Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  These events go far to explain Henry II’s eagerness to have his own son Henry crowned when still a child. A king’s designation of his successor and the performance of homage by the nobility to that heir could not guarantee the succession: Henry I had gone to great pains to compel the magnates of the Anglo-Norman regnum to swear homage and fealty to his daughter Matilda as his heir, yet this had not prevented Stephen’s coup d’état in 1135. The civil war that raged between 1139 and 1153, and the shifting fortunes of the contenders for the crown, not least in 1141 following the capture of King Stephen at Lincoln, had constantly foregrounded the issue of succession and its uncertainties.89 By 1162 there was no longer any immediate challenge to the throne, for William of Blois had died in 1159, the year after Henry’s disaffected brother Geoffrey, even though the house of Blois-Chartres still remained a dangerous force to be reckoned with and was now bound to the Capetian king by close ties of marriage. The coronation of his heir would be both a wise precaution and a potent symbol of the success of the Angevin dynasty where his bitter rival Stephen had failed. Within the Plantagenet family itself, the coronation would make the succession to Henry II unambiguous and secure young Henry’s place as future ruler of England.

  Son of a King: Authority, Status and Plantagenet Kingship

  Henry II’s desire to have his son crowned reflected his concerns not simply for his dynasty’s security but also for its status. While Eustace had advanced his claims to the throne of England as the son of a consecrated king, it remained an uncomfortable fact that Henry II, though the grandson of a king of England through his maternal line, was only the son of a count. Henry, by adopting the title ‘FitzEmpress’, stressed his mother’s imperial status, but in so doing could not but draw attention to Geoffrey le Bel’s lesser rank. Matilda’s own title, moreover, was little more than honorary after the death of her first husband, Emperor Henry V, in 1125 while still more importantly, she had never been crowned and anointed as queen of England.90 If to her supporters she could be titled ‘the Lady of the English (domina Anglorum)’, Stephen’s charter confirming the Treaty of Winchester with Duke Henry Plantagenet in 1153 could refer to Matilda merely – and dismissively – as ‘the mother of the duke’.91 Matilda’s status had suffered still further in the bitter propaganda war waged, especially at the Curia, between churchmen supporting the rival causes of Stephen and the Empress: Stephen’s advocates had argued that as Henry I’s wife Matilda had previously been a nun, their marriage was invalid and that by implication the Empress herself was illegitimate.92

  Hostile contemporaries were quick to play on this perceived weakness, particularly after the deterioration in relations between Henry and Becket. William FitzStephen, who was probably an eyewitness, recounts a telling exchange at Angers in 1166, when Henry II gave an audience to some of Becket’s clerks. One of these, the aristocratic and haughty Herbert of Bosham, upbraiding the king for adopting ‘evil customs’ which oppressed the Church, compared his actions with those of Frederick Barbarossa and further offended Henry by referring to Frederick merely as king, not as emperor. Henry, who had acknowledged the special imperial dignity of Frederick in an embassy of 1157, repaid the insult by alluding to the fact that as canon law forbade priests from marrying, their offspring were deemed illegitimate and as such were themselves barred from the priesthood. As he remarked angrily: ‘For shame! It’s come to a pretty pass when this son of a priest can upset my kingdom and disturb my peace’. ‘Not I,’ boldly retorted Herbert, ‘nor am I the son of a priest, for I was born before my father became one. Just as you can’t be the son of a king if your father wasn’t one.’93 A later anecdote reported by Matthew Paris tells of how, at the great banquet following young Henry’s coronation at Westminster in 1170, Henry II personally served his son at table, to emphasize his new regal status. This moved the archbishop of York to comment to the young Henry how extraordinary it was to be waited on by a king, only to receive the reply, ‘It is no disgrace for the son of a mere duke to serve the son of a king.’94 A reflection of Matthew’s deep hostility to Henry II for his opposition to St Thomas, the story is undoubtedly apocryphal. Yet it contains a grain of truth: young prince Henry must have been well aware of his privileged and novel status in the Angevin dynasty as the son of a king, and perhaps too of his father’s own insecurities regarding his royal rank.

