Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  But Richard was not just a rough-hewn warrior. As a talented musician and songwriter, he had a command of Latin sufficient to discomfit a less erudite archbishop of Canterbury, and could parry and thrust with words as deftly as with the sword. There is simply too much evidence of his eloquence, verbal sharpness and skill in debate to be discounted as merely the flattery of sycophantic courtiers. His conversational style was described as bantering, half joking, half serious; he never made the classic mistake of the half-intelligent, which is to mistake earnestness for profundity.68 Like his father, he believed in putting the over-mighty clergy in their place from time to time. Much later in Richard’s career the great preacher of the day, Fulk of Neuilly, ventured to chide him for having three daughters, Superbia, Luxuria and Cupiditas (pride, avarice and sensuality) and suggested that he would never receive the Grace of God as long as they remained at his side. Richard thought a moment, then replied: ‘I have already given these daughters away in marriage. Pride I gave to the Templars, Avarice to the Cistercians and Sensuality to the Benedictines.’69 Turning the tables on him, the troubadour Bertran de Born called Richard ‘Nay and Yea’. This was an enigmatic accolade, which some have construed to mean that Richard was fickle and volatile, saying first one thing and then its opposite or that he said one thing and meant another. But, bearing in mind Bertran de Born’s close association with Eleanor and Richard rather than Henry II, the most likely interpretation is that the troubadour was paying a genuine compliment, stressing a capacity for self-confidence, quick decision and terse delivery - Richard Black and White, as it were.70

  Yet above all Richard was a product of the South and a lover of Aquitaine which was why, in later life, to the consternation of Anglocentric historians he neglected England and Normandy. More than once Richard dabbled in the affairs of Spain, and it is surely not too far fetched to regard this interest as the seedbed of the later crusader, for Spain was famous most of all for its struggle against Islam and the Moorish invaders. Although the author of the famous pilgrim’s guidebook inveighed against the Gascons for their drunkenness, lechery and poor table manners - they squatted around a fire instead of sitting at table, they shared the same cups and the same bedrooms and presumably therefore possessed women in common - he came close to apoplexy when he described the Basques and the people of Navarre. Among the crimes set down to their account were the following: they all ate out of a single cooking-pot like pigs at a trough; their speech was most akin to dogs barking; they had no shame about exposing their genitals especially when warming themselves at a fire; they treated women like beasts of the field and sometimes literally so as they practised bestialism with mules and horses and even attached chastity belts to these animals to prevent interlopers enjoying their ruminant favours.71 But to Richard this sort of propaganda was arrant nonsense; he preferred the freedom, hedonism and sybaritism of the warm south to the straitjacket of the priest-ridden north. Unquestionably the major influence in this as in so many other aspects of his young life was his mother, who idolised him and called him ‘the great one’. Richard’s status as his mother’s favourite son is well conveyed in state documents, where Eleanor habitually refers to him as her ‘dearest son’ (carissimum), while John is merely her ‘dear son’ (dilectum). The warmth of the relationship between mother and son was now about to have explosive and potentially catastrophic consequences.

  2

  EVEN WHILE SHE CHERISHED her beloved Richard, Eleanor of Aquitaine continued her amazing career as queen and woman. Apart from her other qualities, she was a childbearing machine of superb efficiency. In September 1158 she gave birth to her fourth son Geoffrey, her seventh child, and the fifth with Henry. Geoffrey as an adult turned out to be short of stature, but fair and handsome, looking more Norman than Poitevin. The most charming of the Devil’s Brood, he would also prove the most untrustworthy. Shrewd, cunning, a humbug and hypocrite with a compulsive tendency to deceit, Geoffrey had one saving grace: charm. With his mother’s vivacity, he was a plausible, persuasive rogue, and with his ‘gift of the gab’ he could talk his way out of anything, and into a multiplicity of intrigues, usually directed at his father. Gerald of Wales described Geoffrey as ‘overflowing with words, soft as oil, possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the seemingly indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite and a dissembler’. Roger of Howden’s assessment was along the same lines but pithier: ‘Geoffrey, that son of perdition’.1 In 1161 Eleanor bore her second daughter, also called Eleanor and in 1165 her third, Joan (or Joanna). John, born on Christmas Eve 1166, and named for the saint’s day, was her last child, the product of a rare marital coupling when Henry held one of his itinerant courts at Angers. Twenty-nine years separated the birth of Eleanor’s first child, Mary, from the last-born, and the age gap between John’s mother and father now loomed alarmingly: Eleanor was 42 but Henry still only 34. The adult John always struck observers as being the most purely Poitevin of Henry’s sons, being short and dark, a true child of the south. In time he would rival Geoffrey for treachery. He saw little of his mother during his childhood, as in 1169 she dropped him off at the abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, in the care of the Church, ostensibly to be trained as an oblate and, it seems, he remained there five years. According to some sources, at the age of six he was moved to the household of his brother Henry, the ‘Young King’ where he received the rudiments of knightly training. His academic education was entrusted to Ranulph Glanville, one of Henry’s senior officials.2 But modern scholars tend to doubt this story, and instead emphasise the five-year continuity at Fontevraud, the termination of which can be precisely dated to July 1174, for on the eighth of that month Henry II took John with him from Normandy to England.3

