1120–1189
Eighty-three years earlier, almost to the day, another king had set sail from Barfleur in the direction of England. This was John’s great-grandfather, Henry I.
Henry was the youngest son of William the Conqueror, and both king of England and duke of Normandy – the two countries had been yoked together by William’s famous conquest of 1066. Since that momentous event, royal crossings of the Channel had become a matter of necessity and routine; William, for example, had made the voyage at least nineteen times during his twenty-one-year reign.1 As this implies, it was not regarded as particularly risky, and Henry on this occasion made it across without incident. The king and his household set out from Barfleur at twilight on 25 November 1120, in calm and clear conditions, and arrived safe and sound in England the next morning.
But it soon became apparent that one ship from the royal fleet was missing. This was the so-called White Ship, a sleek new vessel that had been offered to Henry by its owner just before his departure, but which in the event had been left for the use of the more youthful members of the court. These young men and women had remained on shore as the rest of the royal entourage embarked, partying with the ship’s crew and becoming increasingly merry. When they finally put to sea it was late and dark, and all of them were hopelessly drunk. Determined to overtake the boats that had already left, they set out recklessly, and almost immediately struck a rock. The boat went down with the loss of all but one, who lived to tell the tale. Those who perished included many sons and daughters of the English aristocracy. They also included Henry I’s son and heir, William.2
‘No ship ever brought such misery to England’, said one contemporary chronicler. When King Henry heard the news, says another, he fell to the ground, overcome with grief. It was not simply the loss of a child, devastating though that must have been – it was a dynastic catastrophe. Henry had fathered no fewer than twenty bastard children (the royal record), two of whom had also perished in the White Ship, but William had been his only legitimate son. The king, who had been a widower since the death of his queen, Matilda, two years earlier, wasted no time in trying to remedy the situation; barely a month later he married for a second time, taking a new young wife in the hope of producing a new male heir. But despite his best efforts, no more children were forthcoming. By the mid 1120s Henry was well into his fifties, and still without an obvious successor.3
And so the ageing king attempted to solve the problem in a different way, by fixing the succession on his only other legitimate child: his daughter, Matilda. Matilda had been married as a girl to the German emperor, but in 1125 she was newly widowed; Henry brought her back to England and lent on his leading men to accept her as his heir. The following year, to bolster Matilda’s chances further, he arranged for her to be married to Geoffrey, son of the count of Anjou, a young man with the curious nickname ‘Plantagenet’.* It was evidently Henry’s hope that his daughter and her new husband would produce a son who would one day rule in his stead.4
And they did. In 1133 Matilda gave birth to her first child, and happily it was a boy, named Henry in honour of his royal grandfather. Young Henry would indeed grow up to inherit his grandfather’s cross-Channel dominions, and much more besides. As King Henry II he would be the wonder of his age, greater in reputation than his grandfather: a successful warrior, a conscientious reformer, a maker of new laws and a builder of mighty castles. He would also be the father of King John.
But in 1133 all that lay in the distant future. In the meantime Henry had to obtain his inheritance, and that proved to be no easy task. Just two years after his birth his namesake grandfather died – his death famously said to have been caused by eating too many lampreys – and once the fearsome old king was gone his succession plan fell apart. Many of the barons who had sworn to support Matilda reneged on their oaths, and gave their support instead to her cousin, Stephen, who was crowned in December 1135, within days of Henry I’s death. There followed a protracted period of civil war in England and Normandy as the supporters of each side slugged it out. For a few powerful men with flexible consciences and strong right arms it was a time of great opportunity; for everyone else it was a time of calamity and oppression. Contemporary authors complained of lawlessness, unlicensed castle-building and terrible unchecked violence. In the famous words of the Peterborough chronicler, ‘men said openly that Christ and his saints slept’.6
Victory ultimately went to Matilda’s party. In 1144 her husband Geoffrey, now count of Anjou, successfully wrested Normandy from Stephen’s grasp, and five years later he granted it to his eldest son, the newly knighted Henry, just sixteen years old. At the start of 1153 Henry, now nineteen, invaded England, but with inconclusive results: the barons for the most part refrained from supporting either side, leading to a stalemate. It was only when Stephen’s eldest son, Eustace, died that summer that the weary king agreed to recognize Henry as his heir. When Stephen himself died in October the following year, Henry peacefully succeeded him as king of England.7
Henry II, even at the start of his reign, was a much greater ruler than Stephen in every sense. Not only was he the undisputed ruler of both England and Normandy; he was also, since the death of his father in 1151, count of Anjou, which meant he ruled everything beyond Normandy’s southern border to the valley of the Loire. Nor was that the limit of his power. In 1152 Henry had extended his rule even further, becoming the duke of Aquitaine, a vast territory that stretched from Anjou’s southern border to the Pyrenees. He had obtained this massive windfall by marrying one of the most celebrated women in European history, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
The marriage of Henry and Eleanor has become the stuff of legend and romance, talked about and written about from their day until our own. For modern audiences, mention of their names together tends to evoke images from the 1968 film The Lion in Winter, in which Eleanor was played by Katharine Hepburn and Henry by Peter O’Toole. Picturing the real Henry is comparatively easy, thanks to several contemporary pen portraits which agree in their main details. He is described as being a little taller than average, red-haired, freckled and broad-chested, with a tendency to corpulence, despite constant exercise and a frugal diet. In Eleanor’s case we are not so lucky: beyond describing her as beautiful, chroniclers give us no idea of her appearance. Nor do we have any physical remains to help us out. Both Henry and Eleanor were buried in Fontevraud Abbey in France, but their bones were lost when the abbey was sacked in the sixteenth century. We do still have the effigies that were originally placed on top of their tombs, and in Henry’s case his likeness accords broadly with the descriptions provided by the chronicles. Eleanor’s effigy, therefore, may also be an approximation of her likeness, but no more. The queen was over eighty when she died, yet her effigy clearly represents a much younger woman. It is best regarded as an idealised image of a queen rather than an attempt to portray an individual.8
