Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  The Young King’s own cult was to be of limited impact and short duration, but his widow Margaret and his sisters Matilda, Eleanor and Joanna played a role in disseminating that of Thomas Becket more widely through Europe. When in 1186 Margaret married Béla III, king of Hungary, she took with her a devotion to St Thomas, which must have been a constant reminder of her late husband, and Béla established a religious chapter dedicated to St Thomas close to his castle and royal centre at Esztergom.98

  Legacy

  If the Young King’s death had allowed Henry II and Richard finally to triumph over the rebellious nobles of Aquitaine, it almost immediately provoked another dangerous crisis. Philip Augustus’ relationship with young Henry had been cordial, but with his brother-in-law dead, he at once demanded that Henry II return Gisors and the Norman Vexin, which had been assigned as Margaret’s dower. He also insisted that she receive those lands in England and Normandy which had been assigned to her as her marriage portion, but which Henry II had withheld.99 His hand had been strengthened by the fact that Margaret herself was now out of Henry II’s reach, having been sent to the safety of the Capetian lands by young Henry before the outbreak of war in Aquitaine. Henry II, however, refused to grant Margaret these lands and revenues, claiming with evident sleight of hand that they had been ceded to Queen Eleanor. To confirm this transfer and deny any French claim, the king ordered Eleanor’s release from custody, commanding that she make a progress around her dower lands.100 Henry was equally determined to maintain possession of the Vexin. He replied to Philip that Gisors was his by right, for it belonged to the duchy of Normandy, while if King Louis had had any rights in it at any time, he had quitclaimed these on behalf of himself and his heirs when he gave Margaret in marriage to young Henry. Philip refused to accept this and a series of further conferences between the two kings failed to reach any agreement.101 Finally, on 6 December 1183, at a large assembly held between Gisors and Trie, Henry met with Philip. It was agreed that Margaret and Philip would quitclaim Margaret’s dower lands, as well as Gisors, in return for an annual payment of 1,700 livres angevins for her lifetime.102 Henry was to give Gisors and the Vexin to whichever of his sons he chose, but on condition that the recipient should marry Alice, who still remained in Henry II’s custody at Winchester and who had been betrothed to Richard since 1169.103 Margaret, unlike her unfortunate sister, was now finally free of the Angevins.104

  Philip’s price for such concessions, however, went far beyond an annual pension for Margaret: he demanded that Henry II perform homage to him. If the Norman Vexin belonged by right, as Henry claimed, to the duchy of Normandy, then Henry must also perform homage for it as the duke of Normandy.105 Henry II had been caught by his own logic. Despite the fact that, as Howden noted tersely, ‘he had never wished to perform homage’, he now had little choice but to do so.106 On 6 December 1183, Henry ‘swore homage and allegiance for all his lands across the sea to Philip, King of France’.107 It was no little irony that, for all Henry II’s attempts to enhance and preserve the status of Angevin kingship, the Young King’s death had brought about circumstances in which, for the first time, Henry himself as king of England was compelled to perform homage to a king of France. Philip’s demand, moreover, was the harbinger of a sustained, aggressive and ultimately successful attack on Henry II’s position, starkly symbolized when in 1188 Philip hewed down the great elm tree near Gisors which had been a traditional site for talks between the kings of France and the king-dukes of England and Normandy.108 The political landscape had changed profoundly since young Henry had held the crown over Philip’s head at Rheims in November 1179.

