Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  Nor was Howden alone in depicting the Young King’s fate as part of a larger narrative of providential retribution on Henry II. Thomas Becket’s clerk and hagiographer Herbert of Bosham recounted how the tearful archbishop had told Herbert of his prophetic dream, in which he had foretold the death of young Henry (who as a child had been Becket’s ward) as the result of God’s anger at Henry II’s persecution of the Church and of Thomas himself.42 It was, however, Gerald of Wales who set the Young King within a still darker and more distorting picture of Henry II and his family in his De principis instructione, a work begun in the 1190s but not completed until 1218, by which time Gerald was seeking the favour of the Capetians. By then deeply embittered by his failure to gain the ecclesiastical preferment he believed he deserved, Gerald sought to portray the Angevins as a uniquely dysfunctional family. As he has Count Geoffrey of Brittany say, ‘It is our own basic nature, planted in us as if by hereditary right from both our close and our distant ancestors, that none of us should love the other, but that always brother should fight against brother, and son against father’.43 Henry II himself is depicted as a king who moved from excessive love for his children to deep hatred of them, for ‘this had been the perverse nature of King Henry, that, with all his power, he excited and perpetuated quarrels between his sons, hoping from their discord to gain peace and quietness for himself’.44 This inbred hostility was, argued Gerald, the result of a corrupted lineage; not only was Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor ‘adulterous’, but Henry’s own father Geoffrey le Bel had, he alleged, had sexual relations with her, while Eleanor’s own infidelities to both Louis VII and Henry II were notorious. The dynasty was thus a blighted and doomed one. The Young King’s rebellions, moreover, were part of a morality tale on a grand scale.45 Henry II, rising to the heights of power and fortune through divine favour but then turning from God through sin, tyranny and persecution of the Church, compelled God to chastise him, especially by the rebellion of the Young King. For a time Henry’s penance and humility over Becket’s death regained divine favour, allowing him to defeat his enemies, but he again lapsed into evil ways, and, despite ignoring repeated warnings, was destroyed by the successive rebellions of his children. Gerald could thus regard young Henry as a flagellum Dei, a tool of divine vengeance against Henry II, but at the same time condemn his ‘monstrous ingratitude’ in rebelling against his father.46 Gerald readily acknowledged the Young King’s qualities and martial reputation, but now such virtues served only as a poignant vanitas, highlighting the fragility and emptiness of worldly fame and heightening the tragedy of his untimely end.

  The depiction of the Young King by Gerald of Wales, Howden and other chroniclers has had a profound and long-lasting influence. Historians of Henry II, Eleanor, Richard the Lionheart, Thomas Becket and William Marshal have all touched on the Young King where his life intersected with those of their principals, yet their gaze has usually been brief and their verdicts almost always harsh. They echo the chroniclers’ condemnation of young Henry’s acts of rebellion against his father, seen both as morally reprehensible and as demonstrating a want of responsibility and political acumen.47 The tone was set early. Bishop Stubbs deprecated young Henry’s filial disobedience, but struggled to explain the apparent paradox of his evident popularity: ‘that wicked son in whom, although we see little else than unreasonable and perfidious disobedience, his contemporaries saw so much that was attractive and charming, that his popularity was one of the wonders of his age’.48 Such a view was endorsed by Kate Norgate in her influential history of the Angevins: ‘From the day of his crowning to the day of his death, not one deed is recorded of him save deeds of the meanest ingratitude, selfishness, cowardliness and treachery’.49 For Norgate, young Henry lacked the true qualities of either the Angevin or the Norman, and appeared the antithesis of her hero Richard the Lionheart. Even his acknowledged virtues could not compare with those of Richard: ‘Richard’s generosity and graciousness were of a higher type than young Henry’s; they were displayed only when they were deserved’, while the Young King’s ‘careless, easy, shallow disposition’ contrasted with the latter’s ‘energetic temperament’.50 Like Stubbs, she found his contemporary popularity bewildering, while ‘the attraction exercised by him over a man so far his superior as William Marshal, is well-nigh incomprehensible’.51 Her condemnation was repeated almost verbatim by Olin Moore, author of the first dedicated study in English of the Young King, who dismissed expressions of praise upon his death as mere self-serving flattery of courtiers or attempts by Henry II’s critics to cast him in a more negative light in comparison with his son’s alleged qualities.52