  Henry II has been characterized as a king ‘indifferent to rank and impatient of pomp, careless of his appearance, and disdaining the trappings of monarchy’, whose practical, workaday dress reflected his ceaseless activity.95 Such a picture, however, is misleading, for Henry II was acutely conscious of the importance of the symbolism of royal power, while his court may well have witnessed a new and heightened emphasis on courtliness and protocol precisely to counter doubts as to his regal status.96 His wish to crown his son in and after 1162 was a continuation of his sustained efforts from 1154 to restore the authority and dignity of a kingship that had been severely damaged by a long civil war, and one which had even seen a reigning monarch defeated, captured and imprisoned in 1141. Consequently, Henry’s plans in 1162 should be understood within the wider context of the great significance he had attached to crown-wearing ceremonies in the first years of his reign. Henry had spent from January 1156 to April 1157 on the continent, where he had suppressed the serious rebellion by his brother Geoffrey in Anjou, and had returned in time to quell potentially very dangerous unrest in East Anglia by forcing both Stephen’s son William de Warenne and Earl Hugh Bigod to yield a number of key castles.97 It was thus a major reassertion of his kingly authority when in May 1157, ‘in the second month after his return across the sea’, Henry wore his crown at Pentecost at Bury St Edmunds before a large assembly of prelates, magnates ‘and a crowd of common people’.98 Bury was an unprecedented site for a great council and crown-wearing, chosen not only to overawe both Warenne and Bigod but to reaffirm the close ties between the king and the great abbey of St Edmund.99 At Christmas that same year, Henry again held a second crown-wearing, this time at Lincoln, following his imposition of overlordship within the British Isles; his campaign against Owain of Gwynedd had nearly cost him his life, but had ended in the submission of the Welsh princes, while King Malcolm IV had been forced to yield the northern counties, lost to the English crown under Stephen, together with the great fortresses of Carlisle, Newcastle and Bamburgh, and had become Henry’s man. Lincoln had been carefully chosen for its symbolism, for it was outside the walls that King Stephen had been defeated and captured in 1141 by Henry’s uncle Robert of Gloucester.100

  Then, in what was evidently envisaged as a fitting and dramatic climax to the year’s extraordinary activity, and perhaps even to the whole period of his successful restoration of peace and royal authority since his coronation in December 1154, Henry and Eleanor wore their crowns at Easter at Worcester. This was another site that was unusual for a crown-wearing, its choice dictated by Henry’s desire to assert his authority in the marches.101 Yet there was to be a more striking dimension to the Worcester crown-wearing. As Roger of Howden noted, ‘when they came to the offering, they took off their crowns and offered them up on the altar, vowing to God that never in their lives would they be crowned with any others’.102 It was not unknown for crowns to be granted as votive offerings: the great crown worn by Henry at his first coronation in December 1154, for example, was gifted by his mother, the Empress, to the monastery of Bec.103 Equally, royal oblations could subsequently be redeemed from the altar by gifts of money.104 Nevertheless, there is no direct evidence for Henry II holding any further crown-wearing ceremonies until considerably later in his reign, when the impact of Becket’s murder and his son’s rebellion may well have compelled him to consciously reinforce his own royal dignity through ceremony, just as in 1172 he had adopted the style Dei gratia in his charters in the wake of Becket’s murder and the settlement with the papacy. Reflecting an earlier tradition of insular historiography in which the study of symbolism and ritual had not yet found a signi
ficant place, Kate Norgate dismissed the incident at Worcester as stemming from ‘nothing more than Henry’s impatience of court pageantry’.105 Both Roger of Howden and Ralph of Diss, however, were surely far closer to Henry’s real motivation when they interpreted his actions at Worcester as a formal cessation of crown-wearing and thus a public and highly self-conscious gesture of royal humility.106

  In this context, it is possible that as early as 1158 Henry II had already begun to envisage young Henry taking over the ceremonial dimensions of the kingship of England when he reached a suitable age. The Plantagenets themselves had attempted to use the eldest son’s position to stress legitimacy and future unity beyond a time of existing conflict. Geoffrey le Bel’s anomalous position as duke of Normandy, more in reality by conquest than in right of his wife, had led him to stress that he would step aside as soon as his son Henry was of age and that, in the interim, the latter would have a share in its governance.107 Following King Stephen’s capture at Lincoln in 1141, the Empress Matilda had begun to associate Henry’s name with hers in her charters, while in the wake of her own ensuing political and military reverses, the Angevin party increasingly projected the youthful Henry Plantagenet as the legitimate heir, for whom Matilda and Geoffrey were but holding the Anglo-Norman regnum in trust till he came of age.108