  Much of Philip’s success would stem from the continuing disputes between Henry II and his surviving sons over the question of succession and the division of the Angevin empire, and here the Young King’s legacy cast a long and baleful shadow. Richard absolutely refused to countenance Henry II’s plan that Richard would step into the Young Henry’s shoes as his principal heir to England, Normandy and Anjou, while John would replace Richard in Aquitaine and Geoffrey continue to hold Brittany: he had not engaged in ceaseless campaigns since 1175 to impose his rule on the duchy, then surmounted the massive rebellion of 1183, only to yield it to his youngest and untried sibling.109 But still more, he saw that, if he did so, his father would be no more willing to grant him direct rule in England, Normandy or Anjou than he had been to grant it to the Young King. He successfully resisted Henry II’s efforts to bestow the duchy on John, and easily repelled the attempts of the latter, aided by Geoffrey, to take Aquitaine by force.110 As the eldest surviving son, however, Richard had good cause to expect that as of right he would succeed on his father’s death to the heartlands of Henry’s empire as his principal heir, and contemporaries shared this view. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of young Henry’s death, Bertran de Born even assumed that Richard in turn would be crowned as associate king of England:

  One thing the Bretons and Normans and Angevins, Poitevins and people from Maine should know; from Ostabat to Montferrand, and from Rosiers to Mirebeau, everyone will see Richard’s armour, and since a count wants a free hand, and it’s his right, let him ask at once for the land of Saint Edmund [England], until they put the sacred oil on his forehead.111

  There is no evidence that Richard himself ever sought such associative coronation, but he was naturally anxious to secure Henry II’s recognition as his successor. Henry, however, dreaded a repetition of the Young King’s rebellion.112 He not only procrastinated but engaged in a dangerous policy of attempting to control Richard by deliberately keeping him in uncertainty. Even after the issue of the succession had been sharply foregrounded by Richard’s taking of the cross in late 1187 on hearing of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, Henry II’s continuing equivocation, then his outright refusal publicly to acknowledge Richard allowed Philip Augustus to play on Richard’s growing, though probably unfounded, fear that Henry would disinherit him in favour of John. Henry II had already driven Geoffrey of Brittany into the arms of King Philip by refusing Geoffrey’s demands that he grant him Anjou, and Philip had fuelled this division by granting Geoffrey the seneschalship of France, in circumstances very different from those of young Henry’s tenure of the office.113 By 1188, Richard himself had drawn closer to Philip and the following year, pushed beyond endurance by Henry’s intransigence, Richard repeated young Henry’s actions in 1173 by allying with the king of France and waging war against his father. Henry II’s inability to trust Richard, fuelled by the traumatic experiences of the wars of 1173–74 and 1183, had ultimately provoked the very revolt of which Henry had been so fearful. This time, the rebellion was successful: whatever Richard’s intentions, it brought about the downfall and death of his defeated father at Chinon on 6 July 1189.114

  In his Collection of the History of England of 1618, dedicated to James VI and I’s queen, Anne of Denmark, the historian Samuel Daniel reflected on the fate of the Young King.115 The subject was an all too poignant one, for only six years earlier James’ eldest son, another Prince Henry (1594–1612), also highly praised for his charm, courtliness and excellence in martial sports and as a leading figure in a chivalric revival, had met an untimely death through illness, shattering the hopes of many and causing an outpouring of grief.116 There were striking parallels between the two young men, but what set them apart were the Young King’s royal title and the ensuing conflict with his father. Daniel found Henry II’s decision to crown his son bewildering, not least as at that time ‘the King of England stood safe enough and was like to have his businesses runne in a strong and entire course’. Yet ‘by casting to make things safer than fast, hee lays open a way both to disjoynt his own power and embroil his people open to division’. Henry’s motive was, it seemed, ‘the love he bore his sone’ and his belief that it was insufficient security even to have had the nobles of the realm swear young Henry homage on two occasions. In a revealing reflection on the perceived power of the great councils convoked by Henry II, Daniel also remarked
that it was ‘strange that a Parliament, an assembly of State, convoked for the same businesse, would in so wise times, consent to communicate the Crowne, and make the common-wealth a Monster of two heads’. ‘Howsoever,’ he noted, ‘this young King shewed shortly thereafter that a Crowne was no state to be made over in trust, and layd much griefe, and repentence, upon his father’s forwardnesse’. Little wonder that his associative crowning had been ‘an act without example in this Kingdome’.117

