The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester – Stephen’s brother – chose to flee the country rather than to submit to his brother’s successor. In doing so, he forfeited to Henry six castles. The only magnate who required serious military measures to be taken against him was Hugh Mortimer, lord of Wigmore castle, who in the late spring clung to three castles in the Midlands and forced Henry to march an army against him. Even he was allowed to keep his lands after making formal submission to Henry.

  This was a lightning clean-up operation, undertaken in the spirit of reconciliation, not revenge, which owed a great deal to Henry’s earlier successful diplomacy in establishing and prosecuting the terms of the peace of Winchester. That there was so little resistance to him, and no threat of a serious rival for the throne, demonstrated the broad appeal of Henry’s strong, unified lordship. He was wielding the sword and the scales of justice like a king; moreover, he continued to procreate, quite literally sowing the seeds of future stability. But speed of reconciliation was a necessity, not a luxury. For England was only one part of the extensive Plantagenet domains.

  In 1156 Henry was forced to leave England, to deal with a rebellion in Anjou led by his younger brother Geoffrey. The troublesome junior Plantagenet believed that under the terms of their father’s will, Henry’s accession as king of England ought to have triggered the handover of Anjou, Maine and the Touraine to Geoffrey, as second son. And indeed, it was quite possible that this had been the elder Geoffrey Plantagenet’s intention. There was no precedent for a single man to rule England, Normandy and Anjon as one.

  Yet Henry had no intention of handing over the Plantagenet heartlands to his vexatious younger brother. Geoffrey had shown himself untrustworthy and disloyal when in 1151 he had joined forces with Louis VII and Eustace to attack Henry’s positions in Normandy. Giving Geoffrey lands that sat directly between Henry’s duchy of Normandy and Eleanor’s duchy of Aquitaine would be asking for trouble. It would also damage Henry’s ambition to rule his extraordinary patchwork of territories under his own, direct, sovereignty.

  But Geoffrey had to be appeased. And it was a sign of the seriousness of this rift between the brothers that on 2 February 1156 a family conference was held in Rouen under the matriarchal eye of the Empress Matilda. Henry met Geoffrey along with their youngest brother William and their aunt Sibylla countess of Flanders, to negotiate a deal. To isolate his brother diplomatically, Henry had performed homage to Louis VII for Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine in late January, and had sent an embassy to the newly elected Pope Adrian IV to request release from the oath he had sworn to uphold his father’s will. He was determined to hold on to Anjou, whatever the cost.

  The peacekeeping efforts came to nothing. Soon after the conference broke up, Geoffrey formally rebelled. The quarrel was resolved only later in the year when the people of Nantes and lower Brittany elected Geoffrey as their new count. It was a stroke of luck that found Geoffrey a rich new territory to call his own and doused his disappointment at being, as he saw it, disinherited by his newly elevated elder brother.

  A delighted Henry vouched for Geoffrey’s election to this strategically useful new position. He paid off his brother’s claim to a Plantagenet inheritance with the gift of a single border castle – Loudon – and a cash pension. This was an acceptable price to pay for quashing a distracting rift. Moreover, Geoffrey’s new position in Nantes extended the Plantagenet family enterprise further downstream along the Loire, and closer to the Breton seaboard – virtually the only piece of French coastline they did not already control.

  This appeased Geoffrey until he rather conveniently died in 1158. But it also showed that, for all his brilliance in pacifying his new kingdom, Henry would have to work with the unceasing effort of an Alexander or a Charlemagne if he wished to keep his vast continental possessions from breaking apart.

