The Old King, however, must have been not a little alarmed when, en route to Périgueux, the Young King was not only admitted to Limoges but ‘joyfully received’ by the monks of St Martial’s abbey and the citizens.106 The shrine of St Martial was a major pilgrimage site, yet to undertake such a visit when Viscount Aimar was still engaged in hostilities with Richard was ominous. It was, moreover, one of the two traditional sites for the double investiture of the dukes of Aquitaine. As counts of Poitou, they first received the sacred lance and banner from the bishop of Poitiers and the archbishop of Bordeaux at the church of St Hilaire in Poitiers; then, as duke of Aquitaine, they were invested with the ring of Sainte Valérie at the abbey of St Martial in Limoges.107 It was at this very time, however, that the monks of St Martial’s were attempting to assert their pre-eminence over St Hilaire as the principal site of investiture, and developing more elaborate rituals, similar to those involved in the creation of dukes of Normandy.108 It was, therefore, a highly charged gesture when the Young King proceeded to gift to the abbey a rich robe ‘of silk woven with gold thread’ with the embroidered inscription ‘Henricus Rex’.109 It was a barely concealed challenge to Richard for the legitimate rulership of Aquitaine. If they had not already done so, it was probably at this time that the members of the league against Richard made overtures to young Henry, offering him their allegiance.110 Geoffrey of Brittany, who was in the Limousin at just this time, appears to have already been involved in the Young King’s plans to take Aquitaine; indeed, he may even have been their principal architect.111 It was only after celebrating the feast day of St Martial on 30 June, when amidst a great gathering in the abbey Abbot Theobald of Cluny celebrated Mass, that the Young King left Limoges to join his father and Richard at the siege of Périgueux.112
In the rebel camp, Bertran de Born was full of fighting talk: ‘At Périgueux, near the wall, I’ll ride out on my Bayard as far as I can throw a club. And if I find there a potbellied Poitevin, he’ll know how my blade cuts – on top of his head I’ll make him a slop of brains mixed with mail.’113 But with the Angevins united – or so it still seemed – the rebels had little choice but to seek peace. Elias yielded the city, and Richard at once had the towers of its walls destroyed.114 At an assembly at St Augustine’s abbey, Limoges, Aimar surrendered his two sons as hostages into Richard’s keeping, and pledged to give no further aid to his Taillefer half-brothers.115 When Henry II returned to Normandy to welcome his daughter Matilda and her husband Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who had been exiled by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, he may have brought potential dissidents north with him.116 Henry seems to have established Henry the Lion and Matilda at Argentan, which after Rouen and Caen was one of the most important administrative centres of the Norman duchy. It was while the court was residing there that Bertran de Born flattered Matilda with his amorous verse, wryly commenting that he wished he had the love not only of duchess of Saxony but also of her brother, Duke Richard.117 He satirized the Norman court as a dull and joyless one compared to the joie de vivre of the south:
A court is never complete without joking and laughter; a court without gifts is a mere mockery of barons! And the boredom and vulgarity (l’enois e e la vilania) of Argentan nearly killed me, but the noble, lovable body and sweet, mild face and good companionship and conversation of the Saxon lady protected me.118
Despite pockets of resistance from the Taillefers, which required further actions by Richard in November, the insurrection in Aquitaine appeared to have been quelled.119 Yet all was not well. For now the Young King once more began to press his father to grant him Normandy ‘or another territory where he and his wife could dwell, and from which he would be able to reward his knights for their service’.120 The recent sojourn in Aquitaine, on a campaign that had only served to strengthen his brother’s hold on the duchy, had fuelled the younger Henry’s sense of frustration at his continued lack of a realm of his own and the demeaning nature of his dependent status. It is possible that a catalyst for young Henry’s discontent was Henry II’s allocation of Argentan to Matilda and Henry the Lion, as this had probably been one of the castles assigned to the Young King in the wake of the peace of 1174. Howden, however, believed that his demands were made ‘by the counsel of evil men’, chief among whom was King Philip.121 If so, the king of France was following in his father’s footsteps, seeking to weaken Angevin power by setting son against father. Henry II, acutely aware that such demands had been the prelude to the great rebellion in 1173, was said to be ‘tormented with inner anxieties’: indeed, so worried was he about his son’s possible actions that he felt unable to leave Normandy to aid the justiciar Ranulf de Glanville in suppressing a major Welsh attack.122 Henry nevertheless refused the Young King’s petition. Recent events in Brittany had only served to compound his innate reluctance to alienate any part of the empire’s core lands: Geoffrey, who had assumed effective authority in the duchy in 1181 on his marriage to Constance, had almost immediately begun to assert his independence from his father by armed resistance, perhaps intending to press his claims to the honour of Richmond and the county of Nantes, which Henry II still held in his own hands.123 The king was forced to send an army into Brittany; it took and garrisoned the castle of Rennes, but Geoffrey had responded by burning much of the town and attacking Bécherel, one of Roland de Dinan’s castles.124 Father and son were reconciled by June of 1182, but the incident must have confirmed Henry II’s fears about what might happen should he grant young Henry direct rule over Normandy, or Anjou or England.
