by Ed West
As a young man, Henry the Young King had also been attached to Thomas Becket, in whose household he had been partly raised, and fell out with his father as a result. This was apparently one motive for the disastrous rebellion that followed.
Young Henry had an enormous entourage that cost £200 per day, at a time when the royal income for a county would be £200 a year. On one occasion he held a celebration of ‘great magnificence’ just for his friends called William—110 of them. One account of the time asks: ‘It was a source of wonder where the wealth was to be found.’ In fact it wasn’t, as it was soon running out. This kind of luxurious extravagance was great in fairy tales but unsustainable in real life, and probably didn’t suggest to his father he would be the wisest of rulers.
Although considered the epitome of manliness in England, Henry the Young King’s band of knights were also perennially beaten at tourneys on the continent, and ‘never came to a single tournament site without being humiliated and ill-used,’ a long running English sporting tradition.6
Among the most dashing of Henry’s entourage was William Marshal, the greatest knight of the period. Marshal would prove to be one of the most important figures in the Magna Carta story, and having served four kings loyally, his tales of heroism became the standard idea of what we imagine by chivalry. This was largely the case because his five sons later commissioned a book about him.
Although born in England and proclaimed in his biography as an English hero, Marshal was like all aristocrats a Norman by origin. His grandfather Gilbert Giffard, literally ‘chubby cheeks,’ had come over with the Conqueror in 1066, and been given land in Wiltshire and served as the royal master-marshal, an old military office that involved the day-to-day running of the court and looking after the king’s horses. William’s father John had been a major baron during the Anarchy and a callous villain straight from central casting, right down to the disfigured face that he’d acquired after a church he was besieging had burned down and its lead roof had fallen on him. John Marshal had changed sides when it suited him and in one battle defeated another dubious figure, Robert Fitzhubert, a Flemish mercenary who had previously burned eighty monks to death while trapped inside a church. Fitzhubert had tried to capture Marshal’s fortress by stealth but was defeated and hanged.
When he was just five, young William was given over as a hostage by his father, and when King Stephen threatened to hang him in front of the castle walls John had replied ‘I still have the hammer and the anvil with which to forge still more and better sons!’ Stephen’s military advisors had also suggested using young William as a human catapult, but this didn’t budge Marshal either, who seems to have been quite a stern father figure overall. However, Stephen didn’t have the heart to go through with it and let the boy go.
William was a younger son and so, like any penniless young Norman aristocrat, he had made his way into fighting. Under the tutelage of his uncle, Earl Patrick, he had become a dashing warrior first in the service of Queen Eleanor against rebellious southern French barons and, after Patrick had inevitably been killed, Henry the Young King.
Marshal’s biography, which is told in verse, is obviously hugely flattering, and in a way that sounds odd to modern ears, claiming that ‘his body was so well-fashioned that, even if he had been created by the sculptor’s chisel, his limbs would not have been so handsome.’ It also stated that he had ‘fine feet and hands,’ with brown hair, dark complexion and, more strangely, ‘a crotch so large. . . . that no noble could be his peer.’ This was probably a reference to the width of his hips and horse-riding ability, and not anything unseemly, but it sounds like a rather strange thing for children to boast about their dad.
William Marshal claimed he had captured five hundred knights in his tournament career, which he managed to do partly because he was able to grab the bridle of another knight’s horse, and partly because he had an unusually thick skull that allowed him to take the endless beatings his life inevitably involved. On one occasion, Marshal had to have his helmet wrenched off him, on a day in which he received such a pummeling from sword and mace blows that his helmet was crushed down ‘to his scalp.’ As one historian comments: ‘All in all, Marshal seems to have regarded it as a splendid day.’7
By 1179, William had risen to become a ‘knight banneret,’ which meant someone in service to a lord, but important enough to carry his own banner, and had become the young king’s leading knight despite being accused of adultery with Henry’s wife Marguerite, literally ‘doing it to the queen’ as it was recorded at the time. Henry seems to have stopped speaking to him, which appears unusually lenient.