Whatever her physical attributes, Eleanor’s position as a great heiress made her irresistibly attractive. Probably born in 1122, she had suddenly inherited the duchy of Aquitaine in 1137 when her father, Duke William X, died unexpectedly while on pilgrimage, leaving no son to succeed him. Aquitaine was a mighty prize, covering perhaps a third of modern France, and so Eleanor became a highly desirable bride. Within a few months she was married to Louis, the son of the king of France, who one week later succeeded to the French throne as Louis VII. Their marriage, however, was not destined to last. Apart from being a similar age (Louis was about two years older) they appear to have had little in common, and when they went on crusade in 1147, malicious tongues whispered that Eleanor had seen rather too much of her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Certainly by the time of their return from the east in 1149 the king and queen’s marital problems were public knowledge, with even the pope encouraging them to start sleeping together again. The deciding factor was probably the fact that, after fifteen years of increasingly unhappy wedlock, they had produced two daughters but no sons. In March 1152 Louis had their union annulled.9
Eight weeks later, Eleanor married Henry. Although this marriage is often described as a love match in modern accounts, there is no reason to suppose that the motives of Eleanor’s second husband were any less hard-nosed than those of her first. Aquitaine was still a great prize, and by marrying Eleanor Henry became its new duke. The question was whether he would be able to hang on to it. Henry was only nineteen at the time, but Eleanor was thirty. If her second marriage, like her first, failed to produce any sons, then Henry’s claim to Aquitaine would last only for his own lifetime, and the duchy would pass to Eleanor’s daughters, who remained in Louis’ custody. The French king was not happy about his former wife’s swift remarriage, but in divorcing her he was evidently prepared to gamble that no more children would be forthcoming.
Louis was set to be disappointed. Henry and Eleanor went on to have many children together – at least eight whose names are known to us. Their first child, born a year after their marriage, was a boy, named William in the long tradition of Aquitainian dukes, and three more boys followed by the end of the 1150s. Aquitaine was clearly going to pass to Henry’s heirs.10
During these early years of his reign there was much else to keep Henry occupied. England and Normandy were both battered from years of civil war, and their great men had grown accustomed to doing as they liked in their own locales. Henry reversed this situation, restoring royal and ducal authority and taming the power of his magnates, sometimes destroying or confiscating their castles, and building new ones of his own such as Scarborough, Newcastle and Orford. A vigorous, intelligent and aggressive ruler, he moved like lightning across his vast demesnes as circumstances demanded, prompting some to comment that he must fly rather than travel by horse or ship. ‘He was ever on his travels’, wrote the cleric Walter Map, ‘covering distances like a courier, and showing no mercy to his household.’ And Henry’s household was massive. Because of the sprawling empire he had assembled, he was the richest ruler in Europe, and in consequence he had the largest entourage. ‘No such court like it has ever been heard of in the past,’ said Walter, ‘nor is likely to be feared again in the future.’11
This was the world into which John was born, probably around Christmas 1166 – or possibly 1167. The uncertainty arises because his birth occurred towards the end of the year, and because those few chroniclers who bothered to record it did so in lackadaisical terms. As Henry and Eleanor’s eighth or ninth child – and, as it turned out, their last – John was not very important, at least from a political point of view. That much was made clear within a year or so of his arrival by the succession scheme devised by his father. Henry’s plan, revealed in a peace treaty with Louis VII in 1169, was that on his death his extensive dominions would be divided. His firstborn son, William, had died as an infant, leaving a younger brother, Henry, born in 1155, as the eldest surviving child. Young Henry, it was envisaged, would inherit his father’s patrimony – England, Normandy and Anjou. Aquitaine, which had been acquired by marriage, was to pass to the second surviving son, Richard, born in 1157, while a third son, Geoffrey, born in 1158, would receive the duchy of Brittany, which Henry II had obtained by force in 1166. But beyond that Henry had no more provinces to parcel out. For John there was, at present, no provision.12
There was very likely an element of prudence in this omission. The sons Henry had included in his planned division had all survived the perils of infancy and were entering adolescence and early manhood. John, by contrast, was still little more than a baby, and might well follow his eldest brother to an early grave. Yet John was also treated differently to his older siblings in another respect. As far as we can determine, it seems that Henry, Richard and Geoffrey, along with their older sisters, were raised in England. In 1160 the archbishop of Canterbury had written to Henry II, then on the Continent, suggesting that the king might consider returning to England at some point, since it would (among other things) enable him to see his children. As this implies, the older children did not get to spend much time with their father. They probably did, however, get to spend at least some time with their mother. Eleanor also had to travel, of course, but her constant childbearing in the 1150s and early 1160s must have meant her itinerary was less hectic than that of her husband, and her governmental duties seem to place her in England for most of this period. Certainly later in life Eleanor’s older children were to demonstrate a closer attachment to her than to Henry.13
