The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  Through all this, Henry II was the arch dynastic architect, forever juggling, scheming and manipulating to advance the current interests and the future stability of his mighty Angevin realm. The royal seal set upon this design was to be young Henry’s coronation in the summer of 1170. If the king had harboured any lingering doubts about the wisdom of this definitive act of pre-designation, they were pushed to one side after a close brush with death, when the royal fleet was caught by a howling March storm in the Channel. Four hundred courtiers drowned in this catastrophe – among them the king’s personal physician Ralph of Beaumont. The ceremony was set for mid-June, so Queen Eleanor came north to attend, with William Marshal and the rest of her retinue in tow. Henry II circumvented the ongoing issue of Thomas Becket’s absence and exile by convincing Roger, the archbishop of York, to preside over the ritual. Realising that this break with tradition would probably elicit papal condemnation, the king ordered England’s ports to be shut, forestalling any message of objection from Rome.

  On 14 June young Henry was crowned and anointed as king of England in Westminster Abbey, before his father and mother, and an assembly of the realm’s greatest barons and nobles. William Marshal may well have been present as part of Eleanor’s household, and his biography later recalled the ‘rich pageantry’ of the day. The only significant absentee was Henry’s young wife, Marguerite of France, who had remained in Normandy. Some contemporaries thought that her exclusion was accidental – the result of unfavourable winds, or an unintended consequence of the Channel ports’ closure. More likely, it was a calculated move, designed to leave an opening for future political machinations, perhaps even for the eventual annulment of the marriage. This certainly appears to have been King Louis VII’s interpretation, for he was said to have been furious to learn that the ceremony had been held without his daughter.

  A new English monarch had been proclaimed: Henry the Young King; the man destined to become Henry III. The practice of preemptive coronation was common elsewhere in Europe and customary among the Capetians. It established an heir’s inalienable right to succession. But this was its first use in England since the ninth century, and it was not without its problems. There were now two anointed Angevin monarchs; two human beings who had been transformed by a sacred Christian ritual and thus held the same office. It was obvious to all in June 1170 that the teenage Young King was the junior partner – the associate monarch – waiting in the wings, but that situation could not be expected to hold indefinitely.

  For now, Henry II was ready to put his son to work. The Old King (as contemporaries began calling him, even though he was barely forty) was set to return to France, eyeing a reconciliation with Thomas Becket, and he wanted Young Henry to hold the reins of power in his absence. A special royal seal-die was created for the new monarch. This was one of the medieval world’s most critical instruments of government – a carefully engraved mould, designed to leave a unique, authenticating imprint on the wax seals attached to crown documents. Most English royal seals had two sides (thus requiring a two-part die) and typically showed a monarch both seated in state, and on the reverse, astride a horse, thus evoking the interlocking ideals of king and warrior. Young Henry’s seal had only one side and, unusually, depicted him without a sword in his hand – one of the key symbols of regnal authority. Henry II might be leaving his son with a seal-die of his own, but it was one that offered a graphic affirmation of the Young King’s limited, associate status.

  King Henry II also took care to surround his son with trusted counsellors. Those tasked to watch over the Young King’s governance of England were all known familiars of the Angevin regime; men like William of St John, Hugh of Gundeville and Ranulf FitzStephen. But Henry II also made one additional appointment. William Marshal was chosen to serve as the Young King’s tutor-in-arms and a leading member of the new monarch’s mesnie. This was a significant opportunity, not the same as joining Henry II’s entourage itself, but another step closer to the centre of power. Marshal was now to serve at the right hand of England’s next king; the glittering young royal described by the History as ‘the finest of all the princes on earth, be they pagan or Christian’.

  William was perhaps twenty-three-years old; the Young King, his new lord and pupil, eight years his junior. The age gap was not so wide, but Henry was just emerging from his youth, while Marshal carried himself as a seasoned warrior. He had seen battle and death, fought in grand tournaments and earned a certain degree of renown. As such, he was judged a suitable mentor for Young Henry – a figure who could act as his teacher, friend and confidant.

