The rebellion that gripped the Plantagenets in 1173 was, on the heels of the Becket affair, the most serious crisis Henry dealt with during his reign. Apparently out of nowhere, Henry’s wife and his three eldest sons rose in arms against the 39-year-old king. Together with a patchwork of allies that included some of the most powerful men in Christendom, the Plantagenet children raised men and garrisoned castles far and wide across their extensive territories. Henry, taken at first by surprise, soon realized that he faced united opposition from across Europe, galvanized by the involvement of his family. He was forced to fight on multiple fronts for more than a year as his network of territories juddered and threatened to collapse. He would later liken the war to the experience of an eagle, pecked and destroyed by its own chicks.
The trouble began with Henry the Young King. In early 1173, the younger Henry was approaching his eighteenth birthday. He was on the cusp of manhood, and married to Louis VII’s daughter Princess Margaret. Henry has been portrayed by the chroniclers as a feckless and fatuous youth. In person, he was tall, blond and good-looking, with highly cultivated manners. He was a skilled horseman, with a real fondness for the tournament and a huge household of followers who egged on his chivalrous ambitions. He was a twice-crowned king, for his controversial coronation by Roger archbishop of York had been followed in August 1172 by a second ceremony in Winchester, where his wife was crowned alongside him. On both occasions, Henry had been anointed with chrism – an especially holy oil – and treated with extraordinary reverence in the company of vast numbers of knights. At one coronation banquet he had been personally served by his father. The young king revelled in his own magnificence, and was widely seen as arrogant, greedy and glib.
Despite his exalted position as his father’s heir, the Young King was also, paradoxically, denied the real fruits of kingship. Henry planned for him the succession to England, Normandy and Anjou. But as he approached manhood the Young King’s access to landed revenue and power – the essence of kingship – was strictly limited. Although endowed with titles, he was never properly invested with the lands and revenues of his kingdom, duchy or county. He was heavily in debt, as a result of maintaining a lavish courtly lifestyle without the means to pay for it. And his pride was wounded. Henry II had been sixteen when the full duchy of Normandy was settled on him. Henry the Young King was nearly two years older and had virtually nothing. The frustrations that he felt during his long wait to inherit were fed enthusiastically by his father-in-law Louis VII.
The breach between Henry and his father occurred as a result of the old king’s arrangements for the six-year-old John’s marriage. To provide for John, Henry gave him a wedding gift of three castles: Chinon, Loudon and Mirebeau. These fortresses were strategically important, lying between Anjou and Maine. Chinon in particular was an important centre of Plantagenet power – a linchpin in what the Young King viewed as his rightful inheritance. All, therefore, were part of the power bloc that young Henry felt he had been denied. Within days of the castles being granted, the furious young Henry slipped away from his father’s company and rode for the court of the French king. A rebellion had begun.
For Henry II to fall out with his eldest son was understandable – perhaps even inevitable. The situation became serious when Richard (who was fifteen) and Geoffrey (fourteen) also joined the rebellion, riding from their mother’s side at Poitiers to join Louis. ‘The sons took up arms against their father at just the time when everywhere Christians were laying down their arms in reverence for Easter,’ wrote the chronicler Ralph de Diceto. Public opinion pointed to Eleanor of Aquitaine as the person who stirred her younger sons to join the revolt against the old king. Henry himself certainly seems to have believed it, since he had the archbishop of Rouen write a letter to his wife reminding her of the duty to ‘return with your sons to the husband whom you must obey and with whom it is your duty to live’.
Why Eleanor turned against her husband after such a long period of quiet loyalty is still something of a mystery. It has been attributed to peevishness at having been discarded by her husband for his mistress Rosamund Clifford (which had no basis at all in fact), or resentment at the influence of Henry II’s mother, the Empress Matilda (ludicrous, since Matilda had died in 1167). It is likely that she had a rather more substantial grievance.
In 1173 Eleanor was as politically disenchanted as her eldest son. During the first fifteen years of her marriage to Henry, she had been occupied with producing children. Since John’s birth that period in her life had been over, and she had assumed a new place in the grand Plantagenet federation. She returned to her role as duchess of Aquitaine, exercising political control over the great southern quarter of the Plantagenet dominions that she had brought to them in her own right. Yet in 1173, she – like Henry the Young King – found her political role undermined by the reality of life with Henry II. Even as she acted out her part as duchess of Aquitaine, Eleanor’s independent control over her duchy was slowly being eroded. Ignoring his wife’s perogative over her own duchy, Henry had begun to dispose of parts of Aquitaine as he saw fit. He granted Gascony as their daughter Eleanor’s dowry when she married the king of Castile. Then, when making a peace with Raymond, count of Toulouse, he made the count do homage to Henry the Young King – who held no rights in Aquitaine. This was a move which implied to Eleanor that her husband had begun to see her duchy as subject to the Anglo-Norman Crown, rather than an autonomous part of the broader Plantagenet dominions. Like her eldest son, Eleanor began to feel that she had been granted the most hollow form of power. She chose to rebel in search of the real thing.