  More recent historians, while not displaying the moral outrage of Stubbs and Norgate at the young Henry’s filial impiety, have remained critical. It was perhaps inevitable that for Lewis Warren, the pre-eminent biographer of Henry II, the Young King fell far short of his great father, whose reign he did so much to trouble. Warren recognized young Henry’s personal charm and winning character, yet still dismissed him as ‘shallow, vain, careless, empty headed, incompetent, improvident and irresponsible’.53 In a typically vivid character sketch, he encapsulates what has remained the prevailing verdict:

  The Young Henry was the only member of the family who was popular in his own day. It is also true that he was also the only one who gave no evidence of political sagacity, military skill, or even ordinary intelligence, but such, after all, are not looked for in a fairytale prince, and the young Henry had all the trappings of a hero of romance or aubade. He was tall, handsome, gay, and splendidly improvident. He had the sort of charm that makes even gross irresponsibility seem nothing more than the mischievousness of a lively boy.54

  Even David Crouch, the historian who has best captured young Henry’s glamorous stardom and importance in the tournament circuit of northern France, sees his as ‘a wasted young life’, and implicitly has found this ‘feather-brained lord devoted entirely to military pleasures’ wanting when compared to his tutor-in-arms, the great William Marshal.55 What kind of king young Henry would have made had he outlived Henry II and enjoyed sole rule of the heartlands of the Angevin empire can only remain conjecture. But we might reflect that had William Marshal died in 1183, before he had been propelled into increasing political prominence by the final crises of Henry II’s reign, he would have been remembered, if at all, merely as an outstanding but ruthlessly acquisitive prizefighter with a talent for self-promotion and self-preservation, not as the commander or senior statesman that he came to be in his later years.

  That such predominantly negative judgements of young Henry have remained largely unchallenged is in part due to the paucity of studies devoted to the Young King, in contrast to the much more extensive scholarship focusing on his brothers Richard and John, as well as on Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.56 C. E. Hodgson’s ‘Jung Heinrich, König von England’, a 1906 German doctoral dissertation, has long remained the most detailed historical study, while the only dedicated work in English, O. H. Moore’s The Young King Henry Plantagenet 1155–1183 in History, Literature and Tradition, deals briefly with his career and, as its title suggests, is primarily concerned with his literary Nachleben.57 Since these early studies, various aspects of his career have been examined further, as they are in Anne Duggan’s important re-dating of the papal mandate authorizing the young Henry’s coronation by the archbishop of York, Thomas Jones’ analysis of the war of 1173–74, and Ralph Turner’s work on the households of Henry II’s sons and the upbringing of royal children.58 An important milestone was reached in 2001 with Roger Smith’s analysis of the Young King’s status as associate king as revealed by his seal and charters, accompanied by a calendar of his surviving acta.59 Nevertheless, it is striking that despite a renaissance in Angevin studies within Anglo-French scholarship, the most recent dedicated study of the Young King has been Valter Leonardo Puccetti’s Un fantasma letterario. Il «Re Giovane» del Novellino, a masterly exploration of the genesis of the character and qualities of young
Henry as they appear in the Novellino, which sheds much light on his ideological and cultural milieu.60

