The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Henry put to sea in July 1174 at Barfleur, with a vast army of Brabanter mercenaries and the women and children of his immediate family: the Young King’s wife Queen Margaret, and his younger children Joanna and John. He also took with him a number of captives, including his own wife.

  Conditions at sea were wild, with a rough wind and violent waves. When his sailors expressed concern, Henry stood before his entire crew and told them that if God wished him to be restored to his kingdom, He would deliver them safely to port. He did.

  God’s will was at the top of Henry’s mind. He arrived in Southampton with one object before he engaged in battle. It was perhaps the masterstroke of his entire campaign. Rather than head directly for East Anglia, where Philip of Flanders had landed and was mustering his forces, Henry made for Canterbury.

  Henry could be a stubborn man, but he was usually sensitive to others’ perception of him. He knew that many people thought the Lord had rained rebellion and discord upon him in revenge for Becket’s death. He also realized that while the cause of rebellion was tangled up with the cause of the blessed martyr Thomas there could be no hope of peace.

  Three days after his landing, Henry arrived in Canterbury determined to put on a show. Ralph de Diceto described the scene:

  When he reached Canterbury he leaped off his horse and, putting aside his royal dignity, he assumed the appearance of a pilgrim, a penitent, a supplicant, and on Friday 12 July, went to the cathedral. There, with streaming tears, groans and sighs, he made his way to the glorious martyr’s tomb. Prostrating himself with his arms outstretched, he remained there a long time in prayer.

  With the bishop of London looking on, Henry protested with God as his witness that he had not intended Becket’s death, but acknowledged that by his rash words he had inadvertently caused it. Diceto continued:

  He asked for absolution from the bishops then present, and subjected his flesh to harsh discipline from cuts with rods, receiving three or even five strokes from each of the monks in turn, of whom a large number had gathered … He spent the rest of the day and also the whole of the following night in bitterness of soul, given over to prayer and sleeplessness, and continuing his fast for three days … There is no doubt that he had by now placated the martyr …

  Indeed he had. With this extraordinary show of public penance Henry had won the most important propaganda battle of the war. The chronicles buzzed with reports of this great king prostrate, half-naked and bleeding as he was whipped in the harshest manner.

  And as Diceto wrote, God and the martyr were listening. Far away from Canterbury, on the morning after King Henry’s penance, William the Lion was resting, his helmet by his side as he ate breakfast. The Scottish king had renewed his attacks from the previous year on the northern castles he had been promised in return for his complicity in the rebellion. The castle of Wark had withstood fierce blows with picks and siege-irons, an assault with catapults and an attempt to burn it down. The Lion had sent forces against Carlisle and Prudhoe, also without success. As he breakfasted he contemplated his next move: an attack on the formidable polygonal shell of the castle at Alnwick.

  Then, disaster struck. A band of Yorkshire knights who had been tracking the Scots from Prudhoe to Alnwick launched a surprise attack. A fierce battle broke out in which all of the Scottish knights were either killed or captured. William the Lion was among those taken prisoner.

  It was late at night, and Henry was in bed at Canterbury when the news of William’s capture at Alnwick reached him, brought by an exhausted messenger who had flogged his horses non-stop from the north to be first with the news. Brimming with joy, the king leapt out of his bed and roused all his barons to tell them the incredible news, thanking God and the martyr Thomas for his good fortune. With one fortuitous event, the heart was ripped out of the rebellion.

  With only the slightest military effort, Henry now consolidated his power in England, vanquishing his enemies in the Midlands and East Anglia. Those who were not subdued by force had surrendered to the old king by the end of July. On 8 August 1174, Henry was back in Barfleur. He had been away from the Continent for less than a month.

  During that time Louis, Henry the Young King and Philip of Flanders had broken into Norman territory and besieged Rouen. It had been Henry’s chief gamble that he would be able to smash his way to a rapid victory in England before the citizens of Rouen gave in. The gamble had been rewarded. Now, confident of victory, he gathered another force, containing fierce Welsh mercenaries as well as his trusted Brabanters. The French soon dropped their siege. Shortly afterwards Louis VII sued for peace.

  The Great War had been won. ‘Peace was restored after the kingdom’s shipwreck,’ wrote Henry’s treasurer, Richard FitzNigel. ‘The most powerful men who conspired … learned that it is difficult or impossible to snatch the club from the hand of Hercules.’ Henry’s skill and good fortune as a general had allowed him to outflank the inferior French king and his own callow sons. He had survived the betrayal of his wife Eleanor, who was now locked away in an English castle. He could afford to be merciful to his sons when they made peace at Montlouis in 1174.

  Having demonstrated his mastery at Moutlouis, Henry allowed that everyone who had rebelled might have their lands and possessions back in the same state as a fortnight before the rebellion began. He endowed each of his sons with castles or revenue – although not the power that they craved, for Henry lived in justifiable fear of dispersing his landed power before his death. The Young King received two castles in Normandy and £15,000 of revenue from Anjou in return for confirming the wedding grants of border castles that had been made to John. Richard received two mansions in Poitou and half its annual revenues. Geoffrey received half of Brittany’s annual revenues, and arrangements were made to formalize his marriage to Constance, the heiress to the duchy. Having given all this, Henry forbade his sons to ask for any more than he should choose to give them, then sent Richard and Geoffrey off to Poitou and Brittany to stamp out the embers of the rebellion they had stirred up.