  L’Espace Plantagenet

  The 1150s were a glorious decade for Henry. From a position of relative insignificance and general insecurity in 1151, he had extended his lordship far and wide. The progress was relentless and impressive. In 1155 Pope Adrian IV (the only Englishman ever to boast that title) gave Henry a blessing to expand his power in Ireland, when he granted the papal bull Laudabiliter, exhorting Henry to reform the Irish Church. Henry did not act on Laudabiliter straight away, but a principle had been established. In 1157 Henry took the homage of Malcolm IV of Scotland at Peveril castle, regaining the northern counties of England that had been usurped during the civil war, and exchanging them for the earldom of Huntingdon, which was a traditional Scottish honour. The same year, Henry drove his influence into Wales, aiming to re-establish the dominant position in the south that had been established by his Norman ancestors. He was almost killed during an ambush in Ewloe Wood, near Flint, during one of the major military exercises of the campaign, and found the warlike, master-guerrilla Welsh as fierce an enemy as every one of his predecessors had. But the two great Welsh princes Owain of Gwynedd and Rhys ap Gruffydd of Deheubarth were persuaded to submit in the face of a massive show of military strength. This in turn freed Henry in 1158 to use the threat of military force to claim the county of Nantes, thus expanding his direct power into the duchy of Brittany. And in the same year, he betrothed his eldest son Henry to Louis VII’s daughter Margaret, with the Norman Vexin – a tiny but strategically vital portion of the borderlands between the Île de France and Normandy – given as a dowry to be delivered on the celebration of the marriage.

  Piece by piece, and front by front, Henry was proving to all the princes and kings with whom he rubbed shoulders that the Plantagenets were a power to reckon with. Already, as the 1150s drew to a close, Henry was the master of more territory than any of his ancestors could ever have dreamed of. And yet he was ever driven by ambition. The world, it seemed, was not enough.

  Thus, in midsummer 1159, in the season when the sun beat mercilessly down upon the southern valleys of France, a gigantic army rumbled towards the city of Toulouse. Inside the walls, 35,000 souls quaked with fear as they listened to the tread of foot soldiers, the thud and creak of warhorses and wagons, the blare of trumpets and drums, and the monstrous drag of siege engines. As the army marched, it wreaked destruction. Cahors, Auvillars and Villemur were ransacked and torched. Crops were burned, and property plundered. The whole region of Toulouse contemplated a new scouge of the west. ‘Henry the second … terrifies not only the Provençals as far as the Rhône and the Alps,’ wrote the author and diplomat John of Salisbury. ‘[He] also strikes at the princes of Spain and Gaul through the fortresses he has destroyed and the peoples he has subdued.’

  The army with which Henry II crossed southern France in June 1159 was the largest he would ever raise. The cost in England for mercenaries exceeded £9,000: more than the previous year’s entire royal income. The poet Stephen of Rouen wrote that Henry came with ‘iron, missiles and machines’, while the Norman chronicler Robert of Torigni called it ‘the military force of the whole of Normandy, England, Aquitaine and the other provinces which were subject to him’. There was no doubt as to his purpose. Henry came in conquest: to take Toulouse from its ruler, Count Raymond V, and add it to the duchy of Aquitaine. ‘The king was claiming the inheritance of his wife Queen Eleanor,’ wrote Torigni, laconically. But Henry was doing more than that. He was engaged in a wide-reaching campaign to assert his rights as overlord to a vast expanse of territory that stretched from the foothills of Scotland to the Pyrenees.

  The army included many great nobles. His recently reconciled neighbour Malcolm IV of Scotland sailed south with a flotilla, joining Henry’s army at Poitiers. Southern lords including Raymond-Berengar IV, count of Barcelona, and Raymond Trencavel, lord of Béziers and Carcassonne, joined in too, gleeful at the prospect of harassing a neighbour. And somewhere in the middle rode the churchman who had organized the campaign: Thomas Becket, chancellor of England and archdeacon of Canterbury, wearing helmet and hauberk, his armour gleaming in the sun. Becket had command of what is said to have been a person
al troop of seven hundred knights. This figure is almost certainly an exaggeration; even so, we can be sure that Becket mustered a strong military force, particularly for a cleric.

  The siege of Toulouse lasted from June to September 1159 and represented the height of Henry II’s ambitions in Europe during the early years of his reign. Henry had expended considerable time and effort reforming and securing the vast territories he had accumulated between 1149 and 1154. But he had no intention of making do with his lot. Toulouse marked the logical conclusion of a policy that he developed following the pacification of England. Viewed from the distance of centuries Henry’s tactics resemble imperial expansion: he used armies, quite often massive armies, to encroach on territory on the fringes of his already extensive borders to become not merely a king and a duke, but an emperor.

  In reality, his policy was more pragmatic. Henry aimed, in simple terms, to pursue all his rights, in all his capacities, at all times. There were occasions when he used military means, and others when he used diplomacy. He drove hard to have his lordship recognized wherever he could do so, tidying up all the fraying parts of his huge network of territories by waging wars against the fringes. Toulouse was just another border region, in which his authority was challenged. He was not so much leading a war of conquest as of recognition.

  Toulouse, however, was a famously tough nut to crack. Eleanor of Aquitaine held a rather tortuous claim to the county via her paternal grandmother, Philippa, who had been passed over for inheritance in the 1090s. In 1141 her first husband Louis VII had attempted to invade in much the same manner as Henry did in 1159, but had been repulsed. That did not discourage Henry II. He had a decent claim, the wherewithal to raise a large army, and the political momentum gained from success against the Welsh and the Bretons. Both had been overawed by his ability to raise large armies. As he turned to Toulouse, Henry simply ratcheted up the same policy.

  No doubt, as John of Salisbury reported, the princes of Spain and Gaul did indeed remark upon the size of the host Henry assembled, entrusted as it was to the charge of the splendid Chancellor Becket. But the princes would also have been sceptical of Henry’s chances of success. Toulouse was a large city, but well protected, positioned on a sharp bend in the Garonne, and divided into three fortified sections. The ancient Roman city was adjacent to a walled bourg which had sprung up rather later around the vast, beautiful basilica of the church of Saint-Sernin. A wall ran both around these two areas and between them, and to the south lay the Château Narbonnais, a separate castle in which the city’s ruler resided. It could not be parched into submission, since the river provided a constant supply of water and did not dry up during the summer.

  For all the efforts of Henry’s invading force, and all the misery they inflicted on the countryside and castles of the region, the sceptics were vindicated. As had happened to Louis in 1141, a king once again had thrown his might at the city defences and found himself thwarted.

  How did so huge a force fail to overrun a relatively tiny prize? Perhaps the liberal lordship of the counts of Toulouse was preferred to the clunking mastery suggested by Henry’s invading force. Perhaps the city’s natural defences really did make it untakable. But in either case, the decisive blow to finish Henry’s campaign was struck in the early autumn of 1159, when he was caught unawares by the arrival in Toulouse of Louis VII.

  Of all the lords in France it was Louis whom Henry troubled the most during the expansions of the 1150s. The duke of Normandy’s elevation to the rank of king made him a dangerous vassal for the Capetian Crown – a vassal with military resources and aristocratic prestige that far outstripped any other French nobleman. This was most obviously a problem where the boundaries of the duchy of Normandy and French royal lands met, in the area known as the Vexin. It was true that in 1156, in a ceremony of great pageantry and political symbolism, Henry had done homage to the French king, swearing to Louis that ‘I, King Henry, will safeguard the life, limbs and landed honour of the King of France as my lord, if he will secure for me as his fidelis my life and limbs and lands which he has settled on me, for I am his man.’ But Louis’s feudal status would be worth nothing if he sat by and allowed Henry to conquer Toulouse – an area that he had explicitly failed to bring within his own direct control nearly two decades previously. Moreover, Count Raymond was the French king’s brother-in-law. To let him down would proclaim a very hollow lordship.

  Louis arrived in Toulouse knowing that his mere presence at Count Raymond’s shoulder would force Henry to consider very carefully whether he could afford to continue his campaign. Attacking Raymond alone was one thing; to take on Louis and Raymond together was an act of explicit aggression that would cause Henry untold problems further north in Normandy and Anjou – areas he had been at pains to keep in good order. Furthermore, to take on Louis in an armed contest and lose would be to undermine the symbolic value of the whole Toulouse expedition as a show of force, expressing the combined might of the English Crown and Plantagenet dominions.