Attitudes to cheating were contradictory, ‘for according to the ethos of chivalry an act of infidelity was no disgrace.’ It was okay to have an affair with another man’s wife so long as ‘he observed the manners of polite society and was prepared to fight and to die for the lady he professed to love,’ which is admittedly quite an expectation.8
However, sometimes people reacted badly. One of William’s contemporaries, Count Philip of Flanders, accused a knight called Walter of Fontaines of committing adultery with his wife Isabel of Vermandois. Without a trial, he had the man beaten with cudgels until he was almost dead, and then a gallows was erected above a foul-smelling latrine. Poor Walter was stripped, bound, and strung up by his feet, upside down, his head dangling into the cesspit. He died of suffocation. However, despite all this Philip didn’t divorce his wife—although it’s safe to say the honeymoon period was over by now.*
Henry’s frustration grew worse, however, after the old king almost died of fever and the young man geared himself up to rule—only for his dad to annoyingly pull through, leaving Henry left with little to do. He made the king give him a second coronation, with the new Archbishop of Canterbury doing the honors, and at a banquet he demanded his father wait hand and foot on him. When the older man complained, ‘No other king in Christendom has such a butler,’ young Henry replied: ‘It is only fitting that the son of a count should wait on the son of a king.’ History does not record the angry middle-aged monarch’s response.
Then, after a very public argument in 1173, Henry started an open rebellion, joined by powerful landowners such as the earls of Norfolk, Chester, Derby, and Leicester. The Revolt of 1173–74 ultimately was a very bad-tempered family argument that unwillingly involved the whole country but it also served as a precursor to the Barons’ Wars against the king’s son and grandson, John and Henry III.
The conflict was stirred up by Eleanor, who had now finished her days of giving birth—eight children in total—and was free to indulge in her main interest, scheming. Eleanor seems to have fallen out with her husband over his relentless adultery, in particular his favorite mistress Rosamund Pike— ‘fair Rosamund, the rose of the world.’ Rosamund died in 1176, in mysterious circumstances, which was a shame as Henry had at one point planned on marrying her to his youngest son.
The young king also made a deal with William, king of the Scots, to give him Northumberland in return for his help against his father. This was quite reckless, especially as the Scots had invaded only twenty years earlier and caused mayhem in the north. The Caledonian king accepted, ‘and the Scottish army “armed men and naked” poured across the border.’9 However this invasion ‘was of the usual kind, devoid of any strategic plan; the border castles were in turn besieged, though few were taken; the land was devastated and plundered; grim atrocities were perpetrated.’ Then the Scots were all beaten, as was young Henry.
After the king had been reconciled with his heir, he demanded that his second and third sons, Richard and Geoffrey, do homage to their elder brother. Richard refused and, just sixteen, he persuaded his fifteen-year-old brother to join him in rebellion. If young Henry sounded like an awful man, then his unruly siblings were even worse. Geoffrey was described by chronicler Roger of Howden as ‘that son of perdition, that son of iniquity,’ while Gerald of Wales called him a smooth-tongued hypocrite ‘overflowing with words, soft as oi
l, 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 endeavor, a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler.’ Not a fan, then. The nicest thing a modern historian could say of Geoffrey was that he was ‘a worthless creature, who spent his life in aimless killing and plundering.’10
Richard, meanwhile, had spent much of his youth in Aquitaine with his mother, and was always much closer to her and her homeland than to his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, to say the least.
In 1174, the two brothers took up arms against their father, encouraged in this weird Freudian rebellion by their mother, as well as the King of Scotland. However, Eleanor supposedly fled in men’s clothing to France, where her ex-husband Louis VII handed her back to the king; she now spent the next fifteen years in prison at the behest of her husband.* Her boys were forced to submit, the feisty young homicidal maniac Richard begging for forgiveness; father and son made up.