  Much about John’s early years is doubtful, but some aspects have become clearer as a result of modern research. For a long time it was thought that the story that he was born in Oxford was simply a corruption of the known fact that his brother Richard was born there; it now appears that both brothers may have emerged from the womb there.4 It also seems likely that Eleanor of Aquitaine was born in 1124 (rather than 1122, the traditional date), and that her childbearing record has been obfuscated by Ralph of Diceto’s clear statement that Henry II and Eleanor had six sons, two of whom died in childhood. This means that in addition to William (1153-56), somewhere along the line there was another short-lived male baby.5 Also a date of 1124 rather than 1122 for Eleanor’s birth means that she may have borne John not quite so dangerously near the menopause as has sometimes been thought - though all such generalisations are difficult, for in the twelfth century fifty counted as extreme old age. It always used to be thought that Eleanor slowed down in her childbirth pattern, whether because of stillbirth or lowered fertility with the onset of the menopause, and there may be truth in these assertions, but a last child at 42 puts Eleanor more in the realm of naturalism than mythology.6 But why was John, unlike his brothers, placed in Fontevraud from the age of three to seven-and-a-half ? It is highly unlikely that he was earmarked for a career in the Church, and the misleading term ‘oblate’ probably means no more in this context than that he was a ‘boarder’ at the abbey. John and Joan were the two youngest children, both put into care at Fontevraud because of Eleanor’s absence on the business of Aquitaine. In some ways it was an odd choice for John, for it was a ‘double abbey’, ruled by an abbess, where the women outranked, and were served by, the men7; it was a questionable environment for a prince, and an absurd one if John were really being trained as a prince of the Church, where male hierarchy was the dominant ethos. Many plausible reasons have been given for the choice of Fontevraud: it was equidistant from Eleanor’s domains in the south and Henry’s in the north; both children, and especially Joan, needed female attendants; the abbey had close ties to both Henry’s and Eleanor’s families; the nuns were aristocratic ladies; and, possibly clinchingly, Henry’s first cousin Matilda of Flanders was there as a nun in the
years 1169-74.8

  In later years John was notable for quasi-autistic tendencies, and he always seemed to have a grudge against the world. This has been plausibly linked to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s neglect of him. Some cultural historians have alleged that John’s infancy was not especially lonely and deprived, both by the general standards of royal childhood and the ethos and values obtaining in the twelfth century. Mothers, it is said, bore children but they did not nurture them, and it was servants, tutors and others who brought them up.9 But this collides with the known fact that Eleanor was much more involved with her older children, and especially Richard, than most high-born ladies of the time and that, in addition, she signally neglected John.10 John’s upbringing was markedly different from that of his siblings in a number of ways. Because of the seven-year age gap between him and Geoffrey, he had no brother with whom he could bond. He saw far less of his mother than his brothers had.11 He had very different relations with his sisters from those of his brothers; he did not know his eldest sister at all, and even Joan, his companion in Fontevraud, was sent off to be married when she was nine. With an absent mother, no grandmother and no sisters during his formative adolescent years, it would not have been surprising if John developed misogynistic tendencies, and there is much in his later career that points in that direction. John’s upbringing lacked stability also. Because he was his father’s favourite and constantly with him - which also meant constantly travelling and being on the move with the itinerant court - he lacked the security of a settled home environment, which Eleanor certainly provided, for three elder sons.12 Given that Eleanor and Henry were far from model parents for a variety of reasons, some of them obvious in the narrative already provided, and the ‘Devil’s Brood’ were never easy children at the best of times, John’s problems as a child can be seen as overdetermined and exponential.

