Far closer to the Plantagenet court, indeed integral to the entire trans-maritime government of Henry II, the symbolism of the serpent undoubtedly appealed to Henry and his family. Like Medea fleeing from the wrath of Jason, so Henry II was obliged regularly to take ship across the Channel, both before 1154 to evade his enemies in England, and after his accession as King, to assert his rule in France. It is therefore highly significant that serpentine imagery was integral to the naming of the King and Queen’s great ships as esnecca (‘the snakes’), themselves, like Medea’s chariot, responsible for transporting the court from one part of Henry’s dominion to another.⁸¹ It is perhaps of even greater significance here that Nicholas de Sigillo, tentatively identified above as Henry’s seal keeper in the 1150s and early 1160s, was himself hereditary keeper of the King’s esneccum berthed in Southampton.⁸² We have already encountered Nicholas’ own seal, impressed from a fine classical gemstone, displaying what could be interpreted as a lion attacking a dragon (Fig. 2.7). Given his offices, both at court, and as custodian of the King’s ship, the esneccum, what more appropriate seal could Nicholas possibly have possessed?⁸³

If we look more closely to Henry’s court and its servants, we almost immediately light upon other sigillographic references to snakes or serpents. Some are highly conjectural. The seal of Laurence usher of the King’s Exchequer, for example, from c. 1200, shows an antique intaglio that could be interpreted as David with the head of Goliath but might just as easily be identified as Perseus with the (serpent-entwined) head of Medusa (Fig. 2.9).⁸⁴ Other such references are clear. We might begin here with the signet ring, undoubtedly genuine, discovered in the grave of Henry II’s courtier Hubert Walter, excavated in 1890. Hubert was himself associated with Henry II’s chancery, later justiciar to Richard I, chancellor to King John, and archbishop of Canterbury. His ring displays a Greco-Egyptian Chnoubis: a gnostic solar icon with the head of a lion and the body of a serpent. Both serpent and lion could have been deliberate references to Hubert’s masters, the Plantagenet kings. Hubert’s use of a classical gemstone itself followed in the tradition of archbishops Theobald and Thomas Becket both of whom had employed classical gems in their seals, in Becket’s case an image that has been identified as Mercury, not only messenger of the gods but bearer of the serpent-entwined caducis.⁸⁵ Becket’s ‘Mercury’ is shown without caducis. Likewise, the counterseal of Becket’s most detested rival and fellow veteran of the household of archbishop Theobald, Roger de Pont-l’Evêque, archbishop of York. Roger’s classical counterseal shows a three-headed chimera, apparently of the heads of Jupiter, Apollo and Saturn. In Christian terms, this could be interpreted as the Trinity. In the circumstances of the 1150s and ’60s, it might also have served as a reminder of Roger’s entanglement in the serpentine coils of Henry II’s court.⁸⁶ In the world of seals and sigillography it is important to remember that courtiers tended to mimic the seals or insignia of their superiors. The signets of Thomas Becket, Roger de Pont-l’Evêque, Hubert Walter, and even the ambiguous but perhaps dragon-headed seal of Nicholas de Sigillo, supply yet further circumstantial proof that a serpent may indeed have been a prominent feature of Henry II’s most personal display of power.

Besides the notice of a privy seal with serpent and chariot, there is at least one other reference that has been cited to suggest that Henry II possessed a privy seal or signet. In Gerald of Wales’s ‘Vita’ of the King’s bastard son and chancellor Geoffrey Plantagenet, Gerald tells us that, following Henry II’s death, Geoffrey went to Richard at Fontevraud and there delivered up what appears to have been the King’s great seal itself guarded under the seals of various barons who had attended the King’s last days.⁸⁷ Shortly before this, Gerald tells us that Geoffrey had received a ring from the dying King engraved with a panther (annulum aureum optimum cum pantera). This the King had proposed to send to his kinsman the King of Spain, presumably to Alfonso VIII of Castile, married to Henry II’s daughter Eleanor.⁸⁸ There is no certain proof that this ring was actually worn by Henry let alone that is was used by him as a signet or seal. Nonetheless, L. F. Salzman, in 1914, suggested precisely this, in the process unwisely developing Gerald’s words to imply that Henry II used a signet ring ‘engraved with his symbol, a leopard’.⁸⁹ That signet rings were known at Henry’s court seems undeniable. In 1183, for example, keen to make peace with his rebellious eldest son, Henry II had sent the Young King a precious ring. This in turn is said to have been employed, almost certainly as a signet, together with the Young King’s seal, to authenticate deathbed letters in which the Young King sought to secure his father’s approval for a series of pious last wishes and bequests.⁹⁰