money, the Young King was reduced to becoming a routier himself, plundering and rampaging through the land, looking for money to pay his mercenaries, particularly targeting churches and monasteries. By the beginning of May his fortunes were rising again, for even Richard and Henry, the masters of siegecraft, had found St Martial a nut too hard to crack. Facing large-scale desertions from the demoralised besiegers, lashed by wind and rain in their tents while their foes in the citadel taunted them, Henry and Richard raised the siege. The pendulum of war seemed to be swinging decisively the Young King’s way when other great magnates, following King Philip’s example, began thronging into Aquitaine, principally Hugh, duke of Burgundy and Raymond, count of Toulouse. It was only with the sudden arrival of their ally King Alfonso II of Aragon that the Old King and Richard were able to hold their own. The Young King, elated by the turn of events, went over to the offensive at Limoges and captured Richard’s old base at Aixe. Then fate intervened. Suddenly, on 26 May 1183 young Henry fell ill with a fever. The end came soon; he died on 11 June.⁶⁰

On his death the rebellion collapsed like a house of cards; since the entire purpose of the revolt was to make the Young King duke of Aquitaine, there was no longer any point in the struggle. Hugh of Burgundy and Raymond of Toulouse returned home. Bertran de Born ruefully reflected that he had backed the wrong horse and now thought he should have raised up Geoffrey instead.⁶¹ Heartened by yet another dramatic pendulum swing, Richard and Henry returned to Limoges to besiege St Martial. On 24 June Aimar surrendered and the citadel was razed to the ground. While Henry headed back to Anjou, Richard and Alfonso besieged Bertran de Born in his ‘impregnable’ castle of Hautefort; it fell after seven days and was returned to Constantine.⁶² As Richard proceeded to lay waste the lands of the count of Périgord, one by one the rebels surrendered; either their castles were demolished or King Henry’s troops occupied them. Geoffrey was punished by being deprived of all castles in Britanny. Bertran de Born was left with a lifelong grudge against King Alfonso for the loss of Hautefort. Henry II rewarded the Spanish monarch lavishly for his help, but it is recorded that Alfonso took all this money home with him instead of ransoming his men, or at least so the bitter Bertran de Born claims.⁶³ Henry took the Young King’s death very hard. ‘He cost me much, but I wish he had lived to cost me more’, was his magnanimous tribute. Perhaps at some level he resented the fact that Richard had now moved into pole position as heir apparent, or maybe his confidence was shaken in his (Richard’s) hold on Aquitaine, for when the rebels laid down their arms Henry resumed direct control of some of the castles he had given Richard before the war.⁶⁴ Richard accepted the loss of face stoically, consoling himself with the thought that he would soon succeed the ailing Henry. Certainly his martial reputation, which had dipped in April-June during the abortive siege of St Martial, was even more widely acknowledged than before. Bertran de Born, his implacable enemy, paid tribute to Richard’s gifts of tenacity, resourcefulness, unswervingness, claiming that it was unlikely his side could have prevailed ultimately even if the Young King had not died and describing his foe as ‘more dangerous than a wounded boar’.⁶⁵ And he also recognised, as Henry II never seemed to, that Richard’s motivation was always the love of Aquitaine which he had inherited from his mother. It was for Aquitaine, de Born conceded, that Richard had ‘gained and given and spent so much wealth, and dealt and received and withstood so many a blow, and endured so much hunger and thirst, and so much fatigue from Agen as far as Nontron’.⁶⁶ Always a poor judge of his sons, Henry was now about to precipitate a fresh crisis in his empire by his failure to understand this simple fact about Duke Richard of Aquitaine.