  To whom did William owe this marked honour? On the evidence preserved in the History of William Marshal, the decision seems to have been Henry II’s. The biographer recorded that ‘the king put [William] in the company of his son’, adding that Henry II ‘promised to do the Marshal much good in return for his care and instruction’ of the Young King. The History even noted that William graciously decided not to haggle over terms of service at this point. However, the biography also made it clear that Marshal came to London with the queen, and her hand in this affair must be suspected. Historians have long argued that Eleanor was already obsessively concerned with Aquitaine and the career of her younger son Richard, but this view is strongly informed by hindsight. In 1170 the queen had every reason to maintain close contact with, and potential influence over, her eldest son, the heir designate to the Angevin heartlands. The appointment of her household knight, William Marshal, as the Young King’s military tutor offered just such a connection. Only time would tell where Marshal’s loyalties really lay.

  King Henry II duly left Young Henry with William Marshal in England and crossed over to Normandy before the end of June. In the course of the summer the king met with Thomas Becket and, in official terms at least, their bitter quarrel was finally put to rest, though barely submerged tensions remained. The Angevin realm appeared at last to be at peace. Then, around 10 August, the Old King fell ill with a persistent fever and was confined to bed near Domfront in southwest Normandy. Perhaps years of incessant travel and the strain of managing his vast realm had finally caught up with him, and though a new doctor had surely been appointed to his household, Henry may now have missed the ministrations of the late Ralph of Beaumont, his former personal physician. As weeks passed, the king’s condition deteriorated, and he seems to have made a heartfelt appeal to the Virgin Mary, hoping for a miraculous cure. It seemed that his careful provisions for the Angevin succession had been made not a moment too soon. Fearing that he was close to death, the Old King issued detailed instructions for his burial, and drew up a final will confirming the Treaty of Montmirail and Young Henry’s rights to England, Normandy, Anjou and Maine. News of the king’s grave infirmity crossed the Channel, only to be followed in September by rumours that Henry II had died. The Angevin world held its breath. It seemed that a new young king was about to come to power, and William Marshal would be at his side.

  AN UNQUIET HEIR

  Henry the Young King came tantalisingly close to power that autumn. Waiting anxiously in London through mid-September, Henry and the entourage of clerics and knights like William Marshal around him, must all have been quietly preparing for his accession – for the moment when the reign of King Henry III would begin in earnest. But in the end, news of the Old King’s recovery arrived and the moment of danger and opportunity passed. Given that Young Henry was only fifteen and possessed very limited experience of rule, these tidings were perhaps greeted, first and foremost, with a sense of relief. After all, the Young King still had a long and golden future ahead of him; his day would come.

  Though Henry II ultimately survived this illness, the experience evidently left him shaken. Having despaired of his life, the king immediately set out on a 300-mile pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Rocamadour, in Aquitaine. This remote cult site housed a famous effigy, the Black Madonna – thought to be a particularly powerful focus of the saint’s presence. It was also the suppose
d burial site of Mary’s own household servant Amator (who, legend told, had travelled from Palestine to France, living out his days as a hermit in the local cliff-side caves). In spite of his convalescent state, the Old King made the long, arduous journey to venerate the Virgin and show gratitude for his recovery, distributing alms to the poor as he went. Perhaps he even followed local custom of ascending the steep flights of steps leading to the cliff-top shrine on his knees. With his act of devotion complete, Henry returned to the business of state.

