Rejecting Overtures of Peace
Such stubborn resistance could not disguise the fact that the Young King and his allies had suffered significant setbacks. Despite the initial successes at Aumale and Drincourt, the offensive in the north had stalled: the French had been shamefully repulsed at Verneuil and at the defeat at Dol had inflicted a major blow to the Young King’s support in western Normandy and Brittany. In thanksgiving for his victories, Henry II celebrated the festival of the Birth of the Virgin on 8 September at Le Mans, and remained there till the festival of the exaltation of the Holy Cross, 14 September.159 Yet he was anxious, from a position of strength, to make peace with his sons. Other forces were also pressing for a reconciliation. Henry II’s kinsman King Amalric of Jerusalem, alarmed by Saladin’s control of Egypt as vizier of Nur al-Din, had sent a delegation to the West headed by the bishop of Lydda, and in one of the letters he sent with the envoys he appealed to Archbishop Henry of Rheims to make peace between the king of England and his sons so that King Henry could come East.160 Evidently, the extent of Capetian involvement in the inception and sustaining of the rebellion had not been clear to Amalric. The pope, who was doubtless better informed, also urged Archbishop Henry to work for the restoration of peace between the kings of France and England, so that aid could be swiftly sent in this time of crisis to the Holy Land: Christians were fighting each other while Saladin threatened to conquer Christ’s patrimony.161 He also sent a distinguished legation, comprising Peter, archbishop of Tarentaise, Giles, bishop of Evreux, the bishop of Clermont and the abbot of Cîteaux to broker peace talks between Henry II, his sons and King Louis.
It was in such a climate that on 25 September 1173 Henry II met with his sons and the king of France near Gisors. At this great assembly, attended by many of the leading clergy as well as nobles from the Plantagenet and French lands, Henry II first promised to address the grievances that Louis and his men had against him. Though ‘against the hope and advice of many’, he then made a generous offer which he hoped would reconcile his disaffected sons and detach them from the French. Young Henry was to receive half of the revenues of his demesne lands in England and three ‘strong and suitable castles in which he and his household would be able to reside honourably and securely’.162 Alternatively, he could hold four castles in Normandy instead, with the same revenues suitably adjusted.163 If he preferred to remain in Normandy, the Young King would receive all the revenues of Normandy with the exception of those from Rouen, Cherbourg and Arques, and three suitable castles, one within the duchy and two on its frontiers.164 In financial terms, these were very handsome offers.165 In offering his son a number of castles, moreover, Henry II was granting young Henry a symbolic yet tangible stake in his future inheritance, as well as directly responding to the ostensible casus belli, the Young King’s anger at the granting of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau to John as part of the Maurienne marriage. To Richard, Henry II offered half the revenues of Aquitaine and four castles, and to Geoffrey the lands that would come with Duke Conan’s daughter, if the pope granted consent for their marriage. These terms were to be submitted to Peter of Tarentaise, who had played a role in the great peace summit at Limoges earlier that year, and to the papal legates, who could add to these initial terms whatever amounts of revenue they considered just.166
The peace negotiations, however, proved fruitless. In his proposals, Henry had sought to share the wealth of his dominions with his sons, and, as his delegation of powers of arbitration reveal, he regarded as the principal issue for negotiation the amount of revenue each of them would receive. Yet just as with his own brother Geoffrey in 1156, the Old King had failed to address the real grievance of his eldest son. There was no offer of rule in Normandy, England or Anjou, and Henry II’s terms had explicitly reserved to himself ‘justitia et regia potestate’.167 He doubtless felt he could not be seen to yield to demands for partition or a diminution of his own power made under the threat of force. Young Henry and his brothers accordingly rejected their father’s proposals. Roger of Howden believed that King Louis was responsible for persuading them to do so, yet writing to Pope Alexander, Giles, bishop of Evreux, pinned the blame squarely on the Young King.168 Although Henry II’s terms were pleasing to the legates and even to the French king and most of his men, young Henry impudently spurned all his offers ‘in contempt of reverence due to a father and divine and human law’, while he also offended King Louis by rejecting his counsel. If true, this gives a very different picture from the common assumption that in 1173–74 young Henry was simply the cat’s paw of the Capetians.169 Given how badly the allies had fared in the war up to this point, Louis may well have wanted to cut his losses, but young Henry was not prepared to accept so limited a grant. In all this, warned Giles, the Young King had acquiesced to the counsels of those who, despairing of forgiveness because of the enormity of their iniquity, had set their minds on the killing of the king, the ravaging of the kingdom, and the heavy affliction of the Church. It was now time to demonstrate the apostolic power, given by God, ‘to execute vengeance on the nations, and punishments among the peoples’.170
