The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Discussions between the two parties took place throughout the late summer, overseen by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and King Stephen’s brother, Henry bishop of Winchester. In November 1153, at a conference in Winchester, a formal truce was agreed. Stephen formally adopted Henry as his son and heir. ‘What inestimable joy! What blessed day!’ cheered Henry of Huntingdon. ‘The king himself received the young prince at Winchester with a magnificent procession of bishops and nobles through the cheering crowds.’ England could harbour its greatest hope of peace and prosperity under a single, unified and universal royal authority since 1135.

  The peace was sealed in a highly symbolic venue and ceremony. Winchester was the place where English kingship was sanctified: the old Minster was the resting-place of St Swithun and legendary Saxon kings like Aedwig. The great men of the land gathered in the chill of the cathedral, to be addressed by King Stephen and Duke Henry.

  What a pair they made. The 61-year-old Stephen performed his role with dignity. ‘A mild man, and gentle, and good,’ was how the Gesta Stephani described him. Next to the impish, scruffily red-headed, twenty-year-old Henry, he seemed a relic of a departing generation. But he stood with grace and spoke to the congregation, uttering words that would have had his eldest son spinning in his recently dug grave.

  ‘Know that I, King Stephen, appoint Henry duke of Normandy after me as my successor in the kingdom of England and my heir by hereditary right,’ Stephen said. ‘Thus I give and confirm to him and his heirs the Kingdom of England.’

  Henry made a similar statement. Then, in the presence of all his future nobles, he did homage to Stephen, and received the homage of Stephen’s younger son William. It was an open and wholly visible representation of the new order of things. A new narrative of royal lineage had been publicly constructed. The legal chaos of a usurpation or deposition was avoided. Through sound military leadership and brilliant diplomacy, Henry had muscled his way into the English succession.

  The celebrations were lavish. Stephen swept into England’s ancient capital with his newly adopted son: ‘the illustrious young man was gloriously received in the city of Winchester, led by the king, with a glittering procession of bishops and famous men,’ wrote William of Newburgh. ‘Then the king took the duke to London, and there he was received with joy by an innumerable assembly of common people, with splendid processions …’ The truce of Winchester was formally sealed and distributed at Westminster. ‘Peace dawned on the ruined realm,’ wrote Henry of Huntingdon, ‘putting an end to its troubled night.’

  During the limbo that prevailed between Henry’s acceptance as heir and Stephen’s future death, the old king agreed to act on the next king’s advice. Together they began the long process of cleaning up the broken kingdom. There were three key tasks: suppressing violence and spoliation; ejecting the gangs of hired foreign mercenaries that had flooded the country; and levelling the castles that had sprung up since Stephen’s accession.

  There were still extremist factions who disapproved of the peace process. At a meeting in Canterbury in March 1154, Henry was informed of a plot against his life by dissident Flemings. It was alleged that Stephen’s son William knew about it. Judging that the situation in England was now stable enough to make his continued presence unnecessary, and also just dangerous enough to justify his departure, Henry decided to return to Normandy. As Stephen went on progress to the north of England, and busied his administrators with the task of circulating a new coinage, Henry left England that March, taking a discreet route to the Channel via Rochester and London.

  In late October 1154, Henry was campaigning with Louis VII against rebellious vassals in the borderland region between Normandy and France known as the Vexin, when the news reached him that Stephen was dead. According to the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, Stephen had been meeting with the count of Flanders on 25 October 1154 when he was taken ill. ‘The king was suddenly seized with a violent pain in his gut, accompanied by a flow of blood (as had happened to him before),’ wrote Gervase. ‘After he had taken to his bed in [Dover Priory] he died.’ Stephen was buried in the Cluniac monastery in Faversham, Kent, alongside his wife Queen Matilda, whose wise counsel he had lost with her death in May 1152, and his intemperate son Eustace.