  Young Henry was to remain in his father’s shadow, as heir to the realm and associate king, for years to come. Historians have traditionally offered a withering assessment of Young Henry’s career after the summer of 1170. He is typically portrayed as a handsome but feckless dandy – the extravagant playboy who, once denied the chance to rule in his own right, submerged himself in the dissolute cult of chivalry, with William Marshal as his guide. Though published as long ago as 1973, Professor Lewis Warren’s seminal biography of King Henry II has retained its influence, and Warren’s appraisal of the Young King in this work was thoroughly damning. Henry was dismissed as ‘shallow, vain, careless, empty-headed, incompetent, improvident and irresponsible’ – quite a list of failings. This estimation has held in almost all quarters of academic perception and (if he is remembered at all) in popular imagination, and as a result Young Henry remains a misunderstood and often overlooked figure to this day. He is England’s forgotten king.

  But a closer and more impartial study of Henry’s life, and his association with William Marshal, reveals that the accepted view is overly simplistic – at times even misrepresentative – and deeply shaded by hindsight. In fact, the best contemporary evidence indicates that the Young King was an able and politically engaged member of the Angevin dynasty, and throughout this period he seems to have worked in close concert with William Marshal. To begin with, in the early 1170s, Henry helped his father to steady the realm during two years of intense crisis by governing England in the Old King’s absence.

  Having recovered from his grave illness in the autumn of 1170, Henry II must have imagined that the worst was over, but this crisis was soon overshadowed. Towards the end of that year Thomas Becket, the long-exiled archbishop of Canterbury, returned to England. Some weeks later, four knights attending the Old King’s Christmas Court in Normandy overheard their monarch angrily decrying Becket’s continued disobedience. Misinterpreting these angry words as a signal for direct action, they crossed the Channel and made for Canterbury. Perhaps their first intention was to arrest the archbishop, but once they had Becket cornered inside the great cathedral by the altar, heated words were exchanged. With their swords already drawn, the enraged knights began hacking at the defenceless prelate and Thomas died beneath a furious cascade of blows that left his brains strewn across the floor.

  The scandal of this horrific murder caused outrage across Europe and marked a defining moment in Henry II’s reign. Not surprisingly, the Roman Church responded to the slaying of one of its leading prelates with vituperative condemnation. The emergence of a powerful international cult dedicated to Archbishop Thomas was more remarkable. In life Becket had been a divisive figure; in death he was revered as a pious martyr. Reports of miracles associated with his resting place in Canterbury were soon legion, and by early 1173 he had been formally canonised as a saint. The Old King survived this storm through a mixture of apologetic diplomacy and absenteeism – setting off to conquer Ireland, while closing the ports behind him so that no orders of excommunication could be delivered. By 1172 a measure of calm had returned and, in May that year, Henry submitted to the formal judgement of a papal legate in Normandy and performed a public penance.

  All of this meant that Henry II did not return to England until the summer of 1172 and, throughout this extended period, the Young King ruled in his stead without apparent difficulty. There is some evidence that he was already struggling to live within his means, given that he had no independent wealth or income of his own. The History of William Marshal recalled that in these years, while William was tutoring Henry in the art of combat, the Young King was ‘spending lavishly’, but observed that this was only to be expected from ‘a king and a son of a king’. In late 1171 Henry crossed to Normandy to hold his own Christmas Court near Bayeux for the first time. One contemporary noted that the Young King was ‘anxious that the festival should be celebrated with great magnificence’ – this was his chance to display the largesse expected of any lord of knights, let alone a crown monarch. A ‘multitude’ attended this opulent gathering; so many that when William of St John jokingly declared that only those named William could dine beside him, 110 men were still left in the room, Marshal presumably among them.

  On King Louis VII’s insistence, Young Henry underwent a second coronation in August 1172, this time with his young wife Marguerite of France in attendance, and Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen presiding over the solemn ritual performed in Winchester Cathedral. Despite the fact that they had already been married for more than a decade, it was probably only from this point onwards that Henry actually began to live with his wife. His status as king had now been proclaimed twice, yet he still had no lands of his own, and with the Old King’s health and political position rejuvenated, Henry had little prospect of inheriting the realm in the near future. The disjuncture between his royal title and actual position began to grate.

