The work of dissolving the former conjuratio continued when on 22 April Philip of Flanders came to the kings at Caen. At Henry II’s prompting, he and the Young King absolved each other of any obligations they had made during the war. In return for surrendering the Young King’s charter granting him the earldom of Kent, with the castles of Dover and Rochester, and for quitclaiming the Young King of all promises made to him, Henry II renewed the annual money fief of 1,000 marks, and young Henry confirmed this grant with his own charter.63 The renewal of the conventio of 1163 was a visible sign of the realignment of Flanders with the Angevins and away from Louis, and Henry bestowed great honour upon the count before he again left ‘with the licence of both kings’.64 Shortly before his visit to Caen, Count Philip, his brother Peter, and many of his men had taken the cross, intending to leave for the Holy Land the following summer.65 The hostile Ralph of Diss believed that they had done so to expiate the outrages the Flemings had committed in the recent war against the English and Normans, and added that the souls of all those Flemish slain at Fornham would proclaim the iniquities of Count Philip before the Great Judge.66 Though he subsequently took pains to delay Philip’s crusade, Henry II pledged him a sum of money ‘for the soul of Matthew, count of Boulogne’, to help retain knights in defence of the land of Jerusalem.67 The war of 1173–74 had been not only a conflict between father and son; it had been a war between kinsmen.
Reassured of his father’s good intentions and forgiveness, the Young King and Margaret crossed with Henry II from Barfleur to Portsmouth, arriving on 9 May 1175.68 As a public and potent symbol of the love and reconciliation between father and son, ‘every day at the stated hour for meals they ate at the same table, and rested their limbs in the same bedroom’.69 After the power struggles between father and son in 1173–74 over high clerical appointments, the return of order and harmony was symbolized by the two kings jointly presiding over an ecclesiastical council, convened ‘by the consent and wish of both of them’ by Richard, the new archbishop of Canterbury, at Westminster on Rogation Sunday, 18 May.70 In the great hall of the royal palace, a series of canons were promulgated, largely restating existing decrees, although the presence of the Young King led to a subtle amendment to the canon strictly forbidding the marriage of children. Everyone present was all too aware that young Henry had been married to Margaret as a mere infant, so a saving clause was added stating that an exception could be made in urgent necessity for the establishment of a firm treaty of peace.71
Business pertaining more directly to the settlement of the realm was discussed at a great council held two days later, on 20 May.72 The Westminster council was of particular importance, as it represented the first major convocation of Henry’s magnates since the establishment of peace. The question of the Young King’s status remained a pressing issue. For although he had made a dramatic and complete submission to his father at Bur-le-Roi, this ritual had occurred in Normandy, and before a comparatively small number of nobles. Accordingly, in order to make more widely known the nature of his son’s submission and to explain his new feudal subordination, Henry II commanded a letter, whose text was subsequently circulated as a newsletter, to be read out at the opening of the council:
King Henry, the father of the King, to his faithful subjects, greeting. I give thanks to almighty God and to the saints, whose grace, although not because of my merits, has visited and gladdened me beyond belief. My son, King Henry, came to me at Bur, and on the Tuesday next before Palm Sunday … with great shedding of tears and many sobs, he prostrated himself before my feet, humbly begging for mercy; and that I would, with fatherly love, grant forgiveness for what he did to me before the war and during the war and after the war. He also begged with all humility and as much devotion as he could that I, as his lord and father, would accept his homage and allegiance, asserting that he would never believe that I had given up my indignation against him unless I would do to him what I had done to his brothers, at their petition and humble insistence. I, therefore, moved by pity and believing that he spoke from his heart and that he was remorseful and humbled before me, put away my anger and indignation (ira et indignatio) against him, and wholly took him into my fatherly favour (in gratiam paternam), having received homage from him and an oath upon the holy relics placed before him that he would bear me faith against all men and abide by my counsel henceforth in all his doings, and that as long as he lived he would seek no harm to either my men or his who had served me in this war, but that he would honour and advance them as my faithful subjects and his, and that he would order all his household and all his state by my advice and henceforth do likewise in all things.73
This rehearsal of the Young King’s earlier submission has been seen as Henry II’s deliberate humiliation of his son.74 No doubt it made for uncomfortable listening, but it scarcely compared with Henry II’s act of contrition at Avranches in 1172 or his penance at Becket’s tomb, and still less with the public humiliation of William the Lion at Northampton in July 1174. Rather, it may have been intended to limit further damage to the Young King’s royal dignity, for by merely reading a narrative of events at Bur-le-Roi Henry II informed the political community of young Henry’s suitable contrition, of the reconciliation between father and son, and of the reason for the Young King’s new status as his homager, all without the need to actively carry out any further ceremony of abasement before the assembled magnates.75 The letter, moreover, stressed reconciliation and, closely echoing the Treaty of Montlouis, assured the Old King’s fideles that an integral aspect of Henry II’s acceptance of young Henry’s submission was its guarantee of their future safety from reprisals, and from the ira of the future king of England.