  Stephen died disconsolate. He was a man obsessed with royal dignity and ceremony, and his failure freely to choose and anoint one of his sons as heir would have been compounded by the humiliation of losing the loyalty and support of his sworn nobles when Duke Henry came to England. But if his reign was a dismal failure, the Stephanic peace was a resounding success, negotiated well and upheld by the admirable will of the major magnates. Henry and Stephen had successfully created a vehicle to ensure the first peaceful transfer of royal power for nearly seventy years. When Henry came to England to claim his Crown in December 1154, it was at his leisure, knowing that he was wanted and implicitly accepted by the political community as king. He promised stability and a single, universal royal authority, such as had been sorely missing for the past, miserable nineteen years. What was more, he had proven himself. There was sycophancy, no doubt, in Henry bishop of Huntingdon’s invocation on the coming of the king, but there was real hope too:

  England, long numbed by mortal chill, now you grow warm, revived by the heat of a new sun. You raise the country’s bowed head, and with tears of sorrow wiped away, you weep for joy … With tears you utter these words to your foster child: ‘You are spirit, I am flesh: now as you enter, I am restored to life.’

  PART II

  Age of Empire

  (1154–1204)

  The most honourable and most victorious

  That has been in any land since the time of Moses,

  Save only King Charles [i.e. Charlemagne] …

  – JORDAN FANTOSME (ON HENRY II)

  A king who fights to defend his right

  Has a better claim on his inheritance.

  Struggle and largesse allow

  A king to gain glory and territory.

  – BERTRAND DE BORN

  Births and Rebirth

  King Henry II was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 19 December 1154, with a heavily pregnant Queen Eleanor sitting beside him. The elderly Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury performed the ceremony, and the great bishops and magnates of England looked on. Henry was the first ruler to be crowned king of England, rather than the old form, king of the English. And the coronation brought with it a spirit of great popular optimism. ‘Throughout England, the people shouted, “Long live the King”,’ wrote William of Newburgh. ‘[They] hoped for better things from the new monarch, especially when they saw he possessed remarkable prudence, constancy and zeal for justice, and at the very outset already manifested the likeness of a great prince.’

  Henry’s coronation charter addressed all the great men of the realm, assuring them that he would grant them all the ‘concessions, gifts, liberties and freedoms’ that Henry I had allowed, and that he would likewise abolish evil customs. He made no specific promises, and unlike his predecessor Stephen he did not hark back to the ‘good laws and good customs’ enjoyed by English subjects in the days of Edward the Confessor. But the charter mentioned specifically Henry’s desire to work towards ‘the common restoration of my whole realm’.

  England found the new, 21-year-old king well educated, legally minded and competent in a number of languages, although he spoke only Latin and French – perhaps also understanding the southern dialect as well as the northern, since his wife’s first language was Occitan. He struck his contemporaries as almost impossibly purposeful, addicted to hunting and hawking and sweeping at headlong pace through the forests and parks of his vast lands. Gerald of Wales descibed a King he knew well:

  He was addicted to the chase beyond measure; at crack of dawn he was often on horseback, traversing wastelands, penetrating forests and climbing the mountain-tops, and so he passed restless days. At evening on his return home he was rarely seen to sit down, either before or after supper … he would wear
the whole court out by continual standing …

  And then:

  He was a man of easy access, and condescending, pliant and witty, second to none in politeness … strenuous in warfare … very prudent in civil life … He was fierce towards those who remained untamed, but merciful towards the vanquished, harsh to his servants, expansive towards strangers, prodigal in public, thrifty in private … He was most diligent in guarding and maintaining peace, liberal beyond comparison in almsgiving and the peculiar defender of the Holy Land; a lover of humility, an oppressor of the nobility and a contemner of the proud.

  Another famous description, by the court writer Walter Map, remarked upon many of the same characteristics. Henry was ‘blessed with sound limbs and a handsome countenance … well read … easy of approach … ever on his travels, moving in intolerable stages like a courier’. He showed ‘very little mercy to his household which accompanied him … he had great experience of dogs and birds and was a very keen follower of hounds’. Even allowing for the flattery and platitudes native to courtiers’ pen-portraits, it was clear that the men who knew him found Henry a striking, successful, energetic ruler.