In John’s case, however, matters were different. In 1168, now that Eleanor’s childbearing days were over, Henry decided he could usefully redeploy her to govern Aquitaine. By this stage her older sons were sufficiently grown up to be learning the ropes of government. Henry and Geoffrey probably remained attached to their father’s side; Richard, who was destined to rule Aquitaine, stayed with his mother and followed her south. But John had no such ropes to learn, and in any case was not old enough to accompany either of his parents as they executed their political responsibilities. Instead, he was left at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou, to be raised by its community of nuns. He was not completely cut off from his family. His sister Joan, born in 1165 and thus a year or so older, was left at the abbey at the same time, and one of Henry’s cousins, Matilda of Flanders, was a member of the community there. It is also possible that his mother could have made occasional visits – Poitiers is about a hundred miles from Fontevraud. Nevertheless, the permanent placement of John and Joan at the abbey suggests that both children probably saw a lot less of their mother than had been the case with their elder siblings.14
Harsh as this sounds as a childcare solution, there were good reasons for keeping toddlers in the safety of the cloister and away from the turbulent world of the court. In 1169, not long after her return to Aquitaine, Eleanor narrowly escaped an ambush by rebellious barons, in which her principal adviser, the earl of Salisbury, was killed. Then, in 1170, Henry committed the most notorious act of his reign by speaking the angry words that led four of his knights to murder the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. The crime shocked all of Europe, and for a time Henry feared it would cost him his throne, as rival rulers urged the pope to excommunicate him and license their invasion of his lands. In the event the pope did neither, but the king remained a pariah until the spring of 1172, when papal legates finally absolved him as he knelt in penance outside the doors of Avranches Cathedral.15
Henry in fact remained in great danger, though he was slow to see it coming. Part of the problem was his increasingly strained relationship with his eldest son. The precise causes of their quarrel are now impossible to determine, but one factor was clearly the younger Henry’s lack of independent power – the perennial complaint of heirs apparent down the ages. In 1170 the king had arranged for Henry to be crowned as an associate ruler – a common practice in France, but without precedent in England – from which point contemporaries referred to them as the Old King and the Young King. But it soon became evident that, despite his new title, the Young King had no real authority. He was given no lands of his own to manage, and hence had no independent income, while the membership of his household continued to be controlled by his father. Tellingly, the seal made for his use after 1170 depicts him without a sword. It is also possible that the young Henry harboured some resentment over the death of Thomas Becket, in whose household he had for a time been raised. It was certainly in revenge for Becket’s death that the Young King claimed to be acting when he rose against his father in rebellion.16
The immediate cause of this rebellion, however, was the favour the Old King had shown to his youngest son. By 1172, it seems, Henry had become conscious of his initial failure to make any territorial provision for John. Within a decade or so, we find chroniclers referring to the boy as ‘Lack-land’ (Sans Terre), and suggesting that it was a nickname bestowed upon him by his father. True or not, towards the end of the year Henry set out to make good the deficiency, and arranged for John to be married to the daughter (and heir) of the count of Savoy. When the two rulers met in Limoges early in 1173, the count asked what lands his future son-in-law would bring to the marriage, and Henry responded, apparently spontaneously, that John would receive a trio of important castles in Anjou – Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau. This proved too much for the Young King, who protested that his father had no right to make grants of land in Anjou without his agreement, and complained about his lack of power in general. When his protests and complaints were ignored, the Young King slipped away from his father’s court at night, and rode to Paris to join Louis VII.17
Louis was a natural choice of ally for Henry II’s disaffected offspring. Not only was he the Old King’s main rival; he was also (and somewhat ironically) the Young King’s father-in-law. Back in 1158 Louis and Henry had attempted to cement one of their periodic attempts at peace by arranging the betrothal of their infant children. Two years later, the young Henry, then aged four, had been married to Margaret, Louis’ eldest daughter from his second marriage, then aged two. Neither the marriage nor the peace treaty was a great success, but it did draw the Young King into Louis’ confidence, and make him a useful tool for French schemes against his father.18
Important as Louis was in encouraging the Young King’s opposition, there is little doubt that the true instigator of the boy’s rebellion was his mother. As soon as Henry II’s back was turned, Eleanor of Aquitaine dispatched her other teenaged sons, the fifteen-year-old Richard and the fourteen-year-old Geoffrey, to join forces with their brother in Paris, while she herself rallied the barons of Poitou. This was an astonishing development. Contemporaries could (and did) note countless examples of sons rebelling against their fathers, but for a queen to rebel against her husband was unprecedented. Eleanor’s reasons for doing so are necessarily speculative. Henry, who had just turned forty, had many mistresses throughout his career, so some commentators have supposed that the queen, now around fifty, was motivated by sexual jealousy. Others have suggested that Aquitaine itself was the key to the queen’s displeasure, arguing that she and her Poitevin supporters had come to fear Henry’s succession scheme, which made the duchy subordinate to the ruler of Normandy and England.19
Whatever the reason, by 1173 Eleanor of Aquitaine had reached the remarkable decision to rebel against her second husband in alliance with her first, and with her sons as co-conspirators. Nor was that the limit of the conspiracy. Right across Henry II’s empire, others were ready to rise up against him. Nobles in England, Normandy and Anjou, still chafing at the losses they had suffered as a result of the king’s masterful rule, rebelled in the hope of reversing them. Neighbouring rulers – the counts of Boulogne and Flanders, the king of Scotland – piled into the fray in expectation of territorial gain. It was a formidable, co-ordinated challenge on all fronts – the greatest crisis of Henry II’s reign.