Despite this refusal, a second meeting was arranged for the following day between Gisors and Trie, in order to establish some form of peace. Tempers soon flared, however, and an angry exchange took place between Henry II and Earl Robert of Leicester. Whatever his other grievances, the destruction of his comital town had been a bitter blow, and after ‘many reproachful and abusive words’, Robert even drew his sword on the king before being restrained by those around him.171 As the conference broke up, skirmishing began between some of the French and English knights, and Ingelram, the castellan of Trie, was captured by William de Mandeville, earl of Essex.172 Robert of Leicester, however, was already riding hard to Wissant, where he found a powerful force of Flemish mercenary infantry and cavalry, together with transports, ready and waiting.173 Count Philip had been busy preparing the next stage of the allies’ strategy: a field army under the earl of Leicester would land in eastern England, where it could count on the support of Hugh Bigod. It would then march to the relief of the garrison of Leicester castle, for the truce that had been agreed with the justiciar would soon be at an end, reinforce the rebel position in the Midlands and, if possible, join forces with William the Lion as he invaded the northern counties.174 Accordingly, on the orders of the Young King and Louis, Earl Robert immediately set sail for England, assisted by his cousin Hugh of Châteauneuf, and Normans adhering to the younger Henry’s cause.175 Something of his confidence can be gauged from the fact that, rather than leave her safely in France, Earl Robert brought with him his wife Petronilla, with her household furnishings.176 King Henry had anticipated some form of landing, but by now he had ordered those ships based at Orford to sail to Sandwich, the traditional base for fleets guarding against invasion.177
The Earl of Leicester’s Invasion
Leicester’s force landed unopposed in the Orwell estuary near Walton, on 29 September, and was quickly joined by Hugh Bigod.178 Hugh, who held the castles of Framlingham and Bungay, seems to have undertaken little direct military action before Leicester’s arrival.179 The newly completed royal fortress of Orford lay just eighteen miles from Framlingham, and a group of castles, including Eye, Haughley, Thetford, Cambridge, Aldreth and Wisbech, had effectively contained his sphere of operations.180 The advent of Leicester with a powerful field force, however, greatly enhanced the offensive potential of Bigod’s strongholds and boosted the morale of the Young King’s supporters in England.181 The earls’ first task was to consolidate their hold on the coast, in order to keep communication with Flanders open and facilitate the landing of reinforcements.182 They brought up siege engines to attack the clifftop castle at Walton, formerly held by Bigod before being confiscated by Henry II, but despite four days of assault the small royal garrison successfully resisted.183 An attempt to seize the nearby town of Dunwich was likewise thwarted by a spirited defence by its inhabitants, even though the earl of Leicester had gal
lows set up to intimidate them into surrendering.184 Bigod, however, succeeded in taking the greater prize of the port of Ipswich and, aided by the Flemings, he laid siege to Eye, which had been granted to him by the Young King.185 The earls’ forces engaged in widespread plundering, devastating the surrounding area, destroying barns, byres and fishponds and seizing corn and cattle.186
These moves helped to consolidate Hugh Bigod’s position, but Leicester still needed to break out from the encircling royal garrisons in order to march into the Midlands. His intention may have been to pick up the Icknield Way just to the west of Bury St Edmunds, then head up the old Roman road, the Via Devana, from Babraham to Cambridge and Godmanchester on towards Leicester.187 On 13 October, the earls stormed and took the large motte and bailey castle of Haughley, held by Becket’s old enemy Ranulf de Broc.188 The attack was not only strategic: it struck a blow for St Thomas, whose aid Earl Robert was invoking for his uprising and the Young King’s cause. A polyphonic song, Novus miles sequitur, composed for the earl shortly before, envisages the newly canonized St Thomas, and hence a ‘new knight’ of Christ, supporting young Henry, the new king:
Map 3 East Anglia and the Midlands, 1173–74
A new soldier (novus miles) follows
The path of the new king (novus rex);
A good shepherd suffers
For the good of his flock …
The blood of Thomas the physician
Has healed the wounds
Of a palsied world;
The Lord’s flock cries aloud
That the physician of the English
Has renewed the world.