It was not an entirely selfish rebellion, for Eleanor did not view Aquitaine’s independence solely in the light of her own prestige. It was also a vital matter for her favourite son, Richard. Under the Plantagenet succession plan, Richard was to become duke of Aquitaine. To that end he had been installed in 1170 as count of Poitou – the natural first post on the way to becoming duke. Eleanor had set up a regency council for Richard and took a very keen interest in his development as a politician. Her worries were therefore his. Would Richard, when he reached eighteen, be scavenging for scraps of real public authority in the duchy that Eleanor was teaching him how to govern? This would have been an intolerable situation for both of them.
And so Eleanor rebelled, and with her sons began to contemplate a grand coalition with one man whom she would never have imagined siding with again in her long life: her former husband Louis VII of France. At the end of February she set out on horseback across country for Paris, where Henry, Richard and Geoffrey were already ensconced with the French king.
For the second time in her life, she rode in mortal danger across the French countryside. The chronicler Gervase of Canterbury tells us that to hide her famous face on her way north Eleanor dressed in male costume as she headed from the castle of Faye-la-Vineuse, near Poitiers, in the direction of Chartres. Despite her disguise, she did not reach her destination. Eleanor was nearly fifty now, and not the same vigorous young woman who had evaded potential husbands during her flight to Henry in 1152. As she made her way along the roads, she was recognized. She was arrested by Henry’s agents, and taken to Chinon castle. When news leaked to the chroniclers of the day that she had been taken while dressed in male clothing, there was an outpouring of scandal and disbelief.
Eleanor was captured early, but she had already guided her sons into the French king’s arms. When Henry II discovered their treachery he sent messengers to Paris, instructing the boys to quit their foolishness. The messengers found Henry the Young King in the company of Louis VII. When they asked him to return to his father, Louis VII interjected: ‘Who asks?’
‘The king of England,’ came the reply.
Not so, retorted Louis, looking at the younger Henry. ‘The king of England is here.’
War had been joined, and both sides prepared for a long fight. Louis VII and the Plantagenet boys attracted a wide coalition of the disgruntled to join them, many enticed by ridiculous promises of enrichment from Henry the Young King’s realms once they had been secured. Puffed up with pride when Louis had a special seal cut for him, young Henry set about using it. The whole county of Kent was signed away, along with important territories in Mortain and Touraine and thousands of pounds of revenue. With such gifts on offer Philip count of Flanders, Matthew count of Boulogne, and Theobald count of Blois all joined up enthusiastically.
In England, they were joined by Robert earl of Leicester, son of the elder Robert who had served Henry II loyally as joint-justiciar until his death a few years previously. Several northern earls and the bishop of Durham also joined the revolt, as did Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk. Finally, the rebels recruited William the Lion, the king of Scotland, who had succeeded his father in 1165 – a man so hated by Henry II that the very mention of his name in a pleasant light was said once to have sent Henry into spasms of rage, in which he thrashed about on the floor of his bedchamber, eating the straw from his mattress. William was promised all the lands that his predecessor Malcolm IV had held in England during the Anarchy.
These gifts of land and sovereignty show how callow the eighteen-year-old Young King was, and how limited his real understanding of kingship. Throughout the Great War that raged during the following eighteen months, Henry the Young King served mainly as a puppet for Louis VII and those allies who wished to erode Plantagenet power wherever they could.
The first stage of the war took place during the summer of 1173. In May the allies attacked towns in the Vexin, without success. In June and July they had greater success, capturing Aumale and Driencourt – but at the latter Matthew of Boulogne was hit by an arrow fired from the castle walls and killed. In July, Louis and Henry the Younger besieged Verneuil, but the siege held out for long enough for Henry II to arrive in relief. The allied troops fled and Henry’s men slaughtered their rearguard as they gave chase.
Meanwhile, in late June, William the Lion and the Scots attacked Northumbria. It was not an impressive campaign. They failed or declined to capture the castles at Wark or Warkworth, ravaged the area around Newcastle-upon-Tyne without consequence and engaged in a huge and bloody melee before the vast stone walls of Carlisle. The loyalist forces were led by the castellan Robert de Vaux. They fought with valour and courage, and seized provisions and booty from the Scots, which allowed them to withstand the subsequent siege. When news reached the Scots that a loyal army was approaching from the south under the justiciar Richard de Lucy, they melted away to cause minor nuisance elsewhere in the border region.