The Old King managed to ride out the storm. In part this was down to his superior resources: Henry was probably richer than all of his opponents put together, and he used his great wealth to recruit mercenaries in large numbers. In part it was due to his superior skills as a warrior and a politician. Henry knew when to sit tight and rely on trusted deputies, and when one of his legendary dashes would be decisive. In part it was down to luck. When his sons launched an attack on Normandy in the summer of 1173, their ally the count of Boulogne was killed by a crossbow bolt and the invasion collapsed; when the king of Scots invaded northern England the following summer, he was taken by surprise by loyalist forces and captured. In the latter case contemporaries saw divine providence at work, for the Scottish king was seized even as Henry was submitting to a penitential flogging by the monks of Canterbury for his role in the death of Thomas Becket. When the king returned to the Continent the following month the rebellion finally collapsed, and his remaining enemies sued for peace.20
Henry was for the most part magnanimous in victory. His eldest sons, if they did not achieve the autonomy they craved, were nevertheless appeased with larger allowances. The Young King was promised 15,000 pounds a year of Angevin money (about £4,000 sterling) and received two castles in Normandy. Richard was given two residences (apparently unfortified) in Poitou and half its annual revenues. Geoffrey received half the revenues of Brittany.21
But the biggest winner was the youngest son. In the first half of 1174, while the rebellion was still happening, John was removed from Fontevraud by his father and brought to England, to be raised thereafter in the royal household. Now seven years old, he had reached an age at which he would in any case have been expected to start learning the sort of skills that nuns did not normally teach, such as horsemanship and how to handle weapons. Moreover, once the rebellion was finally over, John was given a substantial endowment. It included the three castles in Anjou that had been the immediate cause of his brothers’ rebellion, plus 1,000 Angevin pounds a year. In addition he received a similar sum from Normandy’s revenues and two of the duchy’s castles, while in England he was granted even greater gifts: the castle and county of Nottingham, the castle and lordship of Marlborough, and an annual payment of £1,000 sterling. Henry also reserved the right to grant to John any future English lands that might revert to the Crown on the death of their owners. All of these lands and revenues were at the expense of the Young King’s inheritance. It did not amount to a province to call his own, but after 1174 John could no longer be said to lack land.22
By way of stark contrast, the big loser from the failed rebellion was Eleanor of Aquitaine. The queen had been captured in the autumn of 1173, reportedly disguised as a man, trying to reach her sons in Paris. Early in 1174 Henry escorted her to England, where she became his prisoner. For Eleanor there was to be no forgiveness. The following year the king tried to persuade the pope to have his marriage annulled, with the plan of forcing the queen into the abbey of Fontevraud as a nun. When the pope rejected this scheme, Henry settled for keeping her permanently confined, probably in the royal castle at Salisbury (now Old Sarum). In the meantime, he began to consort openly with his favourite mistress, Rosamund Clifford.23
How John might have reacted to his mother’s imprisonment, given his apparently limited contact with her, is open to question. But Eleanor’s older sons were clearly unhappy about her treatment: they, for instance, are also said to have objected vociferously to the planned divorce. That Henry, Richard and Geoffrey were close to their mother as children, or at least closer to her than to their father, is strongly implied by their willingness to join her in rebellion. By keeping Eleanor confined, however comfortably, the Old King was now effectively holding the queen hostage for her sons’ good behaviour. It was an arrangement that might result in compliance, but one unlikely to foster genuine love or loyalty.24
Despite the obvious tensions between Henry II and his sons, they succeeded in co-operating in the years that followed. There was much work to be done in reversing the effects of the great rebellion. Henry himself devoted his efforts to England and Normandy, seizing and destroying the castles of former rebels; Richard and Geoffrey were dispatched to govern their respective provinces of Aquitaine and Brittany. For Henry the Young King there was less to do while his father remained in charge, so he devoted himself to the tournament circuit, winning many friends and admirers in the process. Periodically all three elder sons were recalled to attend their father’s court at great festivals such as Easter and Christmas, and occasionally we also catch sight of John on such occasions. While they were able to work together in this way, the family proved to be unbeatable. In the summer of 1182, for instance, when Richard faced difficulty subduing a fresh rebellion in Aquitaine, his father came to his aid, along with Geoffrey and Henry the Young King, and together they easily brought the rebels to submission.25
Immediately after this, however, they again fell out, the source of contention once more the frustrations of the eldest son. Now twenty-seven, yet still without any meaningful power, the younger Henry approached his father in the autumn of 1182 and asked again for a portion of his inheritance – Normandy, or another territory ‘from which he might be able to support knights in his service’. As in 1173, Henry II refused, with almost identical consequences: the Young King took himself off to the court of the French king.26
The difference on this occasion was that it was no longer the court of Louis VII. The old French king had suffered a stroke in the summer of 1179 and died the following year at the age of sixty. Into his place had stepped his fifteen-year-old son, Philip. From the moment of his birth, Philip – the future Philip Augustus – had carried a great weight of expectation on his shoulders. It had taken Louis three marriages and almost thirty years, but at last in August 1165 he had succeeded in fathering a son. The citizens of Paris had rung bells and lit bonfires in celebration, declaring ‘By the grace of God there is born to us this night a king who shall be a hammer to the king of the English.’ This was the reminiscence of a later chronicler, writing with the benefit of hindsight. Henry II for his part had endeavoured to cultivate good relations with Philip; by 1182 he and his sons had already intervened several times to assist the new French king in establishing his rule. But this initial help earned Henry little in the way of long-term gratitude. As Philip became his own man it became clear that his main policy would be to destroy the power of his Plantagenet neighbours.27
The Young King’s trip to Paris in the autumn of 1182 turned out to be of only short duration. His father, worried that fresh filial disaffection could lead to another general revolt, quickly wooed him back with the promise of an increased allowance. At Christmas the Old King celebrated by summoning all his sons to Caen for what the chroniclers describe as the greatest court of his reign, with more than 1,000 knights reportedly in attendance. During the festivities, however, the tensions within the family exploded. Henry II, perhaps in the hope of further mollifying the Young King, attempted to formalize the future relationship between his various dominions, and demanded that both Geoffrey and Richard do homage to their elder brother – that is, to kneel before him, place their hands within his hands, and promise to be ‘his man’. Geoffrey obliged, but Richard refused: his older brother, he objected, was no better than he. Eventually Richard was won round, and agreed to go through with the ceremony, provided that his right to hold Aquitaine was guaranteed. But this was a guarantee that the Young King was unable to give because – as he now revealed – he was in league with the Aquitainian rebels whom they had collectively crushed the previous summer. Young Henry, it seems, was plotting to replace Richard.28
Henry II imperiously ordered his sons to swear peace to each other, and sent Geoffrey to arrange a conference with the rebels. But here the plot grew thicker still when Geoffrey, on meeting Richard’s enemies, promptly joined them. Henry’s court broke up in confusion. The Young King set out for Aquitaine to assist Geoffrey and the rebels, Richard to try to suppress them. Their father gave orders to raise an army and set out in pursuit.