  For thirteen years England had had two kings, yet the Plantagenet experiment in co-rulership failed catastrophically. The strife, tension and mutual suspicion that had marred the years between 1173 and 1183 ensured that the practice of associative kingship in England and the coronation of the heir in the lifetime of the ruler died with young Henry. Nor may it have been mere coincidence that Philip Augustus, fully alive to the opportunities such division had brought, was the first Capetian to forgo the long-standing practice of anticipatory succession.118 Yet sufficient examples of associate rule in territories as divergent as the empire, the Norman kingdom of Sicily, and the county of Flanders showed that the failure of such condominium was far from inevitable. The plan to crown young Henry had been motivated by far weightier considerations than Henry’s undoubted love for his eldest son. By it, Henry II sought to stabilize the succession to his great empire and thereby avoid a repeat of the kind of disastrous civil war that had engulfed the Anglo-Norman realm under King Stephen. At the same time, it was an integral part of his measures to restore and enhance the dignity of Angevin monarchy and bestow on his dynasty the regal lustre befitting the vast territories it now controlled. The counts of Anjou had come far very fast, but if Henry’s status as king could be impugned by his enemies, that of his son, born in the purple, could not. The title of rex filius regis applied to young Henry was far more than a convenient designator; it held a deep significance. There was nothing inherently unworkable in Henry II’s plan that, from 1162, England should be ruled by his young son through his trusted friend Thomas Becket, wielding the joint office of chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury. Had this arrangement been implemented, the course of Henry II’s reign, including perhaps relations with his eldest son, would have been very different. Responsibility for its collapse must be laid principally at the door of Becket for his resignation of the chancellorship, for it is impossible to believe he had not decided on this before he accepted the archbishopric.

  As a result, young Henry’s coronation was delayed for a further eight years during Henry II’s acrimonious quarrel with Becket, then carried out by the archbishop of York in highly contentious circumstances. Inauspicious as these may have been, however, contemporaries – including Thomas himself – were anxious to stress that the usurpation of Canterbury’s prerogative in no way detracted from the legitimacy and sacrality of the Young King’s regal status. It was only after Becket’s murder and canonization that young Henry’s coronation came to be seen as the baleful harbinger of Thomas’ martyrdom and an affront which would bring divine retribution on young Henry as well as his father. In reality, the wisdom of young Henry’s coronation had been thrown into sharp relief by Henry II’s near-fatal illness in the late summer of 1170.

  Why then did all go awry? In part, the problem was the nature of the relationship between the two royal authorities. As Samuel Daniel noted of young Henry’s crowning: ‘But now with what reservations this was done we are not particularly informed: whether there was an equal participation of rule, or only but of Title; and that the Father, notwithstanding this act, was to have the especial manage of the Government, and the Sonne, though a King, yet a sonne with limited power’.119 Young Henry’s contemporaries shared, and his opponents exploited, such uncertainty, which had been compounded by Henry II’s insistence on his son’s equality of royal status, so that even after two years of bitter war the elder king was still highly reluctant to accept the homage of his royal son. Unlike Frederick Barbarossa, moreover, who had created his son Henry king, Henry II did not have an imperial title which clearly marked a higher sovereignty.120 Such ambiguities, however, were not in themselves the cause of friction, and little suggests that young Henry did not similarly expect to rule under his father’s overarching authority. Far more significant was Henry II’s refusal to grant any such devolved and direct rule to young Henry in England, Normandy or Anjou, and his inability to see that by withholding the governance that such regal status required he was undermining the very regalian authority he had created and was placing his son in an impossible situation.