  From the very first John showed himself to be a peevish, cross-grained individual. The chronicler Richard of Devizes once saw the youth virtually frothing at the mouth in a fury of frustration while he lambasted Chancellor Longchamp: ‘His whole person became so changed as to be hardly recognisable. Rage contorted his brow, his burning eyes glittered, bluish spots discoloured the pink of his cheeks, and I know not what would have become of the chancellor if in that moment of frenzy he had fallen like an apple into his hands as they sawed the air.’13 There were other such incidents. Fulk Fitzwarin was a playmate of John’s at Henry’s court and was often the recipient of the young prince’s foul tempers. ‘It happened one day that John and Fulk were alone in a chamber, playing chess. John took the chessboard and struck Fulk a great blow with it. Fulk, feeling hurt, kicked John hard in the stomach, so that he banged his head against the wall and became faint and dizzy. When John swooned, Fulk became frightened and thanked his stars that there was no one in the room but themselves. He rubbed John’s ears and eventually brought him round. John then went wailing to his father the king. “Hold your tongue,” said Henry, “you are always squabbling. If Fulk has done what you say, you probably deserved it.” He then called for John’s tutor and ordered him to be thrashed for having complained.’14

  John was a thorn in his father’s side before he could walk and talk, and the reason for this was the shambolic feudal system itself. Throughout his reign Henry was constantly looking over his shoulder at his nominal overlord, Louis of France. The French king loomed as a more formidable threat once he sired a son with his new wife Adela of Champagne. Contemporary eyewitnesses tell us that Paris was a riot both of colour and humanity in August 1165 when Louis was finally able to announce the birth of a male heir. Through a cacophony of church bells and tocsin calls the capital of France seemed to be on fire as the common people spontaneously lit hundreds of bonfires. A public proclamation established that the child’s name was Philip and promised that he would make France great: ‘By the Grace of God there is born to us this night a King who shall be a hammer to the English.’15 Philip was brought up to hate the English and their kings, his hatred doubtless fuelled by the rueful and envious broodings of his father, who both detested Henry and Eleanor personally and resented their great power. Louis once told Walter Map: ‘Your lord the king of England, who lacks nothing, has men, horses, gold, silk, jewels, fruit, game and everything else . . . We in France have nothing but bread and wine and gaiety.’16 The significant thing from Richard’s point of view is that within two years in the 1160s two men were born who were to prove his mortal and implacable enemies: Philip of France and his own brother John.

  Yet even without the unwelcome news that Louis, the supposed monk, had proved himself lusty enough to sire a son, Henry faced myriad problems in securing solid successions for his sons while unwinding the Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of medieval feudalism. In theory feudalism was a clearly constructed pyramid of hierarchical rights and duties; in practice it was arcane and confusing. Some writers have likened the power of the Capetian kings of France to the modern United Nations; to use Walter Bagehot’s terms, the ‘dignified’ aspect of feudal overlordship was impressive but the ‘efficient’ reality was that those who were formally vassal-states and vassal-kings defied their superiors with impunity, just as superpowers do with the UN today. Just as, other things being equal, nation-states like to make a show of deference to the UN to ward off the spectre of international chaos, so in the eleventh century vassal rulers saw ceremonial, religious and hierarchical reasons for paying lip-service to notions of fealty. Most of the de facto independent states within the confines of modern-day France recognised the king of the royal territory in the Ile de France as their feudal superior and accepted their technical position as fiefdoms by swearing oaths of homage. Technically, homage was the acknowledgement of land tenure, while fealty implied oath-taking, though naturally the formal acceptance of overlordship was usually combined with an oath of fealty. These oaths were the most important form of legal obligation in medieval society but, as has been widely realised, the paradox was that by the time the oath was the most important foundation of legal titles, it was itself largely a legal fiction; some scholars have gone further and suggested that most of so-called feudalism is a fiction.17 Men swore homage simply to get the feudal lord’s seal on their title deeds, then broke their oaths shamelessly. In the twelfth century the role of the oath as the guarantor of the feudal pyramid - king, dukes, great counts, lesser counts, barons, knights, peasants - was still potent though of steadily diminishing importance. From 1066 to 1204 it made no sense for a king of France to give orders to his ‘vassal’ the duke of Normandy, and, if he did give them, they were sure to be disregarded or disobeyed. Nonetheless, the dukes of Normandy still went through the farce of doing homage for the duchy.