A violent stand-off between the two sides followed, which lasted throughout the whole of the spring of 1183, and started to draw in the rulers of other regions, to the extent that it seemed certain to become a rerun of the great rebellion of ten years earlier. What stopped it escalating in this way was the sudden death of the Young King, who fell sick with dysentery while pillaging along the Dordogne, and died on 11 June. His father, who had suspected that reports of his son’s illness were just another ruse, was reportedly struck down with grief when he discovered the truth. Whatever his faults, the Young King had been a popular figure, praised by contemporaries as the epitome of chivalry, and much loved by Henry II.29
At the same time, one less son might be seen to be a blessing, politically, for a king who seemed to have too many. The Young King had died without any children, so his death presented Henry with an opportunity to revise his plan for the succession. Richard, now the eldest surviving son, would take the place of his dead brother as heir to the patrimony – Anjou, Normandy and England. In return he would surrender Aquitaine to John, who would at last obtain a province of his own. Geoffrey, who had ended his rebellion in the summer, remained duke of Brittany, but was deprived from holding its castles.
But when Henry summoned his sons to Normandy in the autumn of 1183 to announce this plan, Richard made his feelings very clear. After obtaining a few days’ grace to consult his advisers, he rode off at night back to his duchy, sending messengers to tell his father that he would never give it up. This might seem perverse: England, Normandy and Anjou together appear to constitute a greater prize than Aquitaine. But Richard had been linked with Aquitaine since his mother’s return to the duchy in 1168. In 1172, at the age of fourteen, he had been formally invested as its duke, and since that time he had enjoyed – and, moreover, fought hard for – real political power. To accept his father’s new scheme would mean giving up that power in exchange for the empty role his elder brother had found so frustrating.30
Since Richard was so well entrenched in Aquitaine, Henry’s initial reaction was moderate: throughout the winter of 1183–4 he tried to win his son round with promises and reasoned argument. But eventually, faced with Richard’s continued obstinacy, the king snapped, and angrily ordered John to seize the duchy by force. As in the case of Thomas Becket, it is debatable whether Henry really meant what he said, for John had no resources to attack Richard, nor did Henry lend him any. When the king crossed the Channel to England in June 1184, however, John did indeed invade Aquitaine, with the help of his brother Geoffrey. Since John was only seventeen years old and Geoffrey twenty-six, we may suspect the initiative lay with the elder brother. This was John’s first political action, but Geoffrey had been playing these kinds of power games for many years. Contemporaries were aware of his skill in manipulating others, and condemned him for it. He was, said one, ‘overflowing with words, smooth as oil, possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the apparently indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue, of tireless endeavour and a hypocrite in everything’. ‘Geoffrey, that son of treachery,’ said another, ‘that son of iniquity.’31
The joint offensive of John and Geoffrey was not very effective, and Richard, rather than confronting his brothers head-on, responded by laying waste to Geoffrey’s lands in Brittany. But when their father heard that his sons were once again at war he commanded them all to come to England. It is a mark of Henry’s continuing authority that all three obeyed, but perhaps a mark of his desperation that, in advance of their arrival, he released their mother from captivity. Eleanor, now in her sixties, is known to have attended council meetings at the end of 1184, and so it may have been as a result of her influence that a public reconciliation between her sons was achieved that December. As subsequent events would show, nothing in reality had been settled regarding the succession, but Henry was apparently willing to leave Richard in possession of Aquitaine for now. That much was made clear from his sudden revival of a long-nurtured plan to make John king of Ireland.32
Ireland was the last significant addition to Henry II’s sprawling empire. Before his accession it had largely avoided the successive waves of conquerors that had swept over the rest of the British Isles. Neither the Romans nor the Anglo-Saxons, nor even the Norman kings of England, had attempted to extend their power across the Irish Sea. The Vikings had settled there, but only in a handful of coastal towns. For the most part, Ireland remained what it had always been: a Celtic country, whose inhabitants, though they might trade with their English neighbours, owed no allegiance to England’s kings.33
All this changed in the time of Henry II. The king had apparently contemplated a conquest of Ireland at the very start of his reign. Although he had been discouraged by his mother – and was anyway soon distracted by more pressing concerns on the Continent – he had been supported by the Church, who regarded the Irish as a backwards and barbarous people, Christian only in name, with reprehensible attitudes towards sex and marriage. Divorce was available on demand, concubinage was commonplace, and the line between bastardy and legitimacy so thin as to be non-existent. Leaving the strictures of the Church aside, these relaxed attitudes meant that Irish politics, based as they were on rival dynasties, were wont to be turbulent. Ireland was a land of many kings – as many kings as elsewhere there were earls, explained one English observer – locked in a ceaseless round of competition. They competed in part for the distinction of being recognized as the country’s ‘high-king’, but this title was purely honorific, and brought nothing in the way of administrative power. Power in Ireland was based on tribute and military might.34