  This, moreover, was at a time when Henry II held more territories than any previous ruler of England. Just as William the Conqueror’s acquisition of England had raised Robert Curthose’s expectation for the rule of Normandy, so the very size of Henry’s empire, and his continuing expansionist policies, added further weight to young Henry’s natural expectation that his father would delegate rule of one major component of it. Further, Henry II’s unrelenting grasp on power stood in all too marked a contrast with contemporary examples of condominium and with the powerful precedent of his own receipt of direct rule of Normandy in the lifetime of his father, Geoffrey of Anjou. It was a perfect storm. Nevertheless, young Henry was far from blameless in resorting to arms against his father: as Jordan Fantosme has Henry II’s loyal barons tell him, ‘Your son is in the wrong to make war on you’.121 More than rash impatience and disloyalty, the Young King’s readiness to confront his father reflected too great a propensity to be swayed by those seeking their own interests in attacking Henry II. In 1173, Henry II had refused his son’s demands for direct rule in part because he believed the impetus for them had come from Louis VII and those who sought to weaken his empire through division. Paradoxically, however, had he not alienated the Young King, the enmity of Louis and the plots of Eleanor and his baronial opponents would have been far less effective. As it was, young Henry became an ‘anti-king’, all the more dangerous because of his status as an anointed sovereign, and the focal point for the many who resented what they regarded as the overbearing and oppressive rule of Henry II. Yet young Henry was no mere cat’s paw of the Capetian king or of his mother; he was an Angevin, well schooled in realities of power politics and well aware of the conflicts in his family’s own past, including a tradition of disaffected cadets resorting to the kings of France for aid. His rejection of his father’s terms for peace in September 1173 reveals him as resolute in his opposition at a time when Louis VII’s commitment to the war was faltering.

  The gravity of the threat posed to Henry II by the great war of 1173–74 trapped both father and son in its legacy of fear and mistrust and made it all the harder for Henry II subsequently to grant young Henry the very power necessary to place their relations on a more secure footing. Henry II’s attempt to use the wealth of the Angevin lands as a way of pacifying his son met with some success between 1176 and 1182, when the acclaim and kudos the Young King gained in the tournament circuit, combined with his leadership of a number of military expeditions, helped to allay his frustrations and project an imposing image of Angevin authority. Yet no matter how generous, an allowance in revenues could only be a temporary solution and it failed to address the fundamental problem that young Henry remained ‘a king without a kingdom’. Young Henry’s support of the dissident nobles of Aquitaine from 1182 in an attempt to replace Richard was jealously opportunistic, showed scant regard for his younger brother’s rights of inheritance and created renewed and dangerous division within the Angevin lands. Yet equally it was a mark of his desperation. Unlike the war of 1173–74, the Young King’s campaigns in 1183 had not been intended as an attack on Henry II himself, and his father’s subsequent support for Richard placed young Henry in an agonizing dilemma. Though hostile writers in Henry II’s court such as Roger of Howden and Walter Map saw only calculated duplicity by a would-be parricide, young Henry’s actions, including repeated attempts at negotiation and even the taking of the cross in a moment of evident crisis, were not the conduct of a ru
thless heir bent on the destruction of his father. Rather, his unwillingness to launch an all-out attack on Henry II may well have resulted in his losing control of the war to those, including his brother Geoffrey, with far fewer scruples.

  It is little surprise that the rebellion of 1173–74 and the circumstances of young Henry’s death during renewed conflict with his father dominated assessments of the Young King by writers in the orbit of the court of Henry II and then of Richard I. Yet their overwhelmingly critical voices have exerted too great an influence on more recent historians. In the early sixteenth century, Samuel Daniel offered a less hostile view and an acute summary. The Young King, he noted, was ‘a Prince of excellent parts, who was first cast away by his father’s indulgence, then after by his rigor; not suffering him to be what he himselfe had made him; neither got he so much by his Coronation, as to have a name in the Catalogue of the Kings of England’.122 Claims that he was feckless, unintelligent and uninterested in government have little foundation. He had been well trained in the practical skills of governing, both by Henry II’s ministers and by his father, and had jointly presided over many important secular and ecclesiastical councils. If as a child his role in their deliberation and policy making was more of a formality, the same cannot be assumed from his adolescence, and his father’s evident concern from 1175 that he should be party to major initiatives in justice implies a more active involvement. Henry II’s readiness to leave him as effective regent of Normandy in the early 1180s reflects a confidence in his abilities which appears not to have been misplaced. Nothing suggests that he was unready for or incapable of the direct rule he so ardently sought.