The rebel strategy during 1173 was elementary and unsuccessful. They tried to open multiple fronts, dragging Henry II around and hitting him hardest when he was absent. Yet this played to Henry’s greatest strength: moving at pace around his dominions, acting decisively, and deploying mercenaries with pinpoint accuracy to break resistance. He moved his troops around on punishing forced marches – at one point apparently crossing Normandy from Rouen to Dol in two days. He packed his armies with fearsome Brabanter mercenaries: costly but highly skilled, mobile and vicious. Henry wrote that he favoured them for their skills in battle, fearlessness on the attack, and ferocity exceeding that of wild beasts.
Henry’s energetic tactics not only cowed his less resolute enemies; they also exposed the French king as a bad general and a dreary, listless leader. This was quickly obvious, and Henry did his best to exploit it, offering his sons generous terms to lay down their arms during peace talks at Gisors. But the talks were soon abandoned when Robert earl of Leicester, who had joined forces with the rebels, created a scene, drawing his sword and shouting obscenities at Henry. Clearly, the king still had enough militant opponents across his vast domains for war to extend through the summer.
As war continued on multiple fronts, Henry benefited from having highly competent subordinates across his lands. The very nature of his lordship was to establish each of his territories under the administration of talented men who could operate the machinery of government in his absence. Unlike his sons and their allies, he had no need to bribe men to stick by his cause. Men like Richard de Lucy, the justiciar of England, supported their king primarily through loyalty and the bonds of service. Despite everything that had gone before, the Church supported him too.
In September, the focus of war moved to England, where the earl of Leicester and another rebel baron, Hugh Bigod, hired bands of Flemish weavers-turned-mercenaries and attempted to ravage England. They landed in Framlingham and attempted to move north-west through East Anglia towards the Midlands. As the hired soldiers tramped through the countryside, the flat, chilly plains rang with their battle songs.
No one who remembered the dark days of the Anarchy can have been pleased to see Flemings back in England. At Dunwich women and children hurled rocks at the rebel army. Henry’s justiciar Richard de Lucy gathered a great deal of support from the English magnates, though it was said that they were still outnumbered four to one when battle was joined in the marshland at Fornham, near Bury St Edmunds. But the loyalists won a resounding victory, scattering the earl’s knights and leaving the mercenaries to be attacked by local people. Many of them drowned in the fenland bogs.
The winter, which was no season for medieval warfare, brought the customary truces. But when spring broke in 1174, war resumed. Now it was England where the situation grew perilous. William the Lion had regrouped during the winter and his forces were swelling. The loyalists suffered a series of defeats at Northampton, Nottingham and Leicester, while the situation in Northumbria was uncertain. To cap it all, Philip of Flanders had sworn on a holy relic that he would undertake a full-scale invasion of England before early July 1174. After repeated pleas from the English magnates, Henry left his continental lands and sailed for England.
Henry put to sea in July 1174 at Barfleur, with a vast army of Brabanter mercenaries and the women and children of his immediate family: the Young King’s wife Queen Margaret, and his younger children Joanna and John. He also took with him a number of captives, including his own wife.
Conditions at sea were wild, with a rough wind and violent waves. When his sailors expressed concern, Henry stood before his entire crew and told them that if God wished him to be restored to his kingdom, He would deliver them safely to port. He did.
God’s will was at the top of Henry’s mind. He arrived in Southampton with one object before he engaged in battle. It was perhaps the masterstroke of his entire campaign. Rather than head directly for East Anglia, where Philip of Flanders had landed and was mustering his forces, Henry made for Canterbury.
Henry could be a stubborn man, but he was usually sensitive to others’ perception of him. He knew that many people thought the Lord had rained rebellion and discord upon him in revenge for Becket’s death. He also realized that while the cause of rebellion was tangled up with the cause of the blessed martyr Thomas there could be no hope of peace.
Three days after his landing, Henry arrived in Canterbury determined to put on a show. Ralph de Diceto described the scene:
When he reached Canterbury he leaped off his horse and, putting aside his royal dignity, he assumed the appearance of a pilgrim, a penitent, a supplicant, and on Friday 12 July, went to the cathedral. There, with streaming tears, groans and sighs, he made his way to the glorious martyr’s tomb. Prostrating himself with his arms outstretched, he remained there a long time in prayer.
With the bishop of London looking on, Henry protested with God as his witness that he had not intended Becket’s death, but acknowledged that by his rash words he had inadvertently caused it. Diceto continued:
He asked for absolution from the bishops then present, and subjected his flesh to harsh discipline from cuts with rods, receiving three or even five strokes from each of the monks in turn, of whom a large number had gathered … He spent the rest of the day and also the whole of the following night in bitterness of soul, given over to prayer and sleeplessness, and continuing his fast for three days … There is no doubt that he had by now placated the martyr …
Indeed he had. With this extraordinary show of public penance Henry had won the most important propaganda battle of the war. The chronicles buzzed with reports of this great king prostrate, half-naked and bleeding as he was whipped in the harshest manner.