It was these turbulent politics that had ultimately drawn in Henry II. In 1166 the king of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough, had been driven from his lands in south-east Ireland by his rival, the king of Connacht. His first instinct was to seek help from his powerful English neighbour, but Henry, preoccupied with affairs in Aquitaine, was unenthusiastic. Instead, with Henry’s licence, Dermot turned to the Anglo-Norman lords of south Wales: men who had long experience of fighting against Celtic foes by virtue of living on a hostile frontier. In return for the promise of new lands, some of these men crossed to Ireland with Dermot in 1167 and helped him recover part of his patrimony. Cutting-edge techniques and technology – cavalry charges, crossbows and castles – gave them the military advantage over the Irish, and their material gains soon encouraged more adventurers to follow in their wake. Eventually, in August 1170, they were joined by Richard fitz Gilbert, known to posterity as ‘Strongbow’, a former earl who had lost his title by supporting King Stephen. In return for supporting Dermot he demanded the Irish king’s daughter in marriage, along with the right to succeed him after his death. Thus when Dermot obligingly died the following year, it was fitz Gilbert who had stepped into his shoes as Leinster’s ruler.35
At this point Henry II had decided to intervene in person. It was one thing for his vassals to act as swords for hire and win new lands; quite another for one of them to set himself up as an independent power. In October 1171 the king sailed to Ireland, bringing with him his splendid court, and a large army, to overawe both the native Irish lords and the new English settlers. There was no fighting: Richard fitz Gilbert submitted at once and received Leinster back as a fief. Many Irish rulers also submitted to Henry, acknowledging him as their new overlord. The net effect of the king’s intervention, however, was to leave Ireland in a state of limbo. The settlers would later complain that his action had robbed the conquest of its momentum, giving the Irish a chance to recover and fight back. After his departure in April 1172, the country entered into a state of almost constant war between the natives and the newcomers. Henry attempted to make peace with the Irish in 1175, but the English settlers had no interest in observing its terms. In Ireland, the castle-building, colonisation and conflict continued.36
It was against this background, perhaps in the hope of a fresh start, that Henry had earmarked Ireland as a suitable prospect for his youngest son. In 1177, in a council meeting at Oxford, he made extensive grants of Irish land to new settlers and had them recognize John as the country’s future king. At that time John was only ten years old, so his interest in Ireland had to be upheld by deputies. Before his departure in 1172 Henry had granted the Irish kingdom of Meath to Hugh de Lacy, another baron from the Welsh borders, intending that he should act as a counterweight to Richard fitz Gilbert. But after fitz Gilbert’s death in 1176, Hugh de Lacy himself had begun to seem too tall a poppy. When he married the daughter of the Irish king of Connacht, people began to speculate that he was scheming to take the kingship of Ireland for himself.37
The plan to send John to Ireland seems to have been shelved in 1183, when the death of the Young King prompted Henry II to think in terms of a more general reshuffle. Now that it had proved impossible to dislodge Richard from Aquitaine, however, the original plan was resumed. In the summer of 1184 Henry sent new officials to Ireland to prepare the ground for John’s arrival. These preparations culminated on 31 March 1185 when the king knighted his son at Windsor Castle, the symbolic conferral of arms signifying that John, now aged eighteen, was old enough to wield power in his own right.38 How enthusiastic he was about wielding power in Ireland is open to doubt. Two weeks earlier, during a council in London, he had reportedly begged his father to allow him to go to the Holy Land instead. Since the start of the year the patriarch of Jerusalem had been at Henry’s court, trying to obtain military support for the beleaguered Christian communities in Palestine, and had identified John as a potential leader. But Henry had refused their imprecations. Within days of his knighting at Windsor John was dispatched into south Wales, where a company of 300 knights and an even larger force of soldiers and archers were waiting to accompany him across the Irish Sea. On 24 April they set sail from Milford Haven in a fleet of sixty ships, landing safely at Waterford at noon the following day.39
The expedition was an unqualified disaster. The contemporary chronicler Gerald of Wales, who travelled in John’s company at Henry’s request, explains how their mission was compromised from the moment they disembarked. The new arrivals were met at Waterford by a great number of Irish lords – those native leaders who had accepted English authority and come to welcome John as their new ruler. But, says Gerald, the newcomers treated these men with contempt and derision, even to the extent of pulling their beards, ‘which the Irish wore full and long, according to the custom of their country’. Having been humiliated, these Irishmen withdrew their allegiance, and convinced others who had been contemplating submission to do the same. John, they told their fellow countrymen, was a mere boy, surrounded by others almost as young, who were interested only in juvenile pursuits. Under his leadership there was no hope of Ireland enjoying peace and security.40
To some extent, the behaviour of John’s party was only to be expected. They had not come to Ireland to reach an accommodation with the natives – Henry II had abandoned that policy back in 1177. Gerald says that John also alienated the formerly loyalist Irish lords by granting out their lands to his own followers, and this is confirmed by his surviving charters. John’s mistake lay not so much in provoking those whom he expected would be his enemies, as in simultaneously aggravating those whom he assumed would be his allies. The Anglo-Norman lords from south Wales who had founded the colony a generation earlier also weighed up their new lord’s behaviour and found it wanting. Having goaded the native Irish into outright hostility, John and his coterie were said by Gerald to have spent most of their time in the towns on the coast, indulging in riotous living, leaving the settler communities of the interior to fend for themselves against Irish attacks. Gerald is doubtless exaggerating here; his bitterness at John’s failure was personal, for he hailed from one of these same pioneering settler families. John’s charters prove that he spent at least some time on the marches of his lordship, and Irish annalists report that he established three new castles to stake out claims to further territory. When the garrisons of these castles carried out raids into neighbouring Irish lands, however, they were defeated and slaughtered. Others among John’s army reportedly deserted to the Irish side because he refused to pay them properly. By the end of the year, his forces were so depleted that he was forced to return to England.41