  Feminist historians have gone to great lengths to try to work up the importance of women in the society of the Middle Ages, but there is really no need for any special pleading, as females were of overriding importance, if only because, biologically, they survived better than infant males. Nubile heiresses had to be found husbands and, by definition, in exogamy, a woman marrying ‘out’ handed her husband new fiefs if and when her brothers died. These new fiefs were the source of much of the conflict among medieval states. Female inheritance of land conceivably could - and often did - bring mortal enemies together as fellow-subjects under a common government.18 Blood-feuds cut across the lines of feudal obligation and, in any case, female inheritance almost made nonsense of the supposed hierarchical pyramid by making the vassal more powerful than the lord. In the eleventh century every great man held a number of otherwise unconnected fiefs, each with its separate traditions and history, and held these fiefs from a number of lords. If the lords made war on each other, the vassal had to choose between them, so inevitably ended up being branded as traitor by one of them. To take the example of Henry II in France, he was count of Anjou and Maine and lord of Touraine by direct inheritance from his father, duke of Normandy through his mother, duke of Aquitaine through his wife, and in addition had shadowy claims to Auverg
ne, Toulouse and Britanny in the form of homage from local lords plus a claim to the hereditary Seneschalty of France. The office of Seneschal was in the gift of the king of France, and Louis had cunningly given it to Henry as it was the Seneschal’s duty to suppress rebellious vassals. One of Louis’s great rivals therefore had a duty to waste his substance and resources subduing men who in terms of realpolitik should have been his friends.

  To an already complex structure Henry II added another layer when he sought a role for his sullen, jealous and rebellious brother Geoffrey, who had intrigued with King Louis against him. Originally possessor of the castles of Chinon, Loudon and Mirabel - and disappointed at these meagre morsels dispensed to him by Henry - Geoffrey lost even these as a result of allying himself with Louis and finding himself on the losing side. Henry, showing the complaisant attitude to treachery by kith and kin that was to be a marked feature of the Devil’s Brood, found a niche for him as Count of Nantes or Lower Britanny. The duchy of Britanny proper had been stable until the death of Conan III in 1148, but thereafter the territory was rent by civil war. Worn down by the endless factional turmoil and weakened by Geoffrey’s acquisition of Nantes, Duke Conan IV (or ‘Conan the Little’) gradually became tired of the struggle. When Geoffrey died at 24 in 1158 he tried to regain Nantes, but Henry claimed it was his as the inheritance of his brother.19 Crushed and demoralised, Conan lingered on a few more years until, in 1166, he sought permission from Henry to retire to his fief at Richmond in Yorkshire. With no sons, and his sister Constance certain to be married to a foreign lord, he realised that the game was up anyway. Henry nominated Constance’s husband as a cipher duke and forced him to do homage to him personally for Britanny. At the conference at Montmirail in 1169 which ended the war between Henry and King Louis, Conan IV accepted that his daughter should be betrothed to Henry’s son Geoffrey.20 Realising that Britanny was now a lost cause, he chose to do homage to Henry rather than Louis as overlord of the duchy. Since the Devil’s Brood had all done hierarchical homage among themselves and Henry II had made the meaningless gesture of accepting Louis as his feudal lord, it followed that a Breton knight now owed fealty to the following, in ascending order: Duchess Constance, daughter of Conan; to Geoffrey, her betrothed; to the Young King Henry, to whom Geoffrey had done homage; to the Old King (Henry II); and finally to King Louis. Unless all these were in agreement, our putative Breton knight was bound to end up acting treacherously to someone.