Such concerns are prominently reflected in Jordan Fantosme’s remarkable poem on the events of 1173–74. Written soon after the war for a court still traumatized by the recent conflict, it was perhaps performed at just such a great assembly as that at Westminster in May 1175, where men who had but recently fought against each other now rubbed shoulders in a highly charged atmosphere. The Young King’s war is presented as unlawful, unnatural and unjust, but equally Jordan boldly points out that by crowning his son, then denying him any real authority, Henry II himself must take the ultimate blame for his son’s frustrations.76 Skilfully weaving praise of loyalty with rebuke for the folly of rebellion, Fantosme provides a roll call both of those lords who remained faithful to the Old King and of those who were the Young King’s key supporters. The rebels are censured, but neither denounced nor vilified; though they have erred through folly, they are nonetheless still part of the community of nobles, and by coming back to their senses and due loyalty to Henry II they too should be restored to their rightful place within this society. Vividly capturing the hopes and fears of his contemporaries in the immediate post-rebellion period, Jordan’s overriding theme is one of reconciliation. As he urges Henry II:
Noble king of England, do what I desire: love those whose wish it is to serve you faithfully. It is not right that any evil should befall the Young King, since his better nature made him regret bringing in foreigners to bring shame on his countrymen who after his father’s lifetime are to support him. Before this world approaches its end many strange things can come to pass. You never had to sustain a war so bad that your son may not have a worse one on his hands! Now let him think of improving the lot of his own people!77
The message to young Henry was clear: just as he and his supporters should be forgiven and taken back into Henry II’s grace, so in turn the Young King should show his favour to those who had served his father so loyally. For, in due course, they would become his liegemen, and as king he would need their support just as much in any future conflicts. One tangible demonstration of just such a rapprochement was the confirmation by the Young King of his father’s grants to loyal curiales. It may, for example, have been during the Westminster council that the Young King confirmed Henry II’s grant of the chapelry at Blythe to Walter of Coutances, his former chaplain, who had bee
n one of those members of his household who had refused to swear unconditional loyalty to young Henry after his flight to France in 1173, and who had accordingly been sent back to Henry II.78
It was with a similar plea for reconciliation, not only between father and sons but between all members of the Angevin family, including both Queen Margaret and Queen Eleanor, that Guernes chose to conclude his Vie de Saint Thomas le Martyr:
The king should know it well – and I am telling him the absolute truth – that his sons will be honourable, strong and brave. The more they stand by each other, the more powerful they will be. English, Poitevins and Normans will be in great fear of them. Some who are laughing now will end up weeping. As long as father and son continue to love each other, as long as both love their mother and the king’s daughter-in-law, as long as the children stay close as brothers should, as long as the king reigns over them, as emperor and as king, then anyone who meddles with the sauce will find it tastes very bitter. I pray to God and to the martyr whom I have long served, that he bring peace to the kingdom, sustain the affection between father, son, daughter-in-law and wife, and grant them happiness and long life without any change in sovereignty. And may God encourage them to look favourably on me!79
Henry II himself never adopted an imperial title, and readily recognized the more exalted rank of the German emperor. Nevertheless, Guernes here encapsulates perfectly Henry II’s own vision of his ‘empire’ as a family enterprise over which he presided, as well as the political reality that, if united, the Angevins would be the dominant power in France. The question in 1175 was how far such family unity could be rebuilt, and for how long it could be maintained.