In high dudgeon at his father’s response, young Henry left for the court of King Philip, saying that he intended to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem: if he was to be denied a realm in his father’s lands, then he would depart for Outremer, where he might serve some worthy purpose and gain high honour fighting the enemies of Christ.125 Only the year before, Henry II and King Philip had held a summit in April near Nonancourt, at which a delegation of Templars and Hospitallers had produced a bull of Alexander III, Cor nostrum, warning of the parlous state of the Holy Land under the ailing leper king, Baldwin IV, and offering remission of sin for those taking up arms for its aid.126 The two kings had pledged their support, and Henry II had attempted to divert to the Holy Land a planned crusading expedition to Spain led by Hugh, count of Bar, one of the Young King’s former allies in the war of 1173–74.127 As yet, however, there had been no serious response from the Angevin or Capetian monarchs themselves. To send young Henry east at the head of an expedition would have fulfilled the Plantagenet commitment to aid the Holy Land while at the same time offering an outlet for the Young King’s frustrations. All knew that Baldwin had not long to live, and that his death might easily turn bitter factional tensions in the kingdom of Jerusalem into a dangerous civil war unless a new leader could be found behind whom all could unite against the onslaught of Saladin. Many would doubtless have welcomed the charismatic young Plantagenet; had the Young King headed East in 1182, he would have been one of the most powerful contenders for the throne of Jerusalem, and might well, like his great-grandfather Fulk V, have become its king. Yet Henry II was unwilling to endorse such a plan: it may have been that he feared that the challenges of crusade and the fierce political infighting of the Latin kingdom were beyond the capacities of his eldest son. Yet his subsequent refusal in 1185 to send any of his other sons east when begged to do so by the Patriarch Heraclius suggests instead that he was not willing to upset his plans for succession and division of his empire by risking any of his heirs on such an expedition.128
Anxious to prevent the Young King from taking the cross without his consent, Henry II quickly sent messengers offering to give young Henry a stipend of 100 livres angevins (£25) each day, and 10 livres angevins daily for his wife, Queen Margaret.129 This total sum of 40,150 livres angevins (£10,037) was an enormous increase on the yearly sum of 15,000 livres angevins which young Henry had been assigned by the peace settlement of 1174. Henry II also promised that within the year he
would provide 100 knights for service in the Young King’s household. As this was a very high number of knights to retain permanently within the familia, it may be that Henry II was pledging to fund this number of knights on a more ad hoc basis, as and when they were required to form the mainstay of the Young King’s tourneying retinue.130 Even if this was so, the rates of pay given by young Henry to his knights at the tournament at Lagny in 1179 indicate that it represented a very heavy additional outlay for Henry II. The Young King accepted his father’s terms, and swore that he would not withdraw in any way from his father’s wishes or council, and that he would make no further demands.131 Henry II had, or so it seemed, succeeded in purchasing the quiescence of his eldest son. Yet though it made the Young King wealthy, the settlement – in essence a money-fief writ large – still failed to address the fundamental problem which lay at the heart of conflict between father and son, and which also embittered relations between the brothers: he remained a king without a kingdom. For a man in twelfth-century noble society to move from the condition of the unmarried and landless ‘youth’ (juvenis) to the attainment of full adult status required the acquisition of land, whether by inheritance, marriage, gift or war.132 The manner in which contemporaries continued to refer to the Young King clearly indicates his dependent status. Ralph of Diss, writing of the Young King’s return to England in 1179, regarded him as ‘still under age (adhuc minoris aetatis)’, even though he was by then twenty-four, while in 1182 Geoffrey of Vigeois could still refer to him as ‘rex adolescens’.133 Without a realm to govern in his own right, it was young Henry as much as his youngest brother John who merited the epithet ‘Lackland’.
