The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  As Christmas approached, Matilda was growing desperate. Rather than wait for the knights her husband had sent to come and lift the siege of Oxford, she placed her faith in her own resourcefulness. One snowy night Matilda wrapped herself in a white cloak, slipped silently towards a postern door in the castle, crept out past the guards and headed away towards the snowy fields. Her sheer white camouflage – a ghostly cloak against the dark skyline – allowed her to trudge the eight miles or so to Abingdon without being captured. She walked the frozen landscape, ready at any moment for the crunch of hoofs in the snow to announce a search party sent to capture her. But it did not come. At Abingdon, she met with friends, who helped her on to the safety of the west country. She was saved, and with her, the fight for the kingdom of England lived on.

  This famous moment in the war was both providential for Matilda and disastrous for the realm of England. Now reinforced by fresh troops and encouraged by the marvellous escape of his half-sister, Robert of Gloucester led the fightback against Stephen’s kingship. But once again the war lapsed into violent stalemate. Stephen held the Crown, but he remained a weak king who could not command the undivided loyalty of the Anglo-Norman barons. Matilda was at large and more powerful than ever, but after the debacle of 1141 she was discredited in too many eyes to have any hope of conquest in her own name. The only decisive action was taking place in Normandy, where Geoffrey Plantagenet was rapidly occupying a duchy that Stephen had visited only once (in 1137) during his whole reign. By 1144 Geoffrey had captured Rouen and had been recognized as duke of Normandy, forcing those barons whose property bestrode the Channel into the impossible position of having to acknowledge two lords for the same estates.

  Both England and, to a lesser degree, Normandy remained crippled by conflict. The country, wrote the chronicler William of Newburgh, was ‘mutilated’. From 1142 England was firmly split between two courts – one under the king, nominally at Westminster and Winchester, and the other with Matilda, who ruled from Devizes in the south-west. The rule of law dissolved. With it went public order. England was torn three ways by a vicious civil war, between those who backed Stephen, those who backed Matilda, and those who backed themselves and no one else. With no adequate king in the north, King David I of Scotland ruled Westmorland, Cumberland and Northumberland. England, which under Henry I had been wealthy, well governed and stoutly defended at its borders, had now become a patchwork of competing loci of authority and power. The country groaned with popular anguish. ‘It was as if,’ wrote the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘Christ and his saints were asleep.’

  In such a situation there were no victors. Stephen and Matilda both saw themselves as the lawful successor of Henry I, and set up official governments accordingly: they had their own mints, courts, systems of patronage and diplomatic machinery. But there could not be two governments. Neither could be secure or guarantee that their writ would run, hence no subject could be fully confident in the rule of law. As in any state without a single, central source of undisputed authority, violent self-help and spoliation among the magnates exploded. Flemish mercenaries garrisoned castles and newly fortified houses the length and breadth of the country. Forced labour was exacted to help arm the countryside. General violence escalated as individual landholders turned to private defence of their property. The air ran dark with the smoke from burning crops and the ordinary people suffered intolerable misery at the hands of marauding foreign soldiers.

  The chronicles from the time are full of records of the bleak days that accompanied the war. The author of the Gesta Stephani records one example:

  [The King] set himself to lay waste that fair and delightful district, so full of good things, round Salisbury; they took and plundered everything they came upon, set fire to houses and churches, and, what was a more cruel and brutal sight, fired the crops that had been reaped and stacked all over the fields, consumed and brought to nothing everything edible they found. They raged with this bestial cruelty especially round Marlborough, they showed it very terribly round Devizes, and they had in mind to do the same to their adversaries all over England.