  Henry took counsel with his barons and his key advisers, including Becket. Without an insult to the royal honour, the Plantagenet barons counselled that it was unacceptable to attack the French king. Becket protested, demanding an immediate assault on the city. He was outvoted and ignored. Henry gave up the fight. Claiming that he wished to spare the Capetian king and the city, he withdrew from Toulouse around the feast of Michaelmas.

  The chronicler Roger of Howden called Toulouse Henry’s ‘unfinished business’. It was not quite a disaster, yet it was undeniably a failure. The most profitable event of the campaign was tangential to the siege itself: William count of Boulogne, the last remaining son of King Stephen, who had joined Henry on campaign, died on his way back to England in October 1159. His extensive English estates reverted to the Crown. Otherwise, all that could be said for an expensive summer spent hurling rocks at the walls of a city was that Henry had tested to the limit his geographical capacity for wielding military power, while simultaneously showing that a Plantagenet king could outgun, if not outrank, a Capetian.

  And there was another English cost to the failure of the Toulouse campaign. It brought into question for the first time the relationship between Henry and his closest counsellor: the chancellor, Thomas Becket.

  Unholy War

  In the summer of 1158, a year before he led Henry’s troops to the walls of Toulouse, Thomas Becket rode at the head of an even grander procession into the city of Paris. Coming in peace, as the chancellor of England and servant of the English king, he radiated solemn magnificence and glory. Becket had been sent on an embassy to negotiate the betrothal of Henry’s three-year-old son and namesake to Louis’s baby daughter Margaret, creating a dynastic union between the two royal houses of western Europe and securing the Norman Vexin for the Plantagenets. It was appropriate that he should impress the French king with the wealth and dignity of his master.

  Becket put on an extraordinary show. In private he was a rigorously pious man who scourged himself regularly, wore a hair shirt, ate frugally and never took a mistress. But Becket knew how to entertain a crowd. He swept into Paris with exotic gifts and lavish pageantry – dogs, monkeys, and a seemingly endless train of servants, all testifying to the English king’s largesse and splendour. A vivid record was kept by William Fitzstephen, who accompanied Becket and saw it all first-hand:

  In his company he had some two hundred horsemen, knights, clerks, stewards and men in waiting, men at arms and squires of noble family, all in ordered ranks. All these and all their followers wore bright new festal garments. He also took twenty-four suits … and many silk cloaks to leave behind him as presents, and all kinds of parti-coloured clothes and foreign furs, hangings and carpets for a bishop’s guest-room.

  Hounds and hawks were in the train … and eight five-horse chariots drawn by shire horses. On every horse was a sturdy groom in a new tunic, and on every chariot a warden. Two carts carried nothing but beer … for the French, who are not familiar with the brew, a h
ealthy drink, clear, dark as wine, and finer in flavour. Others bore food and drink, others dorsals, carpets, bags of night attire and luggage in general. He had twelve sumpter horses and eight chests of table places, gold and silver … One horse carried the plate, the altar furnishings and the books of his chapel … Every horse had a groom in a smart turn-out; every chariot had a fierce great mastiff on a leash standing in the cart or walking behind it, and every sumpter beast had a long-tailed monkey on its back …

  Then there were about 250 men marching six or ten abreast, singing as they went in the English fashion. At intervals came braces of stag-hounds and greyhounds with their attendants, … then the men at arms, with the shields and chargers of the knights, then the other men at arms and boys and men carrying hawks … Last of all came the chancellor and some of his friends …

  Arrived in Paris … he loaded every baron, knight, … master, scholar and burgess with gifts of plate, clothing, horses and money.

  It was a show fit for a king.

  In 1158 Thomas Becket was fast becoming one of Henry II’s closest friends and most trusted advisers. The king had found him working as a clerk in the service of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury. He had plucked him from obscurity and promoted him as the face of the most ambitious royal family in Europe. Becket rose to the task. He excelled in royal service.

  Twelfth-century government was still a scrappy, personal business. The courtier Walter Map has left us a dramatic, but highly plausible, image of the Henrician court in full pelt.