  A new analysis of the life of the young Henry and his developing role in the politics and culture of the Angevin empire thus needs little justification. To study the career of the Young King is to go to the heart of the critical issues of succession, delegation of power and the division of the Plantagenet lands. Likewise, important light can be shed on conceptions of Angevin kingship and of co-rulership by tracing plans for young Henry’s coronation, mooted as early as 1161, Henry II’s reasons for wishing to crown his son, the precedents on which he drew and the coronation’s place in the bitter struggle between Henry II and Thomas Becket.61 The dominant image, moreover, of the Young King as a frivolous sporting playboy can be challenged as misleading in many ways. Young Henry jointly presided with his father over secular and ecclesiastical councils from the age of seven, was trained for future rule in his boyhood, and between 1170 and 1172 acted as regent of England. There is not the slightest evidence that he lacked ‘even ordinary intelligence’; indeed, Walter Map may have been among his tutors, he was noted for his eloquence and courtliness, and is known to have retained eruditi such as Ralph Niger and Gervase of Tilbury among his household. Nor was avid participation in the tournament in any way incompatible with the serious business of rule, as is amply demonstrated by the careers of two of the tournament’s other greatest patrons and habitués in the later twelfth century, Henry the Liberal, count of Champagne, and Philip, count of Flanders, who was to become a chivalric mentor to the Young King. Indeed, by the second half of the twelfth century, the tournament had become an integral aspect of noble culture, and an increasingly important mechanism for the projection of princely power, wealth and influence, which young Henry was to exploit to the full. If, moreover, the Young King devoted so much of his energies between 1176 and 1182 to the tournament circuit of northern France it was because he was denied the opportunity, which he had consistently requested, of ruling one of the constituent territories of the Angevin dominions. For at the root of the developing tensions with his father from 1173 was not his lack of interest in government, but quite the opposite: a pressing desire to assume the position which his coronation had heralded yet which was being withheld from him.

  The Young King’s resulting rebellion may have shocked contemporaries as ‘unnatural’, yet it stood in a long tradition of conflict between ruling fathers and their eldest sons, at the heart of which lay fundamental but often contentious issues of succession and territorial division. If a charge of ingratitude is appropriate in such circumstances, then his brothers Richard, Geoffrey and John were equally guilty, for all rebelled against their father, and both Geoffrey and Richard in turn would also ally with the king of France. That they did so, however, points less to any supposed moral failings of young Henry or his siblings than to systemic problems between a dynast and his heirs.62 Young Henry’s rebellion was nevertheless of singular importance. Never before had a king of England had to contend with a rebellious son who was an anointed sovereign in his own right, nor would any thereafter. Accordingly, an examination of how the Young King’s royal status related to the causes of the war of 1173–74, its conduct, the terms of peace that ended it, and the long and fragile process of reconciliation that followed, lies at the heart of this study.

  Beyond the familiar generic difficulties of writing the biography of medieval secular figures, a number of peculiar challenges confront the historian attempting to examine the Young King’s life and career.63 Young Henry did not live long enough to receive his own Gesta or Historia. Rather, as we have seen, his rebellions ensured that from 1173 onwards he was viewed by several of the principal writers at Henry II’s court at best with ambivalence and at worst with outright hostility. Nor, despite the glittering circle of literati at Henry II’s court, did any contemporary compose a Life of either Henry II or Eleanor, in which the young Henry might have been expected to feature with a degree of prominence.64 The chronicle material for the first sixteen years of Henry II’s reign, and hence for the childhood and much of the adolescence of young Henry, is particularly thin, with Robert of Torigni’s chronicle standing in near isolation. Yet though Torigni was an intimate of the royal family, his brief, annalistic style contrasts markedly with the more detailed and richly anecdotal writings of earlier Anglo-Norman historians such as Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, while the decision of the witty and acerbic Winchester monk Richard of Devizes not to begin his history of ‘the confused house of Oedipus’, as he called the Angevins, before 1189 can only be lamented.65 Even after 1170, the young Henry appears intermittently and often only fleetingly in the more detailed narratives of Roger of Howden and Ralph of Diss, the ‘administrative historians’ associated with Henry II’s court.66 As was also the case with Richard and Geoffrey, Howden usually referred to the Young King’s movements in any detail only when the young Henry was with Henry II or when Roger had access to reports sent by the king’s sons. His account of the period between May 1175 and Easter 1176, for example, when father and son remained together almost constantly, provides an exceptionally full record of the Young King’s itinerary. By contrast, however, Roger records the Young King’s independent activities on the continent laconically, if at all, except when they directly involved Henry II. Thus, for instance, although the Gesta is often the sole source to mention the expeditions undertaken by the Young King in Aquitaine and Berry in the later 1170s, the bare record makes it hard to gain anything but an impressionistic view of what must have been large-scale military operations, or to gauge young Henry’s role as commander and warrior in them.