  The Young King has often been represented as a rather petulant figure in this period – the impatient, disobedient teenager, unwilling to wait his proper turn. But this ignores the mounting financial and social pressures that Henry had to shoulder as he approached his eighteenth year and full adulthood. He now had a wife and queen of his own to support, and although Marguerite had been allocated valuable dower lands and a hefty cash dowry, these remained in the hands of the Old King, beyond Henry’s grasp. Even contemporaries who usually favoured Henry II acknowledged that the Young King ‘took it badly that his father did not wish to assign him any territory where he could dwell with his queen’. Young Henry also had to think of his household knights – the men who naturally anticipated reward for their loyal service.

  After his first coronation in 1170, Henry gathered a close-knit group of retainers around him. Five knights formed the core of the Young King’s mesnie from this period onwards: three were originally from Normandy – Adam of Yquebeuf, Gerard Talbot and Robert Tresgoz; two from England – Simon Marsh and, of course, William Marshal. By the cultural norms of the day, a man in Henry’s position was expected to offer these supporters protection, advancement and ultimately land; any failure or inability to do so could be seen as a cause of shame, dishonour and impotence. Knights in this period, Marshal included, routinely nagged their lords for favours, seeking everything from property to the hand of wealthy heiresses. This was all an accepted part of climbing the social ladder. But for now the Young King had little to give.

  On the whole, these pressures remained hidden in the History of William Marshal, but other contemporary sources suggest that, by the end of 1172, some of Young Henry’s retainers were encouraging him to take action. One chronicler noted that ‘certain persons began whispering’ to Henry that he ought ‘to rule jointly with his father’ or even ‘rule alone, for having been crowned, the reign of his father had effectively been brought to an end’. It is impossible to know whether William Marshal joined this ‘whispering’ campaign, but word that some knights in Young King’s mesnie were fomenting intrigue certainly reached Henry II, because around this time he intervened, removing the warrior Hasculf of St Hilaire ‘and other young knights’ from his son’s ‘counsel and household’.

  The Old King had no intention of sharing real power with his son. As far as his father was concerned, Young Henry was a king in name alone; a figurehead to be paraded and, if necessary, manipulated. He would be paid a generous (though not inexhaustible) allowance – thousands of pounds per year – but not given actual, independent authority. The lad was expected to wait in the wi
ngs obediently and indefinitely. This approach to the business of rule was a hallmark of the Old King’s reign.

  Henry II was a phenomenally skilful monarch and politician, but he was also a compulsive hoarder when it came to power, reluctant to let a single ounce of authority to slip from his grasp. Perhaps this was sheer greed, or maybe Henry simply thought it inconceivable that another could bear the Herculean task of governing the empire. Certainly, for the majority of his career, he acted like a chess player sitting before a vast board, determined to direct every single piece with his own hand. When pressed, the Old King might turn to a ‘trusted’ subordinate: Young Henry ruled England in his stead after the crisis of 1170; his younger sons, Richard and Geoffrey, would be expected to oversee Aquitaine and Brittany as the decade progressed. But Henry II remained stubbornly unwilling to cede unfettered authority over England or any part of the Angevin heartlands of Normandy and Anjou. In 1150, when Henry II was just sixteen, his own father – Geoffrey Plantagenet – had seen fit to grant him full rights to the duchy of Normandy. Now, twenty years later, the Old King could not bring himself to do the same for his eldest son.

  Walter Map, one of Henry II’s courtiers, later argued that the Old King had been taught by his formidable mother Empress Matilda to instil loyalty through the harsh denial of favour. She was said to have told him that ‘an unruly hawk’ could only be tamed if kept hungry. The secret, she believed, was to repeatedly offer the creature meat, but always snatch the reward away at the last second. By this means, the bird of prey would become ‘keener and more obedient and attentive’. The danger of course, as Map knew only too well, was that a starving hawk might turn on his master.