During John’s absence in Ireland the struggle between his brothers Richard and Geoffrey had continued, with a fresh round of fighting in Anjou. At the root of their rivalry was Henry II’s obstinate refusal, since the death of the Young King, to provide any clarity on the issue of the succession. Henry appears to have wanted to keep everyone in the dark, especially Richard, and to have encouraged the hopes of Geoffrey. Back in December 1183, for example, when Richard had been in open defiance over Aquitaine, Henry had reached a new agreement with Philip Augustus over the Vexin, a strip of territory on the Franco-Norman frontier that had been in dispute for over a century. The two kings had agreed it would become the dowry of Philip’s sister, Alice, and would pass to whichever of Henry’s sons she married. The ‘whichever’ was highly significant, because Alice had already been betrothed for the past fifteen years to Richard. The new note of ambiguity implied that he might not inherit Normandy, and perhaps not England or Anjou either.42
Soon after John’s return from Ireland, however, the pendulum swung perceptibly in Richard’s favour. In March 1186 Henry and Philip met to confirm the Vexin agreement, but this time it was specifically stated that Alice would marry Richard. Now it was Geoffrey’s turn to take umbrage, since this seemed to indicate the decline of his own prospects. Like the Young King before him, he took off to Paris, where he began to plot with Philip. The French king obligingly bestowed upon him the title ‘steward of France’, an honour traditionally held by the rulers of Anjou, indicating that Geoffrey’s thoughts were now bending in that direction.43
As for John, Henry’s intention was still very much to make him king of Ireland. The new pope, elected at the end of 1185, proved to be more enthusiastic about the plan than his predecessor, and had promised to send a gold crown with peacock feathers for the coronation ceremony. Then, in the summer of 1186, even more propitious news arrived. Hugh de Lacy, the tall poppy whom both John and Henry had regarded as an obstacle to their ambitions in Ireland, was dead, felled by a native Irish axe. On hearing this Henry was reportedly jubilant, and made immediate preparations for his son’s return. A new expedition was hastily assembled at Chester and John was dispatched north to join it. He was waiting for a favourable wind to cross the Irish Sea when messengers arrived to tell him of another death. Geoffrey had been killed in a tournament in Paris on 19 August.
This startling news changed everything. At his father’s command John returned south at once, sending a deputy across the Irish Sea in his stead. Ireland was suddenly a peripheral concern, the crown of peacock feathers redundant. New and much wider vistas now opened up to him. Geoffrey, not without Henry’s encouragement, had been angling for a greater share of his father’s inheritance. John now stepped naturally into that role. Geoffrey had died leaving two daughters but no sons; Richard was still unmarried and constantly engaged in the risky business of warfare. In the summer of 1186, John found himself in the exhilarating position of being a single heartbeat from the succession to all his father’s dominions.44
The rivalry that this created between John and Richard was not immediately apparent, thanks to the precipitate action of Philip Augustus. Deprived of his leverage by the loss of Geoffrey, the French king demanded the surrender of Brittany and the dead duke’s daughters, threatening war if Henry refused to comply. Talks during the autumn produced only a short truce, and in January 1187 Philip invaded the Vexin. Further talks in the spring led to a second truce until midsummer, at which point Philip invaded Berry, another contested region, east of Anjou. In the face of this new aggression, the fractious Plantagenets pulled together. John and Richard joined forces in Berry to hold the town of Châteauroux against Philip, and when the French king besieged them there, Henry marched to their relief. For a moment it looked as if the argument might be settled in the fields outside Châteauroux by a decisive battle, but in the event (as indeed happened on most occasions during the Middle Ages) neither side was truly ready to take such an enormous risk. Instead, after two weeks of protracted talks, a third truce was agreed, this time for two years.45
But as soon as the truce was sealed, dissension among the Plantagenets erupted once more, when Richard surprised everyone by riding back to Paris with Philip. ‘Between the two of them,’ wrote the well-informed courtier Roger of Howden, ‘there grew up so great an affection that King Henry was much alarmed.’ The fact that Howden, in describing this sudden affection, mentions that Philip and Richard shared the same bed has led some modern commentators to assume that they were having a homosexual affair, which was almost certainly not the case. Determining sexuality at a distance of 800 years is, of course, difficult, but ‘sharing a bed’ for medieval writers was a typical expression of friendship rather than erotic love. Richard’s sexual preferences are probably better inferred by Howden’s comment elsewhere that the men of Aquitaine disliked their duke because he abducted ‘their wives, daughters and kinswomen by force, and made them his concubines’.46