O Thomas, triumphant soldier
Of a young boy,
Be a spiritual shepherd to the clergy and people.
Harken to Leicester!
Direct its clerics
And knights in such a way
That he [the Young King] may reign in the land,
When the wars are done,
With the eternal king.189
Just as Thomas’ martyrdom has healed the spiritual ills of a corrupt world, so too the reign of the Young King will bring a new beginning, blessed by God and his saint. A rare survival of what must have been a more widespread genre, the song gives a precious glimpse into the efforts of the Young King and his allies to win more widespread support in their struggle against Henry II.
Despite the fall of Haughley, Leicester chose to return to Hugh’s principal base at Framlingham rather than continue his push westward, perhaps because, as Howden believed, he shied away from confronting a large force of royalist knights then assembling at Bury St Edmunds.190 Once back in eastern Suffolk, however, the difficulties of supplying and disciplining so large a force quickly became apparent; Earl Hugh – and, it seems, still more his countess – found the damage inflicted by the Flemish mercenaries on his own lands increasingly intolerable. Whatever his qualms, Earl Robert was soon forced to resume his attempt to reach Leicester.191
The Battle of Fornham
The earl’s delay in effecting his breakout from East Anglia was to cost him dear. The justiciar Richard de Lucy and Humphrey de Bohun had just burned Berwick as part of their punitive ravaging of Lothian when news reached them of Leicester’s landing in East Anglia.192 Concealing the danger and coolly exploiting the fact that William the Lion himself had not yet been apprised of Earl Robert’s invasion, de Lucy negotiated a truce, seemingly from a position of strength, until the feast of St Hilary in January.193 Free to hasten south, de Bohun joined forces at Bury with the earls of Cornwall, Arundel and Gloucester together with other royalists, including Robert FitzBernard, who led a strong force of veterans drawn from the Anglo-Norman settlers in Ireland.194 This powerful army, also containing 300 stipendiary knights from the familia regis, was further strengthened by a contingent of the abbey’s men under Walter FitzRobert, and – perhaps as important for the morale of King Henry’s men – with the banner of St Edmund himself.195 This standard was carried, by hereditary right, by Roger Bigod, Earl Hugh’s eldest son, a striking reminder of how the civil war might divide baronial families.196 A well-informed contemporary believed that the royalists outnumbered Leicester’s forces in cavalry by four to one, but that the earl had a significantly larger force of infantry, with the Flemings under his command numbering around 3,000.197 Leicester was said to have set great store by these mercenaries, for in tight, well-ordered formations the Flemish infantry, armed with long spears, was more than capable of defeating a cavalry charge.198
Though he was aware of the royalist build-up at Bury, Earl Robert nonetheless chose a line of march which took him only few miles to the north-west of the town.199 If he was hoping that the size of his army would deter attack, he was gravely mistaken. Well informed of the earl’s movements and apprised of the local terrain by the abbey’s knights, Henry II’s men launched a bold attack on 17 October, suddenly falling on the Flemings at the little village of Fornham St Genevieve as they were crossing the river Lark, still in their marching order.200 Leicester was taken completely by surprise, and the engagement was as short as it was sudden.201 There was some hard fighting, but the Flemings soon broke under the impact of the royalist knights’ charge. Scattered and knocked down by the cavalry, some were slain in large numbers by the royalist infantry, while others, driven into the marshy ground by the river, were drowned.202 Angry peasants finished off stragglers with scythes and pitchforks, but some managed to flee as far at the abbey itself, where they sought sanctuary by the feretory of St Edmund.203 Those who were not butchered out of hand were imprisoned in wretched conditions, while the bodies of some of the slain rebels were displayed at Bury, Colchester and Ipswich.204 Earl Robert, Hugh de Châteauneuf and other nobles were taken prisoner, as was the earl’s wife Petronilla, a virago said to have been wearing a hauberk and armed with spear and shield.205 Shipped to the king in Normandy, they soon joinined the earl of Chester at Falaise ‘in the strictest custody’.206