Henry II must have wondered what he’d done to deserve all of this, aside from murdering the Archbishop of Canterbury and invading Ireland. Yet more trouble was to come: in the autumn of 1182, young Henry asked his father for Normandy and some other territory ‘to support knights in his service.’ He was twenty-seven and still had nothing to do with his life. The young king stormed off to Paris when his demands were rejected, but his father wooed him back with a raise in his allowance.
Eventually, Richard agreed to do homage to his older brother if his lordship over Aquitaine was recognized. However, the young king refused, as he was secretly in league with rebels there to overthrow him, the barons of the south being sick of Richard’s cruelty. Henry now declared war on his father and brother, and Geoffrey was sent to arrange a conference with the rebels but then joined them, betraying his father for a second time.
However, in 1183, King Henry was distraught with grief when his eldest son died in the Dordogne. The young man became sick while plundering a shrine, succumbing while holding a ring his father had sent him as a token of forgiveness; the older Henry had refused his request to visit because he suspected a trap. In one of his last acts the young man had begged Marshal to take the cloak that he wore and go to Jerusalem on crusade.
The devastated king lamented: ‘He cost me so much, but I wish he had lived to cost me more.’ Such was the glamour attached to young Henry that after his death the people of Le Mans kidnapped the body on its way to Rouen because they wanted it for their local church.
Geoffrey was kicked to death by a horse during a tournament three years later, although there is no record of even his father mourning him. However, Philip the Dauphin of France is said to have been so distraught he jumped in the grave, screaming and wailing; whether or not this was genuine or for show from the scheming prince we can’t know. Geoffrey left behind a wife, Constance of Brittany, who had been forcibly married to him so the Angevins could grab her country; she was two months pregnant.
But the king’s woes were far from over. He angered his new heir Richard by his generosity to John, who had been born in 1166 as an afterthought and had therefore not been allocated any land, so earning his nickname ‘Jean San Terre’ or ‘Lackland.’ So, as well as having Ireland as his plaything, John’s father gave him three castles in Normandy, which was nice, although this was still not as good as getting Brittany (Geoffrey), Aquitaine (Richard), or Normandy and England (Henry).
After Geoffrey’s death, the king demanded that Richard hand over his own personal fiefdom of Aquitaine to his brother. Richard, although widely hated in the region for his violence, sadism, and rape, was not about to give up this rich source of revenue, which also had emotional significance as the home of Eleanor. Richard, who was close to his mother, perhaps weirdly so, now started a new uprising against the old man, with he and Eleanor joined by the new king of France.
In 1180, Philip, the Dauphin of France, had fallen sick, and in desperation his father King Louis traveled to Canterbury to pray with Henry at the shrine of Becket; this had the added advantage of slightly showing up the king of England for having, well, murdered him. Young Prince Philip recovered but unfortunately on the way back Louis died of a stroke, so the mission wasn’t a total success. Now Richard went into alliance with the new king, who wanted to expand his realm and was ‘willing to break promises, betray friendships and wage bloody wars to achieve this goal.’11 In fairness to Richard, he had repeatedly asked his father to ensure his inheritance and the old man had refused to, possibly because he was all along planning to stitch him up and give it instead to his favorite, John.
Full war broke out on the border of the Angevin and French kings’ territories in 1189, with Marshal in charge of the scorched earth policy, the deliberate aim being to terrorize the inhabitants of enemy lands. This was quite common in medieval war, for as that wet liberal Count Philip of Flanders advised: ‘Destroy your foes and lay waste their country, by fire and burning let all be set alight, that nothing be left for them, either in wood or meadow, of which in the morning they could have a meal.’ It rather goes without saying that this wasn’t much fun for civilians caught in the middle, who suffered far more than aristocratic soldiers. As the great medieval historian A. L. Poole said: ‘For the higher ranks, war was, in part at least, a game governed by the strict code of chivalry; it was only the unfortunate peasantry and other non-combatants who suffered from the savage plundering of the routiers.’12
In May 1189, the two sides met at Le Mans, Henry’s birthplace. Richard’s demands included the marriage of Alice, the king of France’s sister, confirmation of his succession, and that John accompany him on crusade, which the king had vetoed. It’s not that Richard especially wanted John’s help fighting, but that he suspected that if he went away John would conspire against him (totally accurately as it happened). With their armies behind them, father and son met here where they embraced, and to those in the distance it looked like they had made peace, in modern terms a touching ‘I love you pa’ scene from a schmaltzy Hollywood film—although what the old king actually whispered in his ear was ‘God spare me long enough to take revenge on you’ (alas, he didn’t).