  Charters, writs and other records can be used to offset the partisan and often distorting lens of chroniclers. Yet whereas some 3,000 acta of Henry II have been identified, only thirty-two of the Young King’s are extant.67 The majority of these, moreover, are homologues, confirmations of his father’s grants issued in near identical form and language, reflecting the Young King’s lack of a landed endowment with which to make his own grants.68 Destruction of some was deliberate: few if any of the Young King’s charters issued during his period of rebellion in 1173–74 survive, for when the war ended, Henry II demanded that any such charters were surrendered to him, whereupon they were almost certainly destroyed.69 Perhaps surprisingly, given his extensive contacts with them, the Young King appears rarely if at all in the known charters of his two principal allies, Louis VII and Count Philip of Flanders, while he witnesses very few of his father’s acta. Few as they are, however, the witness lists to the Young King’s own surviving acta provide an important glimpse of the extent to which his father’s men guided young Henry’s affairs before 1173 and of the composition of the Young King’s household, particularly after 1175.70

  The paucity of such charter evidence can, however, be supplemented by a range of other sources. The letters of John of Salisbury, and the voluminous correspondence of Becket and his supporters, focused though they are on the archbishop’s struggle with Henry II, nevertheless provide valuable glimpses of young Henry. A brief shaft of light provided by the biographers of Becket falls on the prince in the early 1160s, when he became the chancellor’s ward and played a prominent role in presiding over the installation of Thomas as archbishop of Canterbury, and again still more brightly in the critical years of 1169–70, as the dispute over his coronation and his subsequent position as regent drew him ever more deeply into his father’s conflict with Becket.71 Despite the tragic outcome, moreover, the picture drawn of the young Henry by Becket’s biographers was almost wholly positive, and his early act of penance and veneration at Thomas’ shrine in 1172 won him the approbation of Canterbury’s own chroniclers. It is, however, secular texts that afford the fullest and most valuable perspectives on the Young King. Of particular importance is Jordan Fantosme’s remarkable poem concerning the war of 1173–74, written shortly after the establishment of peace between young Henry and his father.72 Little is known of Jordan, but he was proba
bly a clerk of the bishop of Winchester and master of the cathedral schools, which would have placed him close to Henry II’s trusted familiaris, Richard of Ilchester, who had been elected to the bishopric of Winchester in 1173. Jordan’s focus on events in northern England, his intimate knowledge of the court of William the Lion and his praise of William’s younger brother David – who is held up to the Young King as a model of correct conduct – suggest that he may have played a role in Anglo-Scottish diplomacy. The nature and purpose of his Chronicle, as it is traditionally but misleadingly called, has been variously interpreted, though it is unquestionably a pièce d’occasion, celebrating the bravery and loyalty of those lords who had stood by Henry II during the war.73 Yet, crucially, it is written without hindsight of young Henry’s death and in the full expectation that he would in due course succeed his father. It thus displays a careful political balance, censuring young Henry for the folly of rebellion, while at the same time pointing out to Henry II that he must bear a degree of blame for giving his son a royal title but without any real power. Jordan’s poem provides both a vivid and detailed account of the war itself and a precious glimpse of the Angevin court in its aftermath, attempting to heal wounds through a process of reconciliation and political rehabilitation.