  Henry reserved his real wrath for the older heads among the rebels. It was his wife who most appalled him. Eleanor had abused her position overseeing Richard’s fledgling regency in Aquitaine. She had stirred her three eldest sons to rebellion with the same callousness as had her former husband in Paris. And she had rebelled against her sex and status. Henry kept Eleanor in prison at Chinon castle for several months after the rebellion ended. Then, as the summer heat baked the thick stone walls in July, she was removed, transported across the country in the company of Henry’s two rebellious English earls (Leicester and Chester) and sent to Salisbury castle in England. She was kept in courteous imprisonment, or palace arrest, in various southern English castles for the remainder of Henry’s reign. She made a few appearances at court as the years passed, but she was never again trusted by Henry II, who briefly attempted to secure papal approval for a divorce. This came to nothing, and Eleanor remained an exile from the duchy she loved: a punishment that smacked of carefully thought-out cruelty.

  The last significant rebel with whom Henry had to deal was William the Lion. If Eleanor received the most psychologically cruel treatment for her part in the rebellion, then William was punished with the harshest political terms. On 1 December 1174 he was forced to agree to the Treaty of Falaise. Sealed at York, this made William a personal liegeman of both Henry II and Henry the Young King, confiscated castles and ordered the forced allegiance of the Scottish barons, bishops and clergy to the English Crown and Church. The Scottish Crown was thus subordinated to England’s, its dignity formally crushed.

  But even this was limited punishment, for in the light of the greatest military victory of Henry’s career, the king was interested less in revenge than restoring regular government to his dominions. The peace at Montlouis showed Henry at his grandest and his most astute. It was the high point, perhaps, of his entire reign.

  Henry Triumphant

  The Henrician court of the mid-1170s was uncommonly ma
gnificent. Henry’s victory in the Great War established him as the pre-eminent ruler in Europe. Louis VII had been roundly defeated, and in 1177 would sign a non-aggression pact at Ivry, recognizing that the French and English kings were ‘henceforth to be friends, and that each of us will to the best of his ability defend the other in life and limb’. The Plantagenet sons who would form the next generation of European rulers had been taught the lesson of patience as they waited for their inheritance, and had been put to good use across their father’s dominions, snuffing the embers of their own revolt. The king of Scots had acknowledged Henry’s supremacy in the humiliating Treaty of Falaise. In 1175 the king of Connaught, Rory O’Connor, agreed the Treaty of Windsor, which confirmed Henry as feudal overlord of most of Ireland and allowed him two years later to nominate his young son John as high king of the whole country. It seemed that none of Henry’s illustrious neighbours could compete with his mastery. Even the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s fortunes paled alongside Henry’s: while the king of England basked in military triumph, the emperor lost a long-running war with the Lombard League in May 1176, and felt his power in southern Europe seriously diminished.

  Everyone now looked to the king of England as the greatest ruler in Europe. His court received envoys and ambassadors from all over the Christian world: from Barbarossa, the emperor of Constantinople, the archbishop of Reims, the duke of Savoy and the count of Flanders. The pope sent a legate, Cardinal Huguzon, who remained with the king for several years and attempted to persuade Henry to support a revived European crusading movement by taking the Cross. Even William the Lion was a regular visitor to the royal court and council. Henry was called on to arbitrate disputes between the great lords of southern Europe. There were prestigious offers of marriage for his two younger daughters. His eldest girl, Matilda, was already duchess of Saxony by virtue of her marriage in 1166 to Henry the Lion. Even greater prospects now beckoned for Matilda’s sisters, as both became queens consort. In 1176 the king’s youngest daughter, ten-year-old Joan, was sent to be married to King William II of Sicily. The following year Eleanor, fourteen, was married to Alfonso VIII, king of Castile. The Plantagenets’ influence was spreading to the very ends of Europe.

  If his international prestige was at its zenith, Henry also regained his authority in his own lands – and especially in England – with astonishing speed and political intelligence. The two great aims of his reign had been to secure the frontiers of his empire, and to assert and deepen his authority within the areas he ruled. The Great War had left him largely triumphant over the enemies who had harassed his borders. From 1174 his attention turned to the second aim.

  The eruption of violence in 1173 had left England once again dotted with castles and fortifications occupied by the king’s enemies. Just as during King Stephen’s reign, these timber or stone garrisons with their fierce ramparts and deep ditches loomed against the skyline, proclaiming the local power of whichever lord kept them. To Henry, castles occupied without his explicit approval were affronts to his royalty. According to Roger of Howden, in 1176 Henry ‘took every castle in England into his own hand’. He expelled the castellans and placed his own men in charge. To stress the fact that this was a demonstration of his supreme public authority, rather than a partisan act of revenge, Henry forced even his own most loyal servants – including Richard de Lucy, who had done so much to win the war in England – to give up their castles. Some were destroyed, others redistributed to the great men of the land. The message was unmistakable: the authority by which the barons and bishops of England held castles and arms derived from one source only: the king.

  Castles and their keepers had always been a vital matter to Henry. The Norman chronicler Robert of Torigni noted that Henry’s reign saw castles built ‘not only in Normandy but also in England, in the duchy of Aquitaine, in the county of Anjou, in Maine and Touraine’. Since the Norman invasion castles had been the ultimate symbols of military authority. Henry spent heavily on them throughout his reign – at least £21,000 on rebuilding castles in England alone. He hastened the general movement in English castle building away from timber structures towards more permanent and impregnable stone fortresses. Particularly extensive works were undertaken at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nottingham, Orford, Windsor and Winchester. Improvements made to the stone keeps of castles in Scarborough and Bowes secured the border region with Scotland.

  But the jewel that glittered brightest among all of Henry’s castle-building projects was at Dover, at the head of the soaring white cliffs that overlooked the sea approach to England from north-west France. Where once had stood an Iron Age hill-fort, William the Conqueror had erected an earth-and-timber fortress. Henry’s massive reconstruction of his great-grandfather’s castle took twelve years to complete and cost nearly £6,500: more than two-thirds of the total expenditure on English castles during the final decade of his reign. When Louis VII visited England for the first time, for a four-day expedition to Becket’s shrine in August 1179, Dover castle was the first piece of England that the French king and his companion Philip count of Flanders saw. Before they left, Henry proudly took his guests on a tour of the building works. Louis was by now a frail 59-year-old, and Henry must thoroughly have enjoyed guiding his old adversary around the magnificent fortification. An imposing wall overlooked the cliffs and the sea approach, and work was beginning on a massive stone keep that would stand comparison with the great castles of his continental empire: the Angevin fortresses at Loches, Loudon, Montbazon, Montrichard and Beaugency, and the great Norman works at Falaise, Caen and on the border with France.

  Castle building, however, was just one part of a wider drive on Henry’s part to extend his authority in the 1170s. For besides being a soldier, Henry was an astute, legal-minded politician. As the military face of England was overhauled, now he also drove forward a decade of legal revolution that would influence the government of England for generations to follow.

  Henry’s greatest piece of legislative work before the Great War had been the Assize of Clarendon, decreed in February 1166. Its legislation brought the whole system of English criminal law beneath overarching royal control. Norman rule had seen justice served by a patchwork of local courts and jurisdictions that answered variously to the king, his barons and the Church. Now, in response to what Henry had seen as the lawlessness of the 1160s, the ultimate responsibility for dealing with robbery, homicide, theft and the harbouring of criminals was given to royal sheriffs and justices. Baronial and ecclesiastical courts still existed, but they were superseded throughout England by the king’s law. A standard procedure for dealing with crime was introduced. Criminals were to be rooted out through juries of presentment – empanelled bodies, usually of twelve men, who were required to tell the sheriff or justice under oath all the crimes that had been committed in their local community. The suspects were then tried by the ordeal of water – a ghastly ritual in which the accused was tied up and immersed in a pond, river or lake. To sink was a sign of innocence, to float a sign of guilt, which would be punished by mutilation (cutting off the convict’s right foot), banishment or death. A guilty man’s possessions would revert to the Crown.

  Under the Assize of Clarendon, royal sheriffs were awarded the right to investigate crimes wherever they needed, regardless of whether this crossed into great lords’ private jurisdictions. ‘Let there be no one, within his castle or without his castle … who shall forbid the sheriffs to enter into his court or his land,’ said the Assize. This was a truly revolutionary measure, for with it the hand of royal justice reached, or aimed to reach, into every corner of England. The king’s law now clearly trumped all other jurisdictions. Legally and judicially, Henry had declared himself master of his own realm.

  In 1176, this idea was more symbolically important than ever, and in January the Assize of Northampton reissued, modified and strengthened the laws that had been made a decade earlier at Clarendon. The disruption caused by the Great War had led to increased disorder and crime. Punishments
were therefore made harsher: those sentenced to mutilation would now lose their right hand as well as their right foot; those who survived the ordeal of water but were still notoriously suspected of felonies were banished regardless. To bring justice to the people, Henry and his advisers divided England into six judicial circuits, or eyres, and royal judges began a tour of the whole realm, designed both to restore England to order by punishing evildoers and criminals, and to establish the king’s law as the final and ultimate form of public authority. Crimes were investigated retrospectively to ensure that the royal justices could punish, in the words of the assize, ‘all offences … except minor thefts and robberies which were committed in time of war, as of horses, oxen and lesser things’.

  At the same time as reforming criminal law, Henry pushed royal justice to the heart of civil law. When word came back from his justices out on eyre that land dispossession was as great a problem as crimes against his subjects themselves, Henry decided to introduce a system by which land disputes could be quickly and easily settled by appeal to the royal law. The assize of novel disseisin put this into action. It allowed for royal justices to question a jury about contested lands. They asked whether a plaintiff had been unjustly disseised (i.e. dispossessed) of a piece of land; if the jurors found that he had, then the justices decided whether it was the defendant in the case who was to blame. The losing party in the case was amerced – penalized with damages – for the loss he had caused.