As a further gesture of their reconciliation, the two kings then made their way to Canterbury, where the great new choir of the cathedral of Christ Church, ravaged by a devastating fire only the year before, was beginning to rise from the ashes under the direction of the French architect William of Sens.80 Here, on 28 May 1175, in an atmosphere very different to that of the Old King’s urgent visit to the shrine in July of 1174, Henry II gave thanks to God and St Thomas ‘for the peace so gloriously restored to him’. Father and son spent the night in vigil and prayer, united in veneration of the martyr.81 After holding court and ‘a feast of the kings’ at Reading for Pentecost on 1 June, the kings progressed to Gloucester for a second major council on 29 June.82 There was an urgent need to reassert royal authority in the marches, where rising tensions between the Welsh and the Anglo-Norman marcher lords had been compounded by the recent slaying of Henry, lord of Brecknock and Upper Gwent, by Seisyll ap Dyfnwall.83 Henry II also had pressing business with his cousin William, earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan. Although he had been one of the magnates leading the royalist forces in the victory at Fornham in 1173, William was married to Hawise, the sister of Robert, earl of Leicester, and it is clear that Henry held him in mounting suspicion. Even before the outbreak of the war, the king had taken the great castle at Bristol into royal hands. This was a major affront to Earl William, for Bristol was the seat of his treasury and comital government, and he had retaliated by driving out the royal garrison during the war and holding the castle for its duration. For this act of defiance he was now impleaded by King Henry, and, bowing to the inevitable, Earl William returned the keep to the king.84 Henry may already have been planning to divert the inheritance of the earl’s rich lands to John, thereby further providing for his youngest son while at the same time removing any future threat from the great lordship of Gloucester.
The council at Gloucester also gave the Young King the opportunity to see at first hand the workings of the successful policy of détente and devolved authority his father had adopted towards the Lord Rhys, prince of Deheubarth. Recognized as Henry II’s ‘justice’ over much of south Wales, Rhys had remained Henry’s ‘right loving friend’ during the great rebellion and now stood as patron and mediator for other princes – of Gwent, Gwynllwg, Gwerthrynion, Morgannwg, Elfael and Maelienydd – as they made their peace with King Henry and were confirmed in their lands.85 But the king tempered conciliation with insistence that the marchers show a determined face against any future Welsh aggression. By early July, the kings were back at Woodstock, where they presided over a great gathering of bishops and abbots assembled in council to elect and install abbots to twelve vacant houses in the archdiocese of Canterbury and to appoint a new bishop of Norwich.86 Geoffrey Plantagenet was confirmed as elect of Lincoln, having received papal dispensation ‘in respect of his age and his birth’, but it may not have been coincidental that, later that summer, Henry II sent Geoffrey to the school in Tours ‘until he should be worthy of the dignity of such an honour’.87 The stated reason was that Geoffrey was still under the canonical age of thirty required to hold priestly office, but as he had been so active in the defeat of the rebels in 1174, his absence may also have been a diplomatic move by Henry II to place some distance between the Young King and his more loyal natural son.88
The Impact of the War
Speaking of the rebellion, Richard FitzNigel noted that Henry II had ‘so prevailed against almost all the rebels that he was established in the kingdom far more strongly than before, by the very circumstance that should have weakened him’.89 Historians have largely followed the Treasurer’s assessment. The post-war period has been seen as ushering in an age of stability, paving the way for impressive legal and governmental reforms; ‘unbroken tranquillity and steady prosperous growth, social, intellectual, political, constitutional’.90 Henry had overcome baronial opposition, and his judicial and fiscal measures to restore his authority between 1175 and 1176 left him stronger than ever before. The Becket crisis was now in the past: the king and the martyr were reconciled, and relations had been restored with the Church and the papacy. Though it was an unintended consequence of the war, he had established an unprecedented and unambiguous overlordship over Scotland, and was unchallenged overlord of Britain and Ireland. The dazzling match between his daughter Joanna and William II of Sicily, celebrated in 1177, and his arbitration in the same year of a settlement between the kings of Castile and Navarre, were but highlights in a period of successful international diplomacy that saw Henry II at the zenith of his prestige and influence in Europe.91