  Eventually, in 1148, Matilda left England. It may seem strange that she left a fight in which she had invested so much of her life, but after a decade spent leading the Plantagenet cause, her work was done. Her children – Henry and his two younger brothers Geoffrey and William – were growing up across the Channel. Matilda aimed to live out the remaining nineteen years of her life in comfortable retirement at the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pré, a cell of the abbey of Bec at Quevilly, where across the Seine she could visit Rouen, the Norman capital that Orderic Vitalis described as a ‘fair city set among murmuring streams and smiling meadows … strongly encircled by walls and ramparts and battlements …’ The city owed her much, for her grim efforts to distract King Stephen on the English front had allowed Geoffrey Plantagenet to capture it. Now she intended to enjoy the view.

  And in any case, England was not abandoned. Her eldest son was approaching his sixteenth birthday. It was time for him to take up the struggle, time for Henry FitzEmpress to try his hand at conquest.

  Ambition

  Henry, sixteen years old and burning with ambition, landed on the shores of Devon on 13 April 1149. It was his third visit to the fractured realm that he would have heard his mother tell him time after time was his by birthright. He had seen the country in its bleakest hours: a war zone in which empress and king chased each other from town to town and castle to castle, burning property and terrorizing the common people in their quest to grind one another into the bloodstained soil. But his mother, who had carried the fight against Stephen for so long, was gone into retirement. Henry, on the verge of manhood, had come to announce his leadership of the Angevin cause in England.

  This was not Henry’s home. He understood the English language, although he did not speak it. Yet he was no stranger to England. In 1142, aged nine, Henry had been brought briefly to the English front as a figurehead to his mother’s campaign. He had arrived in the dark days, shortly before Matilda’s great escape from the snowy wastes of Oxford. He stayed under the tutelage of his uncle Robert earl of Gloucester as England settled into its vicious stalemate. Henry spent fifteen months studying in Bristol, meeting the famous astronomer, mathematician and Scholastic philosopher Adelard of Bath, who dedicated to the young man a treatise on the astrolabe. Then from 1144, for reasons as much of safety as of political pragmatism, Henry had returned to his father, to help him secure his position as duke of Normandy.

  Henry was a strange-looking young man. His blood was a rich broth of Norman, Saxon and Plantagenet strains. He could switch in seconds from bluff good humour to fierce anger. From his father, he had inherited his auburn complexion and tireless energy; from his maternal grandfather a powerful domineering streak and the nose for an opportunity. Gerald of Wales, a writer well familiar with the Plantagenet family, left a vivid description of Henry later in life:

  Henry II was a man of reddish, freckled complexion, with a large, round head, grey eyes that glowed fiercely and grew bloodshot in anger, a fiery countenance and a harsh, cracked voice. His neck was thrust forward slightly from his shoulders, his chest was broad and square, his arms strong and powerful. His body was stocky, with a pronounced tendency toward fatness, due to nature rather than self-indulgence – which he tempered with exercise. For in eating and drinking he was moderate and sparing …

  From the earliest age, Henry was conspicuously brave, albeit rather reckless. When he had made his second visit to England, in 1147, it had been not to study but to fight. Although he was only thirteen he had managed to hire a small band of mercenaries to accompany him across the Channel, where he attempted to assist his mother’s war effort. The arrival of this wild teenager had briefly terrified England: rumours spread that he had come with thousands of troops and boundless treasure. The truth had been closer to farce: Henry the teenager had barely been able to afford to pay his hired soldiers, who deserted him within weeks of
arrival. (‘Weakened by sloth and idleness, overcome by poverty and want, they abandoned the noble youth,’ wrote William of Newburgh.) Ignoring the rumours, Stephen’s reaction to Henry’s teenage invasion was more amused than intimidated: in order to bring the rather embarrassing episode to a close, the king had paid off Henry’s mercenaries for him and sent him packing back to Normandy.

  Still, from those early teenage days there had been promise in Henry’s recklessness. That the thirteen-year-old Henry had the gall to attempt a solo invasion of England – no matter how poorly executed – is testament to his valuable time spent at his father’s side on campaign in Normandy. Geoffrey Plantagenet had involved his son in government since at least 1144, when he witnessed his father’s charters in Angers. He had watched how a long-term military campaign played out amid the complex, fractured politics of the French mainland. He knew then that he was being groomed as duke of Normandy, and it may also have been suggested to him that he would be count of Anjou too.