  From his earliest years Henry lived a peripatetic life. Although he invested heavily in magnificent castles and palaces, he rarely stayed anywhere for long. Henry’s travelling court was frequently described by visitors as disgusting: smelly and ratty, with the wine served so vinegarish that it had to be filtered through the teeth. Such were the living conditions of a man in perpetual motion. The chronicler Ralph de Diceto described an astonished Louis VII remarking on Henry’s ability to pop up anywhere and everywhere about his territories, without warning. It was as if he flew rather than rode on horseback, said the French king. He was, said the twelfth-century biographer Herbert of Bosham, like a ‘human chariot, dragging all after him’.

  The king could hardly drag his young family about with him, though, and after the splendour of his coronation, the Plantagenets found they needed somewhere to live. Their first son, William, was little over a year old at the time of his parents’ coronation; a second son, Henry, was born on 28 February 1155. Both the boys and Eleanor required households while they were in the country. The enormous Anglo-Saxon palace of Westminster had deteriorated badly during the civil war, and was now uninhabitable. So in 1155 the new royals moved to the royal palace of Bermondsey on the opposite bank of the Thames, far to the other side of the city of London.

  From the palace, Eleanor was able to visit London as she pleased. She would have found the English capital a busy, ripe city: frantic with commerce and entertainment, jesters and jugglers, crime, filth, despair and humanity. The Canterbury cleric and biographer William Fitzstephen wrote a famously wide-eyed description of the city during the 1170s – notwithstanding the writer’s boundless enthusiasm, this would have been much the same then as Eleanor found it when she first settled in England:

  [London] is fortunate in the wholesomeness of its climate, the devotion of its Christians, the strength of its fortifications, its well-situated location, the respectability of its citizens, and the propriety of their wives. Furthermore it takes great pleasure in its sports and is prolific in producing men of superior quality … there are also in London and in its suburbs thirteen conventual churches and one hundred and twenty-six lesser, parish churches … On the east side stands the royal fortress, of tremendous size and strength, whose walls and floors rise up from the deepest foundations – the mortar being mixed with animal’s blood. On the west side are two heavily fortified castles. Running continuously around the north side is the city wall, high and wide, punctuated at intervals with turrets, and with seven double-gated entranceways …

  Two miles from the city and linked to it by a populous suburb, there rises above the bank of that river the king’s palace, a structure without equal, with inner and outer fortifications … To the north there are tilled fields, pastures, and pleasant, level meadows with streams flowing through them, where watermill wheels turned by the current make a pleasing sound. Not far off spreads out a vast forest, its copses dense with foliage concealing wild animals – stags, does, boars, and wild bulls …

  Every morning you can find [people] carrying on their various trades, those selling specific types of goods, and those who hire themselves out as labourers, each in their particular locations engaged in their tasks. Nor should I forget to mention that there is in London, on the river bank amidst the ships, the wine for sale, and the storerooms for wine, a public cookshop. On a daily basis there, depending on the season, can be found fried or boiled foods and dishes, fish large and small, meat – lower quality for the poor, finer cuts for the wealthy – game and fowl (large and small) … Those with a fancy for delicacies can obtain for themselves the meat of goose, guinea-hen or woodcock – finding what they’re after is no great chore, since all the delicacies are set out in front of them … Middlemen from every nation under heaven are pleased to bring to the city ships full of merchandise …

  It was a busy, lively, international city, and it must have kindled in Eleanor memories of Paris – the grandest city in northern Europe, with its own rivers, palaces and rolling meadows: the site of some of her first experiences of queenship. But something in London must have agreed with the queen, for during her first spell in England, Eleanor managed what she most manifestly had not when she was queen of France, and gave birth to a rapid succession of healthy children. In September 1155, as soon as she had recovered from young Henry’s birth, Eleanor was pregnant again: a girl, Matilda, was delivered in June 1156, named for the empress who had struggled so long to secure the Plantagenets’ grand new realm.