  What seems more certain is that Henry II intended the coronation of his eldest son in 1162 and Becket’s elevation to the archbishopric of Canterbury to be the foundation of a regency government of England. Under young Henry’s nominal rule, the kingdom’s de facto administration would be in the hands of Thomas and the justiciars, operating in close communication with King Henry.109 Such an arrangement would allow Henry II himself to concentrate his efforts on the consolidation and rule of his continental territories, where his political and military priorities – and his greatest challenges – firmly lay.110 The ever-present threat of Capetian aggression and restless factions within regional aristocracies, particularly in Brittany and Aquitaine but also on the southern and eastern borders of Normandy, required the king’s near-constant supervision. England, by contrast, with its well-developed structures of central and regional government – the Exchequer, the justiciars, the sheriffs, the shire and hundred courts – could be left under trusted deputies to run itself, save for intermittent crises such as insurrection in Wales, which called for Henry’s personal intervention. Similarly, while a significant role in government may also have been envisaged for Queen Eleanor during those periods when she was in the kingdom, the vice-regency of young Henry would allow her to concentrate more of her efforts on the governance of Aquitaine on Henry II’s behalf.111

  Crucial to Henry II’s conception of this regency was that the offices of chancellor and archbishop should be combined in the person of his trusted friend Thomas. Archbishops of Canterbury had long been among the king’s most prominent advisors, but, as Ralph of Diss noted, King Henry was strongly influenced by imperial practice, whereby the archbishop of Mainz acted as arch-chancellor under the king in Germany, and the archbishop of Cologne did likewise in Italy under the emperor.112 Hard-line reformers within the Church denounced the holding of secular office by ecclesiastics as uncanonical, but Dean Ralph (whose own bishop served as Henry II’s treasurer) saw the uniting of the imperial seal and archiepiscopal staff in the hands of one man as beneficial to both the peace of the Church and the well-being of the empire.113 Henry II had, moreover, or so he later claimed, obtained Pope Alexander’s permission for Thomas to remain as chancellor when installed as archbishop.114 There were in addition immediate precedents: the archbishop of Mainz had been chancellor to Conrad III (d. 1152), and Rainald of Dassel, Barbarossa’s key advisor, continued to serve as chancellor after his promotion to the archbishopric of Cologne in 1159. Similarly at the Capetian court, Hugh of Champfleury had retained his office as chancellor, with papal encouragement, after his election to the bishopric of Soissons in 1159, and continued to hold both positions until 1172.115 Henry thus sought to combine a practical solution to devolving government with the prestige of a chancellor-archbishop for the kingdom of England, whose immediate ruler was to be his son, crowned and anointed as king in his own right.

  The Council of London and the Election and Consecration of Becket

  As Thomas’ biographer Edward Grim noted, Henry II ordered Becket to return to England in 1162 ‘especially to gain the fealty and subjection of all to his son, then to be crowned and sworn in as king’.116 Young Henry, under the chancellor’s guardianship, was sent on ahead, in order to receive the homage of the magnates.117 Henry II seemingly had intended to follow soon after, to be in England for the feast of Pentecost on 27 May 1162.118 Delayed by circumstances or design, he instead sent an embassy headed by bishops Hilary of Chichester, Bartholomew of Exeter and Walter of Rochester with the abbot of Battle and the justiciar Richard de Lucy, to order the prior and convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, to proceed with the election of the archbishop.119 Having elected Becket, though not without dissenting voices, Prior Wibert and a delegation of monks joined a great assembly, which had been summoned at London and was to include all the clergy of the southern province.120 At this council, held on 23 May, young Henry received the homage and fealty of the English bishops, abbots and leading clergy, together with that of the lay magnates.121 Thomas himself, as chancellor, was the first to perform this homage.122 Strikingly, he made his accompanying oath to the young Henry ‘saving his fealty to the king [Henry II] as long as he should live and should wish to reign over the kingdom’.123 The clear implication was that following the impending coronation, Henry II might at some future stage wish to relax or even perhaps remit his direct authority in the kingdom.