  It must have been during his days at Geoffrey’s side that Henry became a keen rider. He spent hours on horseback following his father about Anjou and Normandy, learning to gallop at what would become legendary speed. (In later years, Henry’s legs would be bowed from the shape of the ever-present saddle between them.)

  And Geoffrey must also have taught his son much about the conduct of business and war in a treacherous land. Twelfth-century French politics was violent, changeable and rough, and Geoffrey was an adept player. The land was divided into loose and shifting territories that owed little or no allegiance to any central authority, ruled across large swathes by noblemen who were little more than warlords.

  As he watched his tenacious father grind his way through a conquest of Normandy, Henry learned that political survival was a game of forestalling shifts of power, managing volatile relations between one’s friends and enemies, and appealing to the right allies at the right time in order to further territorial objectives. In such a bewildering business, only the most devious survived.

  In this game of feudal lordship, Henry knew that he had one potentially huge advantage. He was the son of an empress, with a claim to the English throne. France contained many powerful dukes and counts, but only two kings: the king of England and the king of France. To be a major force on the Continent, and to stand up to the new French king Louis VII who had succeeded to the throne in 1137. Henry knew that he must be more than just another powerful count or duke. He was first and foremost ‘Henry, son of the daughter of King Henry [I] and right heir of England and Normandy’.

  When he arrived in England in 1149 the young Henry’s first task was to establish himself as a credible successor to the empress’s cause. It was all very well having royal blood: he now needed the recognition of his peers. Here, the long days in the saddle paid off, as Henry rode north to be invested with knighthood by his uncle, King David of Scotland.

  He was girded in Carlisle on Whit Sunday 1149. And now, sporting the belt of knighthood, Henry decided to show England that he had the martial valour to match. On his way back south he attempted an attack on York. This was unsuccessful, and Henry had to flee to the Channel, harried all the way by royal attacks. The sixteen-year-old knight made his way to the south-west, relieved an attack on Devizes by Stephen’s son Eustace, and skipped back to Normandy. If it was not an entirely fruitful mission, it had a good deal more impact than anything seen from his family in England since 1141.

  In 1149 and 1150, Henry was emerging as a man of destiny. He was gathering political gravity. In 1150 his father invested him formally as duke of Normandy – a title Henry had already been affecting for some months. And in August 1151, Duke Henry performed homage to King Louis VII of France for Normandy: a ceremonial and manifestly public declaration of his ducal right and dignity.

  Then, in September, Geoffrey Plantagenet died. He was thirty-nine years old. According to John of Marmoutier, Geoffrey was returning from a royal council when he was taken ‘severely ill with a fever at Château-du-Loir. [He] collapsed on a couch. Then, looking into the future of his land and his people with the spirit of prophecy, he forbade Henry his heir to introduce the customs of Normandy or England into his own county, nor the reverse.’ Then: ‘the death of so great a prince having been foretold by a comet, his body returned from earth to heaven.’

  It was an abrupt end to a highly eventful career. And it left the whole fate of the Angevin cause resting squarely on the shoulders of Geoffrey’s eldest son. The eighteen-year-old Henry duke of Normandy still had far to go if he wanted to realize the ambitions of his parents. The fight would be hard. But the rewards that it promised were almost beyond imagination.

  A Scandalous Wife

  On 18 May 1152, at the cathedral in Poitiers, Henry duke of Normandy married Eleanor duchess of Aquitaine. Planned in haste and with the utmost secrecy, the ceremony had been executed as quickly as possible. And the effects of the marriage would reverberate across western Europe both in its immediate aftermath and for decades to follow.