And as Diceto wrote, God and the martyr were listening. Far away from Canterbury, on the morning after King Henry’s penance, William the Lion was resting, his helmet by his side as he ate breakfast. The Scottish king had renewed his attacks from the previous year on the northern castles he had been promised in return for his complicity in the rebellion. The castle of Wark had withstood fierce blows with picks and siege-irons, an assault with catapults and an attempt to burn it down. The Lion had sent forces against Carlisle and Prudhoe, also without success. As he breakfasted he contemplated his next move: an attack on the formidable polygonal shell of the castle at Alnwick.
Then, disaster struck. A band of Yorkshire knights who had been tracking the Scots from Prudhoe to Alnwick launched a surprise attack. A fierce battle broke out in which all of the Scottish knights were either killed or captured. William the Lion was among those taken prisoner.
It was late at night, and Henry was in bed at Canterbury when the news of William’s capture at Alnwick reached him, brought by an exhausted messenger who had flogged his horses non-stop from the north to be first with the news. Brimming with joy, the king leapt out of his bed and roused all his barons to tell them the incredible news, thanking God and the martyr Thomas for his good fortune. With one fortuitous event, the heart was ripped out of the rebellion.
With only the slightest military effort, Henry now consolidated his power in England, vanquishing his enemies in the Midlands and East Anglia. Those who were not subdued by force had surrendered to the old king by the end of July. On 8 August 1174, Henry was back in Barfleur. He had been away from the Continent for less than a month.
During that time Louis, Henry the Young King and Philip of Flanders had broken into Norman territory and besieged Rouen. It had been Henry’s chief gamble that he would be able to smash his way to a rapid victory in England before the citizens of Rouen gave in. The gamble had been rewarded. Now, confident of victory, he gathered another force, containing fierce Welsh mercenaries as well as his trusted Brabanters. The French soon dropped their siege. Shortly afterwards Louis VII sued for peace.
The Great War had been won. ‘Peace was restored after the kingdom’s shipwreck,’ wrote Henry’s treasurer, Richard FitzNigel. ‘The most powerful men who conspired … learned that it is difficult or impossible to snatch the club from the hand of Hercules.’ Henry’s skill and good fortune as a general had allowed him to outflank the inferior French king and his own callow sons. He had survived the betrayal of his wife Eleanor, who was now locked away in an English castle. He could afford to be merciful to his sons when they made peace at Montlouis in 1174.
Having demonstrated his mastery at Moutlouis, Henry allowed that everyone who had rebelled might have their lands and possessions back in the same state as a fortnight before the rebellion began. He endowed each of his sons with castles or revenue – although not the power that they craved, for Henry lived in justifiable fear of dispersing his landed power before his death. The Young King received two castles in Normandy and £15,000 of revenue from Anjou in return for confirming the wedding grants of border castles that had been made to John. Richard received two mansions in Poitou and half its annual revenues. Geoffrey received half of Brittany’s annual revenues, and arrangements were made to formalize his marriage to Constance, the heiress to the duchy. Having given all this, Henry forbade his sons to ask for any more than he should choose to give them, then sent Richard and Geoffrey off to Poitou and Brittany to stamp out the embers of the rebellion they had stirred up.
Henry reserved his real wrath for the older heads among the rebels. It was his wife who most appalled him. Eleanor had abused her position overseeing Richard’s fledgling regency in Aquitaine. She had stirred her three eldest sons to rebellion with the same callousness as had her former husband in Paris. And she had rebelled against her sex and status. Henry kept Eleanor in prison at Chinon castle for several months after the rebellion ended. Then, as the summer heat baked the thick stone walls in July, she was removed, transported across the country in the company of Henry’s two rebellious English earls (Leicester and Chester) and sent to Salisbury castle in England. She was kept in courteous imprisonment, or palace arrest, in various southern English castles for the remainder of Henry’s reign. She made a few appearances at court as the years passed, but she was never again trusted by Henry II, who briefly attempted to secure papal approval for a divorce. This came to nothing, and Eleanor remained an exile from the duchy she loved: a punishment that smacked of carefully thought-out cruelty.
The last significant rebel with whom Henry had to deal was William the Lion. If Eleanor received the most psychologically cruel treatment for her part in the rebellion, then William was punished with the harshest political terms. On 1 December 1174 he was forced to agree to the Treaty of Falaise. Sealed at York, this made William a personal liegeman of both Henry II and Henry the Young King, confiscated castles and ordered the forced allegiance of the Scottish barons, bishops and clergy to the English Crown and Church. The Scottish Crown was thus subordinated to England’s, its dignity formally crushed.
But even this was limited punishment, for in the light of the greatest military victory of Henry’s career, the king was interested less in revenge than restoring regular government to his dominions. The peace at Montlouis showed Henry at his grandest and his most astute. It was the high point, perhaps, of his entire reign.