  Matilda’s birth would have relieved some of the sadness Eleanor felt in June 1156, when William, her first son, died. The little boy was three years old. He was buried with dignity at the feet of his great-grandfather Henry I in Reading Abbey. It would have been a time of great grief for the family. But child mortality was a fact even of royal life in the Middle Ages, and the best insurance against it was a large brood of children. Without pause or delay, two more boys were born in England: Richard, at Oxford in September 1157; and Geoffrey, who was born almost exactly a year later.

  Henry, Matilda, Richard and Geoffrey – by Christmas 1158 Henry and Eleanor had four healthy children below the age of four. Three more children would survive to adulthood: Eleanor (b.1162), Joan (b.1165) and John (b.1167). A gap of four years, in which Henry was away from his wife, managing the further reaches of his realm, separated the two bursts of procreation.

  While Eleanor devoted herself to her first long cycle of pregnancies, Henry travelled frequently about his kingdom, addressing issues of government and diplomacy whilst finding time to indulge his great passion for the hunt. As he travelled, Henry grew familiar with the best locations both for government and the chase. Very swiftly after his arrival, work began to transform the hunting lodges of Clarendon and Woodstock into full-blown palaces to match the sumptuous comfort of any in Europe.

  But all the palaces in the world could not answer the pressing question of the 1150s: how could the new king heal a country so deeply damaged by civil war? England had supplied Henry Plantagenet with what the chronicler Richard of Poitiers described as ‘the honour and reverence of his royal name’. But this rich land, with its ports and towns, its hard-drinking, hard-working populace and its ancient history, needed to be rescued from the doldrums. Henry must reimpose on his new realm the royal authority enjoyed by his grandfather Henry I. It amounted effectively to a mission of reconquest.

  The realm was a shambles. Under Stephen royal revenue had fallen by two thirds. Royal lands, castles and offices had been granted away, often in perpetuity. The county farm – a staple royal income collected by the sheriffs – was running dismally low. Earldoms with semi-regal powers proliferated, and in places the country was not only ungoverned but seemingly ungovernable. Relations between Church and Crown were in stalemate following a long-running feud between Stephen and Archbishop Theobald over thei
r respective jurisdictions. Fortresses built as the Normans had conquered south Wales had fallen into the hands of barons and native rulers. The far north of England was effectively ruled by the king of the Scots.

  Henry’s first task was to stamp out the few embers of rebellion. His coronation charter had quite deliberately avoided confirming any liberties or possessions that had been granted by Stephen, either to churchmen or to lay magnates. Anything granted since Henry I’s reign was therefore held to be illegitimate, unless reconfirmed by the new king. He ordered the return to the Crown of all castles, towns and lands that had been granted away under Stephen, followed by an abolition of the earldoms that Stephen had granted to his supporters. In many cases, confiscated lands were granted back to their holders, but Henry was sending a clear message: lordship now began with him, and everyone owed their position and their possessions to the Plantagenet Crown.

  At the same time, directly after Christmas 1154, Henry set in motion a rapid decommissioning programme to enforce the destruction of illegal castles and the expulsion of foreign mercenaries. Hundreds of castles fell in a juddering demolition project during the course of 1155. The sound of falling timber was accompanied by a rush from the shores of Flemish soldiers, so despised by the chroniclers and ordinary people alike.

  Henry had to take serious direct action only against a few of the magnates. William of Aumerle, who had cemented his position in Yorkshire so as to make it virtually untouched by royal influence, was deprived of his lands and of Scarborough castle, the towering stone stronghold that sat on a headland, dominating sea approaches and the windswept north-east of the realm. Roger of Hereford, a Welsh Marcher lord of the sort disinclined to obey royal authority, was persuaded to surrender castles at Gloucester and Hereford by the sensible mediation of his cousin, Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford.