The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Suddenly under the most intense pressure of his political career, the best the king could do was flee. He went to a corner of his empire where it was highly unlikely anyone would follow: Ireland.

  Henry landed at Waterford in October 1171 and stayed in Ireland until the following year. It proved a useful and politic distraction, as it expanded the scope of his influence to the western limits of the British Isles, and kept him conveniently away from the European spotlight while the horror that greeted the archbishop’s death unfolded.

  The situation in Ireland was complex. Although Henry had been granted a form of permission to invade Ireland by Pope Adrian IV in 1155, it had been a matter of limited urgency for him. But latterly, civil war had engulfed Ireland. The king of Leinster, Diarmait MacMurchada, was deposed by a coalition of enemies under Rory O’Connor and forced into exile in England. Henry had granted Diarmait permission to recruit an invasion force from among the Anglo-Norman barons, and Diarmait had used their support well, regaining his throne and handsomely rewarding the barons who had helped him. These included Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, the son of a former earl of Pembroke, whose nickname of Strongbow became famous across Europe. Gradually, Diarmait, Strongbow and their allies were taking on the role of Irish colonizers, and accruing to themselves the sort of autonomous power that Henry found troubling among any men whom he considered his vassals and subjects. Strongbow, in particular, was a troubling figure. Tall, fair and statesmanlike, he commanded respect and admiration from those – like the writer Gerald of Wales – who wrote about him. He had married Diarmait’s daughter, Eve, and when Diarmait died in May 1171, had inherited the lordship of Leinster and huge amounts of territory in southern Ireland.

  When Henry arrived, he brought with him a large army and threatening siege equipment. Yet this was a show of strength, not a serious attempt to throw men like Strongbow out of Ireland. Henry was satisfied at the recognition of his authority, and he was rewarded with this when all of Ireland’s invading lords and a large number of the native princes submitted to him. Strongbow was stripped of his lands and titles, and then regranted most of them as fiefs held explicitly from the English king. Lordship – and the pecking order of princes – was firmly established. Henry’s tidy mind was satisfied.

  He spent six months in Ireland in all, reorganizing jurisdictions and establishing his rights and prerogatives as high king. And as he busied himself, the horror that had engulfed Christendom following Becket’s murder began to subside. Pope Alexander III thawed sufficiently to write to Henry, commending him for his efforts in Ireland. The pope told the Irish bishops that the English king was ‘our dearest son in Christ’, who had ‘subjugated this barbarous and uncouth race which is ignorant of divine law’, and demanded that they assist him as best they could. In spring 1172, Henry was sufficiently rehabilitated to return to the Continent for a reconciliatory meeting that would produce a peace between king and Church, known as the Compromise of Avranches.

  The Compromise ended Henry’s painful breach with the Church. It was a worldly agreement that decreed that a concordat might in theory be made between Church and State, while avoiding most of the bigger questions about how that could practically be achieved. Henry was obliged to drop his insistence that his English bishops observe the letter of the Constitutions of Clarendon, and there were some well-meaning clauses pertaining to crusading obligations. It allowed all parties to go about their business with face saved and conflict averted. Yet to some contemporaries, it seemed that Henry ought still to be punished for his harsh words of Christmas 1170. And so it proved. Within a year of the Compromise of Avranches, divine punishment was visited on the king of England. According to the Chronicle of Battle Abbey: ‘the Lord’s martyr, or rather the Lord, for his martyr, seemed to seek vengeance for the innocent blood.’ The punishment came from a quarter that hurt the Plantagenet king most of all: his family.

  The Eagle’s Nest

  The rebellion that gripped the Plantagenets in 1173 was, on the heels of the Becket affair, the most serious crisis Henry dealt with during his reign. Apparently out of nowhere, Henry’s wife and his three eldest sons rose in arms against the 39-year-old king. Together with a patchwork of allies that included some of the most powerful men in Christendom, the Plantagenet children raised men and garrisoned castles far and wide across their extensive territories. Henry, taken at first by surprise, soon realized that he faced united opposition from across Europe, galvanized by the involvement of his family. He was forced to fight on multiple fronts for more than a year as his network of territories juddered and threatened to collapse. He would later liken the war to the experience of an eagle, pecked and destroyed by its own chicks.

  The trouble began with Henry the Young King. In early 1173, the younger Henry was approaching his eighteenth birthday. He was on the cusp of manhood, and married to Louis VII’s daughter Princess Margaret. Henry has been portrayed by the chroniclers as a feckless and fatuous youth. In person, he was tall, blond and good-looking, with highly cultivated manners. He was a skilled horseman, with a real fondness for the tournament and a huge household of followers who egged on his chivalrous ambitions. He was a twice-crowned king, for his controversial coronation by Roger archbishop of York had been followed in August 1172 by a second ceremony in Winchester, where his wife was crowned alongside him. On both occasions, Henry had been anointed with chrism – an especially holy oil – and treated with extraordinary reverence in the company of vast numbers of knights. At one coronation banquet he had been personally served by his father. The young king revelled in his own magnificence, and was widely seen as arrogant, greedy and glib.

  Despite his exalted position as his father’s heir, the Young King was also, paradoxically, denied the real fruits of kingship. Henry planned for him the succession to England, Normandy and Anjou. But as he approached manhood the Young King’s access to landed revenue and power – the essence of kingship – was strictly limited. Although endowed with titles, he was never properly invested with the lands and revenues of his kingdom, duchy or county. He was heavily in debt, as a result of maintaining a lavish courtly lifestyle without the means to pay for it. And his pride was wounded. Henry II had been sixteen when the full duchy of Normandy was settled on him. Henry the Young King was nearly two years older and had virtually nothing. The frustrations that he felt during his long wait to inherit were fed enthusiastically by his father-in-law Louis VII.

  The breach between Henry and his father occurred as a result of the old king’s arrangements for the six-year-old John’s marriage. To provide for John, Henry gave him a wedding gift of three castles: Chinon, Loudon and Mirebeau. These fortresses were strategically important, lying between Anjou and Maine. Chinon in particular was an important centre of Plantagenet power – a linchpin in what the Young King viewed as his rightful inheritance. All, therefore, were part of the power bloc that young Henry felt he had been denied. Within days of the castles being granted, the furious young Henry slipped away from his father’s company and rode for the court of the French king. A rebellion had begun.

  For Henry II to fall out with his eldest son was understandable – perhaps even inevitable. The situation became serious when Richard (who was fifteen) and Geoffrey (fourteen) also joined the rebellion, riding from their mother’s side at Poitiers to join Louis. ‘The sons took up arms against their father at just the time when everywhere Christians were laying down their arms in reverence for Easter,’ wrote the chronicler Ralph de Diceto. Public opinion pointed to Eleanor of Aquitaine as the person who stirred her younger sons to join the revolt against the old king. Henry himself certainly seems to have believed it, since he had the archbishop of Rouen write a letter to his wife reminding her of the duty to ‘return with your sons to the husband whom you must obey and with whom it is your duty to live’.

  Why Eleanor turned against her husband after such a long period of quiet loyalty is still something of a mystery. It has been attributed to peevishness at having been discarde
d by her husband for his mistress Rosamund Clifford (which had no basis at all in fact), or resentment at the influence of Henry II’s mother, the Empress Matilda (ludicrous, since Matilda had died in 1167). It is likely that she had a rather more substantial grievance.

  In 1173 Eleanor was as politically disenchanted as her eldest son. During the first fifteen years of her marriage to Henry, she had been occupied with producing children. Since John’s birth that period in her life had been over, and she had assumed a new place in the grand Plantagenet federation. She returned to her role as duchess of Aquitaine, exercising political control over the great southern quarter of the Plantagenet dominions that she had brought to them in her own right. Yet in 1173, she – like Henry the Young King – found her political role undermined by the reality of life with Henry II. Even as she acted out her part as duchess of Aquitaine, Eleanor’s independent control over her duchy was slowly being eroded. Ignoring his wife’s perogative over her own duchy, Henry had begun to dispose of parts of Aquitaine as he saw fit. He granted Gascony as their daughter Eleanor’s dowry when she married the king of Castile. Then, when making a peace with Raymond, count of Toulouse, he made the count do homage to Henry the Young King – who held no rights in Aquitaine. This was a move which implied to Eleanor that her husband had begun to see her duchy as subject to the Anglo-Norman Crown, rather than an autonomous part of the broader Plantagenet dominions. Like her eldest son, Eleanor began to feel that she had been granted the most hollow form of power. She chose to rebel in search of the real thing.

  It was not an entirely selfish rebellion, for Eleanor did not view Aquitaine’s independence solely in the light of her own prestige. It was also a vital matter for her favourite son, Richard. Under the Plantagenet succession plan, Richard was to become duke of Aquitaine. To that end he had been installed in 1170 as count of Poitou – the natural first post on the way to becoming duke. Eleanor had set up a regency council for Richard and took a very keen interest in his development as a politician. Her worries were therefore his. Would Richard, when he reached eighteen, be scavenging for scraps of real public authority in the duchy that Eleanor was teaching him how to govern? This would have been an intolerable situation for both of them.

  And so Eleanor rebelled, and with her sons began to contemplate a grand coalition with one man whom she would never have imagined siding with again in her long life: her former husband Louis VII of France. At the end of February she set out on horseback across country for Paris, where Henry, Richard and Geoffrey were already ensconced with the French king.

  For the second time in her life, she rode in mortal danger across the French countryside. The chronicler Gervase of Canterbury tells us that to hide her famous face on her way north Eleanor dressed in male costume as she headed from the castle of Faye-la-Vineuse, near Poitiers, in the direction of Chartres. Despite her disguise, she did not reach her destination. Eleanor was nearly fifty now, and not the same vigorous young woman who had evaded potential husbands during her flight to Henry in 1152. As she made her way along the roads, she was recognized. She was arrested by Henry’s agents, and taken to Chinon castle. When news leaked to the chroniclers of the day that she had been taken while dressed in male clothing, there was an outpouring of scandal and disbelief.

  Eleanor was captured early, but she had already guided her sons into the French king’s arms. When Henry II discovered their treachery he sent messengers to Paris, instructing the boys to quit their foolishness. The messengers found Henry the Young King in the company of Louis VII. When they asked him to return to his father, Louis VII interjected: ‘Who asks?’

  ‘The king of England,’ came the reply.

  Not so, retorted Louis, looking at the younger Henry. ‘The king of England is here.’

  War had been joined, and both sides prepared for a long fight. Louis VII and the Plantagenet boys attracted a wide coalition of the disgruntled to join them, many enticed by ridiculous promises of enrichment from Henry the Young King’s realms once they had been secured. Puffed up with pride when Louis had a special seal cut for him, young Henry set about using it. The whole county of Kent was signed away, along with important territories in Mortain and Touraine and thousands of pounds of revenue. With such gifts on offer Philip count of Flanders, Matthew count of Boulogne, and Theobald count of Blois all joined up enthusiastically.

  In England, they were joined by Robert earl of Leicester, son of the elder Robert who had served Henry II loyally as joint-justiciar until his death a few years previously. Several northern earls and the bishop of Durham also joined the revolt, as did Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk. Finally, the rebels recruited William the Lion, the king of Scotland, who had succeeded his father in 1165 – a man so hated by Henry II that the very mention of his name in a pleasant light was said once to have sent Henry into spasms of rage, in which he thrashed about on the floor of his bedchamber, eating the straw from his mattress. William was promised all the lands that his predecessor Malcolm IV had held in England during the Anarchy.

  These gifts of land and sovereignty show how callow the eighteen-year-old Young King was, and how limited his real understanding of kingship. Throughout the Great War that raged during the following eighteen months, Henry the Young King served mainly as a puppet for Louis VII and those allies who wished to erode Plantagenet power wherever they could.

  The first stage of the war took place during the summer of 1173. In May the allies attacked towns in the Vexin, without success. In June and July they had greater success, capturing Aumale and Driencourt – but at the latter Matthew of Boulogne was hit by an arrow fired from the castle walls and killed. In July, Louis and Henry the Younger besieged Verneuil, but the siege held out for long enough for Henry II to arrive in relief. The allied troops fled and Henry’s men slaughtered their rearguard as they gave chase.

  Meanwhile, in late June, William the Lion and the Scots attacked Northumbria. It was not an impressive campaign. They failed or declined to capture the castles at Wark or Warkworth, ravaged the area around Newcastle-upon-Tyne without consequence and engaged in a huge and bloody melee before the vast stone walls of Carlisle. The loyalist forces were led by the castellan Robert de Vaux. They fought with valour and courage, and seized provisions and booty from the Scots, which allowed them to withstand the subsequent siege. When news reached the Scots that a loyal army was approaching from the south under the justiciar Richard de Lucy, they melted away to cause minor nuisance elsewhere in the border region.

  The rebel strategy during 1173 was elementary and unsuccessful. They tried to open multiple fronts, dragging Henry II around and hitting him hardest when he was absent. Yet this played to Henry’s greatest strength: moving at pace around his dominions, acting decisively, and deploying mercenaries with pinpoint accuracy to break resistance. He moved his troops around on punishing forced marches – at one point apparently crossing Normandy from Rouen to Dol in two days. He packed his armies with fearsome Brabanter mercenaries: costly but highly skilled, mobile and vicious. Henry wrote that he favoured them for their skills in battle, fearlessness on the attack, and ferocity exceeding that of wild beasts.

  Henry’s energetic tactics not only cowed his less resolute enemies; they also exposed the French king as a bad general and a dreary, listless leader. This was quickly obvious, and Henry did his best to exploit it, offering his sons generous terms to lay down their arms during peace talks at Gisors. But the talks were soon abandoned when Robert earl of Leicester, who had joined forces with the rebels, created a scene, drawing his sword and shouting obscenities at Henry. Clearly, the king still had enough militant opponents across his vast domains for war to extend through the summer.

  As war continued on multiple fronts, Henry benefited from having highly competent subordinates across his lands. The very nature of his lordship was to establish each of his territories under the administration of talented men who could operate the machinery of government in his absence. Unlike his sons and their allies, he had no need to bribe
men to stick by his cause. Men like Richard de Lucy, the justiciar of England, supported their king primarily through loyalty and the bonds of service. Despite everything that had gone before, the Church supported him too.

  In September, the focus of war moved to England, where the earl of Leicester and another rebel baron, Hugh Bigod, hired bands of Flemish weavers-turned-mercenaries and attempted to ravage England. They landed in Framlingham and attempted to move north-west through East Anglia towards the Midlands. As the hired soldiers tramped through the countryside, the flat, chilly plains rang with their battle songs.

  No one who remembered the dark days of the Anarchy can have been pleased to see Flemings back in England. At Dunwich women and children hurled rocks at the rebel army. Henry’s justiciar Richard de Lucy gathered a great deal of support from the English magnates, though it was said that they were still outnumbered four to one when battle was joined in the marshland at Fornham, near Bury St Edmunds. But the loyalists won a resounding victory, scattering the earl’s knights and leaving the mercenaries to be attacked by local people. Many of them drowned in the fenland bogs.

  The winter, which was no season for medieval warfare, brought the customary truces. But when spring broke in 1174, war resumed. Now it was England where the situation grew perilous. William the Lion had regrouped during the winter and his forces were swelling. The loyalists suffered a series of defeats at Northampton, Nottingham and Leicester, while the situation in Northumbria was uncertain. To cap it all, Philip of Flanders had sworn on a holy relic that he would undertake a full-scale invasion of England before early July 1174. After repeated pleas from the English magnates, Henry left his continental lands and sailed for England.