A Crisis of Faith: The Quarrel with the Marshal
The question of the Young King’s ability adequately to reward his household knights, which had in part prompted the demands he had made on his father, equally lay at the heart of a crisis which that same year had shattered the frail unity of young Henry’s own mesnie. For his lack of lands with which to endow his men impacted directly on their own status and prospects. By now, William Marshal had served his lord for twelve years but had not gained a foot of land; nor had any of his fellow knights in the Young King’s household, even though many of them had risked much by following him into war in 1173 against Henry II. It is telling that the Young King’s charters regarding former members of his uncle William Longsword’s household who entered his own are only confirmations, not grants from the younger Henry himself. It was Henry II’s own men and established nobles who had first claim on wealthy heiresses or lands that had escheated to the crown, and the financial resources to purchase them from the king. Henry II’s policy in the later 1150s and 1160s had been to recover, not disburse, royal lands and prerogatives, and his subsequent grants of royal demesne were very limited. Nor were there ready opportunities for young Henry and his companions to gain land by the sword. In Wales, the recognition by Henry II of the position of the Lord Rhys, prince of Deheubarth, as his ‘justice of all south Wales’ was a tacit acceptance that marcher expansion had been successfully halted. In Ireland, the English colonists had made impressive gains since 1169, but here again the tide of conquest appeared to have been slowed, and, as importantly, Henry II was increasingly coming to regard Ireland as the land for his youngest son John.
It was little wonder, then, that members of the household of the Young King, trapped as he was in a position of equivocal and secondary status, were in fierce and divisive competition among themselves for any chances of advancement.134 William Marshal may not have received a fief, yet by dint of his skill in the tournament and his relentless pursuit of ransoms and other profits he had done very well for himself. At the great tournament at Lagny in late 1179 he appeared as a banneret, an elevated rank which proclaimed him as a man of sufficient wealth and status to lead a company of knights in his own right, and to carry his own device on a banner.135 Yet this very prominence had earned him enemies among his fellows in the Young King’s household. The mesnie, no less than the wider royal court, was a place rife with envy and plots, and defamation by losengiers or ‘tale-bearers’ was an ever-present risk.136 A jealous clique headed by Adam d’Yquebeuf, Thomas de Coulonces and someone who with deliberate vagueness the History of William Marshal refers to as the ‘seneschal and master of the king’s household’ sought to discredit him in the eyes of their lord.137 They complained that on the tournament field he had put his own interests far ahead of those of the Young King, disloyally leaving his royal master in danger in order to accrue both glory and ransoms for himself. Much of his success, it was alleged, came from the practice of one of the Marshal’s supporters, Henry the Northerner, who in the heat of the mêlée drew knights to the Marshal by crying out, ‘This way, God is with the Marshal! (Ça, Dex aïe li Mareschal!)’. This quickly attracted such a great throng about William that no attention was paid to the Young King. Still worse, by adopting this cry the Marshal had even usurped the war cry of the Norman dukes – ‘Dex aïe!’ – as his own.138