  Following the homage of the magnates, young Henry, as his father’s representative, presided over the continuing process of Becket’s election to the archbishopric, for Henry had granted his son ‘unimpaired kingly power in all matters that concern the crown in this affair’. 124 In the refectory of Westminster abbey, the assembly approved the election, which was then officially published by Henry of Blois, the venerable bishop of Winchester and one of the most senior figures in the English Church.125 Bishop Henry then formally presented young prince Henry with the petition of the clergy that Thomas should be chosen, asking for his ‘assensus, favor et gratia’, and to this the prince formally gave his consent ‘with joy’.126 As the late King Stephen’s brother and a kingmaker in his own right, Bishop Henry may well have reflected on the mutability of fortune, as he found himself having to propose the elevation of Thomas, the man who had played a leading role in securing papal prohibition of his nephew Eustace’s coronation, to the son and heir of Henry Plantagenet, Stephen’s opponent and nemesis.127

  The young prince, ‘the illustrious Henry, still a boy, the king’s son and heir’, played an equally prominent role at Thomas’ consecration, which took place in Canterbury cathedral on 3 June 1162, only a day after Becket had been ordained priest by Bishop Walter of Rochester.128 Henry, accompanied by the justiciar Richard de Lucy, personally led Becket to the church, which was thronged with an ‘almost countless crowd of great men and nobles of the realm’, and he presided as Henry of Winchester duly consecrated Thomas as archbishop.129 Henry II’s absence from both the election and consecration of an archbishop of Canterbury, and particularly that of his close friend and leading minister, was remarkable. Though it is possible that he sought to distance himself somewhat from an election which was undoubtedly more unpopular than Becket’s biographers would admit, and which was clearly the result of overwhelming royal pressure, it is more likely that he sought to emphasize the position and honour of his son, and thereby to symbolize the new order he wished to establish in the kingdom.130

  A Coronation Postponed

  England now had a new primate. Yet the intended coronation of young Henry did not take place. It has been suggested that with the growing prospect of Becket’s election, the bishops of the southern ecclesiastical province of England dissuaded Henry
II from allowing Roger of York to go ahead with the coronation in line with the papal permissions obtained the year previously.131 With a new metropolitan, Canterbury could retain its cherished – and jealously guarded – privilege of crowning the kings of England. Archbishop Roger, however, at once appealed to Rome for confirmation of York’s ancient privileges of having his cross carried before him and of carrying out coronations. Accordingly, the pope issued a bull to this effect on 13 July 1162, at Montpellier. With both metropolitans claiming the right to crown the king’s heir, Henry was forced to postpone the coronation of his son.132 Not for the last time, the young Henry experienced the baleful effect of the bitter and long-standing rivalry between the archbishops of York and Canterbury.

  Yet there was a much more immediate and still more contentious reason for the postponing of young Henry’s coronation. For, once he had been consecrated as archbishop, Thomas promptly resigned the royal chancellorship. At what stage he decided to do so, or formally resigned, is uncertain. Becket’s biographers, heavily influenced by their knowledge of the proceedings later brought against Thomas by Henry II in 1164, claimed that immediately prior to either his election or his consecration the young Henry had quitclaimed him of certain secular obligations.133 They stress that the prince was fully authorized to make such a concession, acting on the authority of Henry II’s letters from Normandy, and that his decision had been confirmed by Richard de Lucy and other of the king’s ministers.134 The resignation of the chancellorship may have been implicit in his request for such quittance, but Ralph of Diss linked it directly to his receipt of the pallium, with which he was invested at Canterbury on 10 August 1162.135 Whatever the case, Thomas sent the great seal back to Henry II in Normandy. His reasons for so doing have been debated, but it was a course of action completely unforeseen by Henry II, who reacted with indignant fury.136 The preparations for young Henry’s coronations were postponed until further notice. In the wake of the heady atmosphere of Becket’s own consecration, this postponement must have come as a puzzling anticlimax to the young prince, who in preparation had no doubt had been well schooled in the nature of the ceremony, his role in it, and the duties of the office. He also soon witnessed a remarkable transformation in his guardian: for while Thomas continued to keep a splendid court worthy of the primate, he now personally abandoned his former lavish, secular lifestyle, and was seen to ‘put on the new man’.137 Becket began to indulge in extensive almsgiving and, in imitation of Christ washing the feet of his disciples, he washed the feet of twelve paupers every day. His own diet became modest, and at meals the household knights were placed at the far end of the hall so as not to disturb the clergy, who were read to as they ate by Alexander Llewellyn, the archbishop’s cross-bearer.138 Nevertheless, as the king’s son, young Henry was first among the noble youths of the archbishop’s household to serve the archbishop at table every day, and Thomas would engage in joking conversations with him, keeping the boy close to him among the other diners.139