Yet this resurgence was neither inevitable nor untroubled. The Young King’s relations with his father between 1175 and 1177 reveal a period of continuing tension, deteriorating at least once into a serious political crisis that again threatened war. When Norgate wrote of a period of ‘unbroken tranquillity’ after 1174, she was only considering England, but even the kingdom was far from immune from the impact of Henry II’s fears of fresh insurrection in 1176. His stated plans for a crusade, halted by the reaction to Becket’s murder but brought back to the fore by the penance accorded at Avranches, had now been rendered all but impossible by fear of his sons’ further disloyalty. The Young King’s actions in 1173–74 were a stark warning to Henry that if he left for the East, he might find his ability to resume power on his return seriously challenged. Though he continued to support the Holy Land with very considerable sums of money, it was a risk he could no longer take.92 The rebellion continued to cast a long shadow and left ‘a legacy of bitterness and mistrust which darkened all the rest of his reign’.93
Indeed, in its immediate aftermath, despite the public reconciliation of the Young King and his father, Henry II feared for his own safety. Twelfth-century kings normally eschewed overt measures of personal security as unbecoming: fear of one’s own subjects appeared an admission of misrule.94 Walter Map told how King Louis, reproved by Count Theobald for falling asleep in a wood when only accompanied by two knights, had answered, ‘I may sleep alone quite safely, for no-one bears me any ill-will.’ ‘What other king,’ asked Map, ‘can claim so much for himself?’95 Henry I, by contrast, ‘dreading night’s terrors’ after an attempt on his life by his own chamberlain, had increased his guards, often changed beds and slept with a sword and shield within reach.96 Henry II did not res
ort to such measures, but at the great council at Woodstock in July 1175, it was publicly proclaimed that none of his opponents in the recent war were to come to court without his expressed consent, on pain of being arrested as an enemy of the king. No one was to linger at court after sunset, nor come to it before sunrise, while no one dwelling east of the river Severn was to bear bows and arrows, or carry daggers, for these were the weapons of an attack by stealth.97 Only the marchers to the west could not be so disarmed, for fear of the Welsh. As Howden noted, these new measures – in any case far too impracticable – were not adhered to for long, but they sharply reveal that a climate of fear and suspicion still pervaded the court.98
The task of recovery was a formidable one, for the Young King’s rebellion had brought devastation to many areas of the Angevin lands. As the annals of St Aubin bewailed, ‘the kingdoms of the earth were overthrown, churches laid waste, religion dragged through the mire and peace lost throughout the land’.99 Though in England the Exchequer had continued to function at a fairly high level of efficiency, some counties had not rendered account, and the war had caused a sharp drop in revenue.100 The northern counties had been ravaged by the Scots, while areas of the Midlands and East Anglia had suffered from the depredations of the rebel garrisons there. To make matters worse, a plague broke out in England in 1175, followed by a severe famine.101 In Normandy, the earliest surviving Exchequer roll, that of 1179–80, still revealed the impact of the war, both in repairs needed to castles and in fall in revenue from those areas worst affected by the conflict.102 The estates of Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen, for example, including those centred on Les Andelys which were among his key sources of income, had suffered badly at the hands of the French. In vain had he begged Archbishop William of Sens to urge Louis to refrain from destroying church lands, had complained bitterly to Pope Alexander, and in a letter of admonition to the Young King during the war, had tried to entrust his lands to his protection.103
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