In addition to these charges, the History claims that his detractors accused the Marshal of being the lover of the Young King’s wife Margaret. To sleep with the wife of one’s lord was not only an act of personal betrayal but an act of treason, because it threatened the purity of the seigneurial or royal bloodline. Allegations of sexual impropriety were thus powerful political weapons at court, both in romance literature and in reality.139 A major political crisis had disrupted the rule of Fulk V as king of Jerusalem, when the handsome young lord of Jaffa, Hugh II de Puiset, was accused by his rivals of being overly intimate with Fulk’s queen, Melisende.140 The Young King’s own mother, Queen Eleanor, had aroused much suspicion in 1148 by her conduct with her uncle Raymond, prince of Antioch, when she and King Louis sojourned there following the Second Crusade. While some among the troubadours claimed that true love only existed outside marriage, the reality for those caught engaging in extramarital affairs could be brutal.141 When in 1175 Count Philip discovered the infidelity of his wife, Elizabeth of Vermandois, she was spared, but her lover Walter was beaten with clubs and hung over a privy to suffocate.142 Events such as these must have lent a real frisson to the exploration of adulterous love in romances such as Tristan, where an older king is cuckolded by a supposedly loyal younger man, and it was at the behest of his patron, Marie, countess of Champagne and the Young King’s half-sister, that in the later 1170s Chrétien de Troyes wove one of the most famous tales of adulterous love, that between Arthur’s queen Guinevere and his best knight, Lancelot, in his Chevalier de la Charette.143
It has been argued, however, that the allegations of adultery levelled at the Marshal were more likely to have been an invention of the author of the History of William Marshal, influenced by just such romances. For although the History stridently denounced them as false, these charges of illicit love with the queen afforded a more glamorous explanation for the estrangement of William from the Young King, drawing attention away from the accusations of disloyal self-serving and lèse-majesté which in reality had probably soured relations between the two men.144 No other chronicler mentions an affair, real or alleged, nor is any disgrace known to have fallen upon Margaret.145 The affair of Adam of Churchdown in 1179 had shown how vehemently the Young King reacted to what he saw as betrayal, yet William was not threatened with any of the condign punishments for such treason.
According to the History, when the Young King heard the charges brought against the Marshal by Ralph Farci, a young nobleman whom the conspirators had chosen because of his intimacy with young Henry, he initially refused to believe them. When five other knights came forward as witnesses, however, the Young King was convinced and, greatly angered, refused to speak to William.146 He nevertheless recalled the Marshal for an important tournament between Gournay and Ressons in November 1182, which suggests that he still felt the need for his skill in the mêlée.147 Yet although William performed well in the fighting, the subsequent attempt by Count Philip to effect a reconciliation between th
e Young King and his most acomplished household knight met with failure, and the two men parted ‘in shame and anger’ without a word.148
The Young King returned to Normandy from the Île-de-France in time to join his father for the Christmas festivities of 1182 at Caen. Intent on making this a particularly magnificent court, Henry II had forbidden his barons from holding their own Christmas courts. As a result, in addition to a throng of leading prelates and nobles, over 1,000 knights were said to have attended.149 The presence of Henry the Lion and the Duchess Matilda, as well as Richard and Geoffrey, made this a great Plantagenet family gathering. Not everything, however, went smoothly: William Marshal appeared to demand justice from the Young King and the chance to prove his innocence by wager of battle against his accusers, who were present at court. When he was denied this request, he indignantly protested to Henry II that the judgement of his court was ‘weighted against right and the law of the land’, and sought safe conduct from the Old King to leave the realm.150 He soon received several offers of retainer and accepted that of Count Philip of Flanders, who granted him a lucrative money fief from the rents of St Omer.151 Philip’s reception of the Marshal – a man who, whatever the validity of the charges, had been publicly branded a traitor – was an indication of the extent to which relations had deteriorated between the count and the Young King in the wake of young Henry’s support of King Philip against him in 1181–82.152
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