  Henry, like his father, was marrying an older woman. Eleanor was twenty-eight years old. Henry had just turned nineteen. He was a restless young soldier little concerned with the trappings of nobility. His bride was almost impossibly glamorous, famous across Christendom for her unconventional beauty, her potent sexuality and headstrong political personality. Most important of all, until just over two months before the marriage she had been queen of France: the wife of Louis VII, mother of two French princesses and a vital part of the territorial reach of the French Crown, through her duchy of Aquitaine, which stretched down from the borders of Anjou to the Pyrenees.

  Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine was one of the greatest coups of his lifetime. For an ambitious young player in European politics, there could have been no more valuable bride. Eleanor brought wealth, power and vast lands. She was an experienced ruler and politician in her own right. And the fact that she had been recently discarded by Louis VII raised her value even higher for a duke of Normandy intent on establishing his status as a pre-eminent French nobleman.

  Eleanor’s life story was already extraordinary. She was born in 1124, the eldest daughter of William X, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou – a patron of the arts and an enthusiastic warrior, who alternated between quarrelling with the papacy and making pious submissions to ecclesiastical authority. But poetry, as well as piety, filled the souls of the dukes of Aquitaine. Eleanor’s grandfather was William IX, ‘the Troubadour Duke’, who had been perhaps the greatest wit, poet and songwriter of his age. He composed verse in the southern French language of Occitan, telling the stories of seduction, heroism and courtliness that were part of the romantic fabric of southern French life. His own reputation – and that of his descendants – mingled inextricably with the visions of passionate courtliness that lay at the core of his poetry. The house of Aquitaine was formed in his image.

  William IX had died in 1126, shortly after his granddaughter Eleanor’s birth. Eleven years later, in 1137, Eleanor’s father William X also died, rather suddenly, while he was on pilgrimage to Compostela. His death left a thirteen-year-old Eleanor both sole heir to one of the greatest inheritances in Europe and a vulnerable orphan in need of urgent protection.

  Aquitaine was a large, sprawling, very loosely governed territory that comprised more than a quarter of the territorial whole of medieval France. It included the lordship of Gascony, the cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne, the counties of Saintonge, Angoulême, Périgord, Limousin, Auvergne and La Manche. The influence of the dukes of Aquitaine looked north via the county of Poitou, and south, where they had links with Navarre and Barcelona. Aquitaine was warm, fertile country, which traded in wine and salt via the Gascon ports on the Atlantic coast. It had an important tourist industry, thanks to control over the pilgrim roads to Compostela, as they converged on the Pyrenean passes. It was a stopping point for pious travellers, who could take on supplies and enjoy the region’s hospitality before they disappeared into the sun-
baked mountains. It provided a potentially huge source of wealth, power and cultural influence to whoever could control it.

  Control came hard, however. Government sat very light in Aquitaine. Power and authority were subject to a patchwork of troublesome and rebellious lords whose fealty to the duke was seldom more than nominal. It was obvious to everyone that this was no place for a thirteen-year-old girl to rule. King Louis VI of France moved swiftly, and three months after her father died, Eleanor was married to the seventeen-year-old Prince Louis in Bordeaux Cathedral. This union with the heir apparent to the French Crown brought Aquitaine beneath the protection of Paris.

  Then, just days after Eleanor’s first marriage, her new father-in-law Louis VI was dead. Eleanor, in her teens, became queen of France.

  The southern queen-duchess had proved out of place at first amid the frosty monasticism of the Parisian court. There was a marked difference between the cultures of the Île de France, in the centre of the Paris basin, and the great southern duchy of Aquitaine. Even the languages spoken were different – the langue d’oïl of the north contrasting sharply with the langue d’oc spoken by Eleanor and her large group of attendants. Eleanor was a typically feisty, worldly, southerner, who both captivated and terrified her new husband. While Louis VII conducted himself with austere, sackclothed piety, Eleanor embraced the splendour of queenship. She and her entourage dressed and behaved extravagantly. Louis VII wore a habit and followed an austere, monkish diet. According to William of Newburgh, Eleanor would complain in later years that in Louis she had married ‘a monk, not a king’. Eleanor enjoyed a rich palace life that shocked her husband’s closest attendants.