It had been a notable victory for Henry II and his supporters.207 For the Young King, however, the defeat and capture of the earl of Leicester and his forces was a terrible blow. Not only had he lost his most powerful supporter in England, but his cause in the kingdom can only have been harmed by the wave of hostility expressed towards the Flemings, whose depredations continued even after the battle, from the castles of Bungay and Framlingham. This rekindled memories of the dark days of Stephen’s reign, when Flemish mercenaries had caused widespread devastation.208 Looking back after the war’s end, Jordan Fantosme could mock the Flemings:
My lords, the truth is that most of them were weavers, they do not know how to bear arms like knights, and why they had come was to pick up plunder and the spoils of war, for there is no more prosperous region on earth than Bury St Edmunds … They made no early start in gathering the wool of England! Crows and buzzards descend on their corpses and bear off their souls to the fire that burns to eternity … The Flemings would have been worthy enough people had God been their helper, but this they had not deserved because of their vast thievery. It was a disaster that the earl of Leicester ever got mixed up with them …209
Contemporaries, moreover, were quick to attribute the swift and decisive nature of the royalist victory to divine judgement.210 Leicester may have invoked St Thomas, but at Fornham it was St Edmund, king and martyr, who had punished those who dared to ravage his lands.211 Howden noted that news of the defeat struck fear into all the king’s enemies. The Young King and Louis were greatly saddened, ‘and from that time, they feared the king of England more than I am able to express, because God was with him’.212
The defeat of Leicester’s field army left Hugh Bigod isolated in East Anglia. He nevertheless still retained large numbers of Flemings in his service. Some may have been survivors from the rout of Fornham, but Ralph of Diss’ statement that there were 14,000 of them – even if a great exaggeration – strongly suggests that the earl of Norfolk had been reinforced by further contingents from Flanders sent subsequent to the
landing of Leicester’s force in late September.213 To contain this threat, Henry II’s men mustered contingents against him at Colchester, Ipswich and Bury. Dean Ralph believed that had the earl been closely besieged, the very number of his Flemish troops would have quickly forced Bigod to surrender through lack of supplies. As it was, however, the loyalist magnates were persuaded, for a large sum, to grant a truce to the octaves of Pentecost, whereby the Flemish were allowed safe passage through Essex and Kent to Dover, where ships, doubtless supplied by Count Philip and the Young King, waited to transport them back to Flanders.214 Bigod’s offensive capabilities had been curbed, but he had not been forced to submit and his castles remained a threat, not least as bases for any fresh invasion that the allies might launch.
With young Henry and his allies defeated or repulsed in Normandy and in England, Henry II was able to campaign beyond the duchy into the Angevin heartlands. Leading his great army of Brabançons into the Touraine, the king compelled the surrender of Geoffrey de La Haye, who yielded up the castle and town of La Haye on 18 November.215 With the surrender soon after of the castle of Preuilly, held by Peter de Montrabei, and Robert de Blé’s stronghold of Champigny, two of the great lordships of northern Poitou were reduced to obedience.216 The importance of the latter fortress as a focus of resistance is indicated by the substantial list of knights and serjeants taken prisoner there, their names carefully enrolled, to which Roger of Howden had access.217 Around 30 November, Henry moved against Vendôme, whose count had been expelled by his own son, Brachard de Lavardin, who had sided with the Young King. Henry’s Brabançons, however, soon took the place.218 But this campaign was to bring a far greater prize. Queen Eleanor, attempting to escape the forces of her husband as they marched south into Aquitaine, had attempted to flee north to Paris, to seek refuge with King Louis and join her sons.219 First she had moved to the castle of her uncle Ralph at Faye-la-Vineuse, but she was captured by Henry’s men on the road to Chartres and brought as a prisoner to Chinon.220 According to Gervase of Canterbury, she had donned the clothes of a man, either for disguise or for ease of fast riding.221 No contemporary records the impact of Eleanor’s capture on young Henry or his brothers, but though she was now Henry’s hostage, her captivity did nothing to lessen the vigour with which they prosecuted the war against their father.
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