In the no-man’s-land between negotiations, Richard was almost killed by William Marshal, who charged straight at the rebellious prince. Neither was wearing armor, and with the famous tournament champion bearing down at him, Richard shouted ‘By God’s legs do not kill me, Marshal, that would be wrong, I am unarmed.’ At the last moment, William ran his lance into the prince’s poor innocent horse instead, replying ‘No, I will not kill you, I shall leave that to the devil.’13 This is how his own biography records the incident; how likely it is that two men in the thick of such violence would have come up with crisp cinematic dialogue is up to you to believe. Marshal’s biographic poem might have slightly massaged the truth a little bit.
At the time, a mural owned by the king was on display in Winchester Castle, which Gerald of Wales described as showing ‘an eagle with four of its young perching on it, one on each wing with a third on its back, tearing the parent with beaks and talons, while a fourth just as big as the other stands on its neck, waiting for a chance to peck out its eyes.’ The painting, Henry said, was about him: ‘The eagle’s four young are my sons, who won’t stop tormenting me till I’m dead. The youngest of whom I’m so fond will hurt me more painfully and fatally than the rest put together.’
Indeed, at the last moment, and in secret, John had joined the rebels. At his camp, the ailing Henry asked to be told the list of men who had supported Richard. The vice chancellor opened it and said: ‘Sire, so Jesus Christ help me, the first which is written down here is Lord John, your son.’ When the king saw his favorite child’s name he said ‘You have said enough.’ He surrendered to the king of France in July 1189 and two days later his head basically exploded with rage, the king dying of a huge brain hemorrhage, and ‘a stream of clotted blood burst forth from his nose and mouth.’
O
f all his sons, only one stood by him on his deathbed, his bastard Geoffrey Plantagenet, the product of the king’s youthful dalliance with Ykenai, a ‘base-born, common harlot who stooped to all uncleanliness,’ according to one—perhaps not entirely sympathetic—chronicler. Her son ended up becoming Archbishop of York, which showed there was some social mobility, providing you were prepared to have sex with the monarch. As the king had said to the young man during a previous rebellion: ‘You alone have proved yourself my lawful and true son, the others are the real bastards.’
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* Philip may have just made up the whole accusation so he could take his wife’s family’s land.
* In her rebellion, Eleanor outraged many people by her unladylike behavior, her escape dressed as a man being symbolic of taking on male roles. She was told off by Archbishop of Rouen who quoted St. Paul ‘unless you return to your husband you will be the cause of general ruin,’ which turned out to be pretty true.
CHAPTER 6
The Lionheart
and the Crusades
As soon as King Henry died, his immediate household staff began looting the corpse, stealing ‘his clothes, his jewels, his money as much as each of them could take’ and this ‘rabble’ left the body of the king lying on a bed wearing only breaches and shorts. When Marshal, a few miles away, learned of the king’s death he led a team to the remains, covering the body and remaining by its side; the knight stood vigil as his former master was taken to the abbey of Fontevraud waiting for the new king to arrive. But when Richard went to visit his father’s corpse as it lay in state, it is said the old man’s ears bled, as ‘his spirit was angered by his approach,’ traditionally the sign of a murderer being in a room. Richard had betrayed his father, and his even more awful brother in turn would betray him.