What alarmed Henry II in 1187 was not reports of his son sleeping with another man, but the political alliance this act implied. First the Young King, then Geoffrey, now Richard: Philip had beguiled one brother after another and turned them against their father. The likeliest explanation for this latest defection is that, during the final round of peace talks, Philip had played on Richard’s fears that Henry was planning to cut him out of the succession, and aiming to pass England, Anjou and Normandy to John. Certainly this was the rumour that circulated among contemporary chroniclers, who were in no doubt about the balance of Henry’s paternal affections. John was ‘a son he loved and greatly trusted’, said the biographer of William Marshal. ‘The youngest son, John,’ wrote William of Newburgh, ‘he loved the most tenderly.’ Richard, by contrast, had always been his mother’s favourite, and events since 1183 had shown that there was little love lost between him and Henry. Soon after his visit to Paris, Richard raided his father’s treasury at Chinon, using the proceeds to garrison his castles in Aquitaine. Such actions indicate the enormous distrust that existed between them.47
At length, by sending messengers to Richard with promises of redress, Henry induced him to return to his side; Richard admitted he had been led astray, and swore that in future he would remain faithful. But suspicion and ill will remained. Towards the end of the summer came the shocking news that the army of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem had been wiped out in battle by Muslim forces led by the sultan Saladin. The Christian communities in the Holy Land, established nine decades earlier during the First Crusade, seemed to be on the point of extinction, and a few months later the people of western Europe heard the worst: Jerusalem itself had fallen. Richard responded at once, pledging to go on crusade by publicly taking the cross, much to the anger and alarm of his father, who saw that Richard’s absence would delay any peace with Philip Augustus. As it was, by January 1188, the public mood was such that both Henry and Philip also felt obliged to take the cross. But now it was Richard’s turn to be alarmed when Henry forbade John from doing the same. For what reason was John being held back, if not to usurp Richard’s position?48
Despite the distrust, Henry and Richard were united in arms against Philip in August 1188, after fresh fighting broke out in Berry and along the Franco-Norman border. But, as before, the subsequent peace talks drew Richard and Philip into collaboration. In November, at Bonsmoulins in Normandy, they arrived together, and presented Henry with a proposal for peace. Philip would give up his recent territorial gains on two conditions: that Richard must marry Alice, and that Henry must make all his barons recognize Richard as his heir. When Henry refused, Richard took it as final confirmation of his long-nurtured fears. ‘Now at last,’ he said, ‘I must believe what I had always thought was impossible.’ So saying, Richard stunned his audience by turning to Philip and doing homage to the French king for Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine.
It was the final break between father and son. Henry tried to woo Richard back as before, but without success. Attempts at further dialogue during the winter achieved nothing, and by the spring of 1189 both sides were readying themselves for war. At the end of May, at La Ferté-Bernard, not far from Le Mans, Richard and Philip repeated their demands for the marriage of Alice and the confirmation of the succession, adding that John must also take the cross and accompany Richard on crusade. John, for the most part invisible during these months, was still very much attached to his father’s side.49
Henry again refused, at which point Philip and Richard launched their attack, seizing La Ferté-Bernard and a number of other castles nearby. Henry, who had retreated to Le Mans – his birthplace – was forced to flee as the city went up in flames, and came close to being captured by his attackers. The king at first headed north, towards the safety of Normandy, but only a few miles from the Norman border, to the consternation of his household, he decided to turn back in the direction of Anjou.
Henry was heading south to die. Although at fifty-six he was not particularly old, even by medieval standards, he was worn out from a lifetime in the saddle and the stresses of recent years. Already unwell the previous Christmas, his condition was no doubt made worse by the struggle against Richard during the spring. Now in the summer heat he fell ill again. By travelling on lesser roads and tracks he managed to reach Chinon, the castle of his Angevin ancestors, where he lay sick for a fortnight.
Meanwhile Richard and Philip were drawing ever closer, overrunning towns and castles in their path. When Tours capitulated on 3 July, Henry was obliged to rise from his bed to meet them, his attendants holding him upright on his horse as the terms of his surrender were dictated. In addition to agreeing to all of his adversaries’ previous demands, Henry was now required to renew his allegiance to the French king, and pay him an indemnity of 20,000 marks. It was a humiliating end for a man who had been the greatest ruler in Christendom. As he leant forward to give Richard the required kiss of peace, says Gerald of Wales, Henry whispered in his son’s ear, ‘God grant that I may not die until I have had my revenge on you.’50
God was not nearly so generous. Too weak to ride, Henry was carried back to Chinon on a litter. As part of the terms of his surrender, the ailing king had agreed to receive back into his peace all those who had deserted him in recent weeks and joined forces with Richard and Philip. That night he asked to hear the list of their names, which his servants had been trying to keep from him. Henry insisted that they be read out, and received what several chroniclers believed to be the blow that killed him. ‘Sire, so Jesus Christ help me,’ said the vice chancellor, ‘the first which is written down here is Lord John, your son.’51
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* No one can say for certain why Geoffrey was called Planta genista, the Latin for ‘broom plant’. None of his descendants used Plantagenet as a surname until it was adopted by Richard, duke of York, in 1460. But it remains a convenient and sometimes unavoidable way to describe the dynasty.5